The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation
We live in an age of deepening fear, anger and confusion. It feels like societies worldwide are falling to pieces, and any remaining hope that we can avoid a more comprehensive collapse is steadily draining away. Many of us react to this escalating chaos by searching for someone to blame, but this approach yields few effective solutions to our problems or meaningful responses to our predicaments. There is no shortage of opposition to the status quo, but it lacks structure and there is nothing resembling an ideology that could bring enough people together to make much difference to the general direction of world events. Most of us aren’t even looking for a unifying ideology – we have collectively given up hope that such a thing is even possible. And all the time we’re accelerating towards social, economic and ecological catastrophe.
I am not interested in peddling false hope (“hopium” in collapse-aware lingo). The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation (RPE) would have been a lot easier to write if I’d been willing to engage in that sort of business, and it would also have had a much larger potential audience. I believe a significant degree of collapse can no longer be avoided; the process has already begun and is gaining momentum all the time. It is not that it is physically impossible to avoid the catastrophe – even without any implausible technological advances (“techno-hopium”), we could avoid disaster if only we could sort out our political-ideological problems. And it’s not that these problems aren’t theoretically solvable in the long term, either. What makes catastrophe inevitable is that we do not have centuries, or even decades, to figure out solutions. We have run out of time. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we ran out of time at least 30 years ago and we have now reached the point where this should no longer be the subject of serious debate. How long can we go on saying “We must act now or it will be too late”? How late must it be before that message is no longer appropriate? Too late for what, exactly?
RPE is not so much about collapse itself as it is about how acknowledging collapse could serve as a catalyst for radical transformation. We cannot afford to stop thinking. Giving up all hope for the future might relieve some of the psychological anguish, but it serves no other purpose than ending the conversation. A real future is coming and we must prepare and adapt, and that means we need to think about it and talk about it much more openly, honestly and realistically than we are now. Where do we go from here? Can we justify any sort of hope for a brighter future? Or must we face the conclusion that Homo sapiens is an evolutionary dead end, and that the sooner we go extinct, the better?
The challenge, then, is how to navigate a world in which the pursuit of holistic understanding has become nearly impossible. Without a coherent framework to guide us, the fragmentation of knowledge mirrors the fragmentation of our society, leaving us grasping at disconnected pieces of truth. If we are to make sense of the complexities facing us – let alone respond to them – we must find a way to think and act beyond the limits imposed by our current cultural systems. This is not about rejecting expertise or dismissing the value of specialised knowledge, but about recognising the urgent need for synthesis: a way of connecting insights from disparate fields and perspectives in search of a bigger picture.
There are no great polymaths any more. The last person who even pretended towards that sort of status was Hungarian-American mathematician and physicist John von Neumann (1903-1957) – an individual blessed with both superhuman intelligence and the best education money could buy. There are several reasons for the end of traditional polymathy, one being the sheer amount of information available now and the difficulty of deciding what can be relied on and what can’t. Academia is structured in such a way as to avoid that specific difficulty (that is what peer review is for) but this makes the general problem even worse, because it forces academics to specialise in very narrow areas. It is no longer even possible to be regarded as an expert in all parts of one particular subject, let alone combinations of subjects that are only distantly related. Having gained the deep specialist knowledge required to become recognised as expert in their field by their peers, the last thing it makes sense for an academic to do is to zoom all the way out to life, the universe and everything in order to place their specialist knowledge into a coherent view of humanity and reality. Academia does not work like that – in fact it actively works to suppress anything of the sort. The closest we get to a broad, inclusive picture is collections of papers with a connecting theme, or books where each chapter is written by a different person. Such books are rarely a rewarding read, and even if you do make it to the end then you’re left with an inconclusive account of what is still a relatively narrow topic. Interdisciplinary talking shops barely scratch the surface of this problem. The net result is that academia operates like a giant version of the blind men and the elephant.
