Jeremy Lent is a long time friend of the podcast. His new book, ‘Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All’ is coming out at the end of April 2026 and so we got together to discuss what an Ecocivilisation is, why we so badly need to become one, and how we might get there.
We are a storied species – we live and breathe and love and learn by the rich tapestry of stories that shape our lives. Everything we do from picking a career to moving house, from finding our life’s co-creator(s) to choosing what to have for lunch is underpinned by stories of who we are and how the world works. Often, we take these stories so much for granted that we don’t even recognise they are stories – we genuinely believe the world works like this…
How do we create stories powerful enough, moving enough, inspiring enough – and grounded enough – to shift the trajectory of our culture onto a totally new pathway?
In a culture where age is, at best, ignored, how do we rebuild a cohort of genuine Elders fit for the rapid transitions of the 21st Century: those who can combine the wisdom of wide boundary perspectives with the humility that allows flexibility of thinking, feeling and being?
What is Integral Altruism and how could it crowd-source the answers to our meta crisis?
It’s a while since I learned about ‘reverse mentoring’: a young person mentoring someone of an older generation. The idea really took hold, so when a mutual friend connected Jonas Søvik and me, I knew I’d found someone from whom I could learn a huge amount about life, ideas, thoughts and how the world feels in circles I would otherwise never reach.
What is a Network State and how does the concept matter in relation to the Trump administration’s attempts to take Greenland – and their ‘peace’ proposals in Gaza and Ukraine?
In the midst of collapse, it can be hard to imagine extending the franchise of legal rights and sovereignties to the More than Human world. And yet, if we’re to transcend this moment, it must be because we have become something other than we are now. To do this, we need the roadmaps that show us how to move through, and beyond, the collapse of the old into something new…
Across the world, our legal systems are crumbling, the rule of sane law dismantled in real time. Yet at the same time, rivers, mountains, bees are being granted legal rights in ways that would have been thought impossible even a few years ago. And in boardrooms around the planet, C-suites and businesses are increasingly looking to the natural world for guidance on how to be in ways that heal the web of life. So how do we make this work? How do we ensure that it’s not just another layer of corporate greenwash?
We live in an ever-changing world, but it is not always obvious what kinds of evolutionary change we are seeing in the broader web of life: in physiology, behaviour, language – and human responses to these. How plastic is the natural world? How resilient? How capable – or not – of adapting to the chaos of the climate emergency, the cascade of toxins in our air, soil and water, to the plastics, heavy metals and other detritus we throw out into the world as if the entire planet were one vast sewer for waste we forget about as soon as we’ve had the dopamine drip that acquiring it evoked?
At the end of a turbulent year that has seen the masks come off the death cult in ways that were probably predictable, but still shocking, we reconvene our December Solstice Traditional conversation. Manda is joined by Della Duncan of the Upstream Podcast and Nathalie Nahai of ‘Nathalie Nahai in Conversation’ to explore the things that have stood out for each of us in our explorations this year—and to look forward to