In the discourse surrounding collapse and the future of human civilisation, Jem Bendell stands out as one of the most prominent and controversial voices. His 2018 paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy challenged conventional thinking on sustainability and resilience. Bendell’s core argument is that we must move beyond the illusion that current global systems can be sustained through incremental reforms. Instead, he contends that we are already in a state of “inevitable collapse” due to ecological overshoot, primarily driven by climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion. Bendell’s notion of Deep Adaptation offers a radical shift in thinking. It asks us to prepare for societal breakdown and to rethink our relationship with nature, each other, and ourselves, in a world where the basic tenets of industrial civilisation may no longer hold.
Bendell’s message did not find an easy path. When Deep Adaptation was first submitted for peer review, it was rejected by academic journals for being “too pessimistic” and “unhelpfully alarmist”. This institutional resistance to his work highlights the limitations of academia in confronting existential risks. Like many voices that call for urgent and fundamental change, Bendell found that the dominant paradigms within academic and policy circles were more invested in sustaining the status quo than in acknowledging the profound transformations required. His paper was eventually self-published, and quickly gained traction outside academic gatekeepers, becoming a touchstone for grassroots movements concerned with climate collapse. The attempts to suppress Bendell’s work bear striking similarities to the broader pattern of resistance to challenging dominant worldviews—whether in academia, politics, or media. His story illustrates the precarious position of radical thinkers who poke at the comfortable narratives of progress and control, and reflects the reality that institutions built on the old order – those of economic growth, material consumption and technological optimism – are incapable of hosting the conversations necessary for the transformation required. At the heart of this struggle is a recognition that the future we imagine must be liberated from the intellectual and cultural forces that resist it. Jem Bendell’s experience, like others before him, demonstrates that the path forward will not be carved out through conventional means.
I am not an academic. I have a lowly BA in philosophy and cognitive science, and my motivation for going to university at the age of 36 was to try to resolve conflicts and inconsistencies in my own belief system. It was more like therapy than a career move. I was a software engineer before, became a professional foraging teacher and author after, and now I run a smallholding in a tranquil corner of West Wales. My only qualification for writing RPE is that I have spent my whole adult life in search of answers to certain questions, the reasons for which I explain in Chapters One and Eight.
The questions are these:
Is there something wrong with civilisation?
Is there something wrong with Western civilisation in particular?
If there is (in either case) then can it be fixed?
Can we know anything about what will happen if we can’t (or don’t) fix it?
What is the best possible outcome for humanity now?
What is the best (or least bad) possible path from here to there?
RPE is an attempt to answer these questions. Should it ever become widely read then I will expect it to draw criticism from academics across the disciplines I have touched upon, which include philosophy, physics, ecology, evolutionary biology, economics, politics, history, anthropology and psychology. I do hope some people who work in these fields will read it, and I wish to emphasise that it is not my intention to start a turf war with them. To do so would fly in the face of the purpose of this book, which is to attempt to construct a whole picture and imagine new ways for people to co-operate in a shared mission to enable and enact desperately needed ideological change. I will have made mistakes. I ask that people try to focus on the overall picture and suggest ways to improve it. If you disagree with details which disrupt the coherence of that picture, then make a suggestion as to what you think a better alternative might look like. We need to be able to understand our world as a whole system, not just countless disconnected component parts.
The concept of Ecocivilisation – Ecological Civilisation – provides an opportunity for us to start again. It originated in the Soviet Union and has in recent years become an important part of strategic policy-making in China. Ecocivilisation is the final stage or state of the social evolution of human societies – a form of civilisation which has established a stable, long-term balance with the ecosystem in which it is embedded, and is therefore sustainable indefinitely.
The West has several related concepts already, but none of them unambiguously refers to an end state. “Sustainability” arguably ought to, but it has come to refer to attempts at sustaining our current version of civilisation while trying to minimise ecological harm, rather than aiming at a coherent vision of an ecologically sustainable civilisation. This lack of joined-up thinking is itself unsustainable. “Environmentalism” has been neutered in a similar way.
The term “degrowth” has proved harder to debase. On first encounter with this term, some people point out that degrowth is inevitable, and probably quite soon, but this is to misunderstand what it means. A process of contraction (of both economic activity and the human operation on Earth) is indeed inevitable, but there are many different ways this could happen. Collapse and degrowth can be thought of as opposing ends of a scale describing the nature of that contraction. Collapse is chaotic, unmanageable and inherently unfair. Degrowth is a conscious attempt to minimise the chaos and manage the process in an attempt to maximise fairness. “Degrowth” is therefore both the name of a movement (in which case I capitalise it) and of a theoretical process (lowercase). This process is the socially ideal form of contraction – a socially and economically fair downsizing of the human operation on Earth.
Degrowth is not gaining much traction. Its advocates suggest that insufficient people have heard of it yet and we just need to get the word out, but it also has something of a credibility problem. This problem is political in nature, and one only needs to look at the inadequacy of our response to climate change to understand it. The political obstacles to making contraction fair on a global scale dwarf even those of stopping climate change, and that suggests degrowth is an unattainable aspiration. We have already witnessed the extent to which global politics has hindered collective action to control carbon dioxide emissions, so why should anyone believe we are capable of tackling the far greater challenge of mitigating or compensating for the consequences of catastrophic climate change?
One of the reasons ecocivilisation may prove to be more useful as a concept than degrowth is that its relevance cannot be undermined by people’s views about the political viability of degrowth and the inevitability of collapse. Because it is unambiguously defined as an end state or goal, with nothing implied about how we get from here to there, it is useful almost everywhere on the collapse-degrowth spectrum. The only exceptions are if you are absolutely certain that humans are heading for near-term extinction, or if you believe it is both possible and desirable to abandon civilisation as a form of social organisation and return to tribalism, pre-industrial agriculture or anarchistic hunter-gathering. I explain in Chapter Two why I think extinction is exceptionally unlikely and a return to a “pre-civilised” state of human social organisation is impossible. We have to find a way forwards, and some kind of ecocivilisation is our only possible long-term destination.
We can expect people to lobby for extensions to the definition of ecocivilisation. For example, they might argue that it must be as socially and economically fair as Degrowthers want the process of contraction to be. However, attempts to widen the baseline definition beyond that which is required for ecological sustainability will lead directly to unresolvable political disagreements before we have even established our opening vocabulary, definitions and starting point. To be clear, I am not implying that we should be aiming for an unfair ecocivilisation. I am merely observing that it is much easier to imagine unfair forms of ecocivilisation than fair ones. A tiny minority could secure a monopoly on power and impose eco-feudalism on everybody else, for example. I hope we can agree that this is not the sort of ecocivilisation we’re aiming for without any need to build it into the definition. We must avoid pointless, unwinnable battles over rival utopian visions of ecocivilisation. We need some idea of what realistic options are available – what sorts of ecocivilisation might actually be possible. Demanding the impossible – making the (allegedly) perfect the enemy of the least bad – helps nobody.
What might a Western ecocivilisation look like? Is there a believable way to get from here to there? Is it possible to build some sort of new ideology and new movement with this concept as its foundation? How would we go about making this happen? Where could we agree to start?
When I began to discuss this with people, one particular problem kept cropping up, in various different guises. It concerns the relationship between reality and morality, and can be illustrated by the following claim, which is a real example:
“But I must point out that the question 'What is real?' is as subjective as 'What is important?'”
First we must be clear what “important” means here. This word can be used in a purely scientific-objective manner but in this case it is being used to mean “morally important”. A value judgement is involved.
I believe this sort of thinking is right at the heart of what is wrong with Western civilisation and must be challenged as a pre-requisite to building a coherent movement towards ecocivilisation. Ecocivilisation must be based on ecology, and that means on the hard sciences, which might as well be defined by their systematic attempt to eliminate the subjective in order to uncover the underlying objective structure of reality. Value judgements do not belong in the hard sciences – those disciplines are concerned with what is real or true, not the moral or aesthetic value of anything.
My position is that objective reality does indeed exist, and that we do have knowledge of it, albeit limited in various ways. The best of this knowledge is completely independent of human value judgements. When I say “objective reality”, I mean that there is something external to the minds of humans, and that this is the reason why certain things are persistently true in your subjective reality, and mine, and everybody else’s. One example is that humans are descended from apes (and technically are apes). Another is that the Earth’s climate is changing more rapidly than it has done at any time since the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and that the primary cause is human activity. A third example is that our world is divided into around 200 independent sovereign states and nothing can be done to change this situation – at least not until a great many preliminary changes have already taken place.
If humans have reliable knowledge of an objective reality, then whether we are concerned with practicalities or with morality it is essential that we start by establishing what we can and can’t objectively know and say about it. Any other approach will lead to impractical answers and false morality. We are heading straight towards the most serious humanitarian crisis there is ever going to be, and we have ended up in this mess because previous and current generations have refused to deal with reality. We cannot solve our problems by claiming that the question “what is real?” is as subjective as “what is important?” That is just an open invitation to people whose value judgement is that (for example) the freedom to acquire unlimited personal wealth is more important than ecological facts about reality. How can we ever come to an objective, collective understanding of what is important if we cannot agree to start our enquiries by establishing what we know about what is objectively real? I am going to make a case that attempts to put morality before reality are themselves immoral: that there is such a thing as objective truth, and that its acceptance is more important than any value judgement. That this is itself a value judgement might seem paradoxical, but it is consistent at the level of meta-ethics. Accepting objective reality is a higher-order moral imperative than any other specific value or moral stance – an overarching principle rather than a contradiction.
This is all highly controversial, and directly related to what have become known as “the culture wars”. Postmodern political ideologies are systemically hostile to realism and claims to objective truth, and deeply skeptical of great societal goals. The anti-realism and cynicism of postmodernism is, at least according to the postmodernists themselves, motivated by morality. Their stated agenda is to make the world a better place by standing up for oppressed and powerless minorities everywhere. They seek to unify the people at the bottom in a celebration of diversity with the intent to overturn oppressive power structures constructed and maintained by the people at the top. However, the effect their ideology has had on society has been the exact opposite: the resistance to existing power structures has been shattered. The “elite” plutocracy/kleptocracy are increasing their wealth and consolidating their power while the opposition quarrels with itself over the politically permissible meanings of words, and over what is or is not a politically acceptable part of reality. And yet many people firmly believe that postmodernism is the end of philosophical history – that there can be no escape from it. I believe this view is wrong. RPE leaves postmodernism behind.
Some readers may be wondering whether I have identified the wrong enemy. They might say that the problem isn’t postmodern leftism, but the capitalist economic system so beloved of the right. And if that is the problem, shouldn’t we be starting with Marxism as a baseline solution? Do we really need to re-invent the wheel? The concept of ecocivilisation was invented in the USSR and is now being implemented (officially, at least) in China, and their versions of the concept were built on top of the idea of a mature socialist society. In fact I hardly mention capitalism and communism in RPE. I do not wish to be sucked backwards into what I call “pre-collapse politics”. I don’t want to get stuck in the ruts of previous attempts to transform civilisation that have not worked, and that were not designed for an age of global ecological collapse. I want to go back to first principles and start again, in search of the whole elephant.
No single ideology is going to be enough. What we need is a meta-ideology – a test of ideologies to measure their compatibility with the great societal goal of transforming Western civilisation as we know it into a form of ecocivilisation based on the best achievements of 2,500 years of Western cultural progress. It will need to facilitate agreement about what is worth keeping, what must be reformed, and what isn’t worth saving or can’t or shouldn’t be saved. It will have to embrace both science and spirituality, and it must do so in a way that does justice to them both. In some ways it will resemble today’s political left and in others it will resemble the right, though it will necessarily reject much of today’s political debate as reality-denying nonsense. This meta-ideology will need to be primarily epistemological. It must be concerned with the status and relationships between different sorts of claims on knowledge, and it must start with ecological realism. We cannot construct an ecocivilisation unless we can agree that there is just one global ecosystem, that it is a real thing and not a social construction, and that we must find a way to share it not just with each other but with all of the non-human components of that ecosystem as well. I call this meta-ideology the New Epistemic Deal (the NED), and it is explained in Chapter Nine – the first eight chapters are the groundwork needed to set that foundation stone in its proper place.
The need to construct a coherent synthesis inevitably means I have to draw heavily on the work of other people. I’m assembling a puzzle largely made of pieces created by others. As a result, some parts of this book read like a who’s who of people who have come up with ecocivilisation-compatible ideas. Of particular importance are two books with remarkably similar titles, although they deal with what might at first appear to be only distantly related subject matter. The titular similarity is no accident though – these two books provide two important pieces of the puzzle, and they fit together in a most unexpected way; neither was designed with any thought of the other. The first is Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (2007) by physicist Henry Stapp, in which the author provides an adaptation and extension of von Neumann’s “orthodox” interpretation of quantum mechanics (sometimes called “consciousness causes the collapse”), including a new hypothesis about free will. The second is Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Concept of Nature is Almost Certainly False (2012) by philosopher Thomas Nagel. Nagel is the most prominent atheist, skeptic and metaphysical naturalist who is also a prominent critic of metaphysical materialism. His book is a close analysis of the consequences for science and naturalism if you accept that materialism is false, and his core subject matter is the evolutionary explanation of consciousness. If materialism has failed, what could a non-materialistic but still naturalistic alternative look like? Both books are groundbreaking attempts to bring consciousness into a scientific conception of reality from which it has always been missing, but they do it in completely different ways. Nagel says very little about quantum mechanics and Stapp says nothing at all about evolution. The bottom line, for them both, is that materialistic science has not been able to answer fundamental questions about what consciousness is, why it exists, when and how it evolved, or how it is causally related to the physical universe. In fact, it isn’t even clear how to ask these questions from that perspective. What is the scientific definition of consciousness? Not only is there no scientific consensus on the answer to that question – there isn’t even an intelligible explanation of why a consensus has proved so elusive.
Chapter Five focuses on Nagel’s vision of a post-materialistic naturalism, and he arrives at a very specific conclusion – that causality as it is understood in the context of materialistic science cannot, on its own, account for the evolution of conscious organisms. Instead, he argues, the process must have been teleological. In other words: conscious life was somehow destined to evolve, and not because of divine will but because somehow that is just how nature works.
Part One of RPE is an exploration of the complex set of problems that humanity in general, and Western civilisation in particular, currently faces. Part Two is my best attempt to imagine a realistic solution. Unrealistic solutions are worse than no solutions at all, for they breed a false sense of security and provide hiding places for the inconvenient truths which grow ever more abundant in our world.
The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation is a book is about transformation – both the socio-cultural transformation of the current, broken and unsustainable forms of Western and global civilisation into a mature global ecocivilisation, and my own transformation from an evangelical materialistic atheist into a magical realist. Common to both transformations is the traumatic process of breakdown and collapse of existing structures as a necessary pre-requisite for the creation of new and better ones. Cultural Anthropologist Victor Turner called this “liminality” – the “between and betwixt” part of a rite of passage, such as a coming of age or a marriage, when the participants no longer belong to the old state but do not yet belong to the new one.
Liminality is the disorienting, in-between stage where old structures have collapsed, and new ones are not yet formed – a state of profound possibility. The deep bonds that emerge in such moments exist outside the normal hierarchies of structure and anti-structure, fostering equality and shared purpose. Turner called this “Communitas”. Collapse can be thought of as a perilous journey through liminality on a global scale. Just as in personal transformation, societal collapse brings both loss and opportunity: the loss of what no longer serves us, and the chance to rebuild with intention, imagination, and a deeper sense of what it means to be human.
The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation is about navigating the threshold: between what is and what could be, between despair and hope, and between an unsustainable present and a sustainable future. To move forward, we must embrace the discomfort of liminality, the insight of communitas, and the radical creativity that collapse demands. Transformation is not optional.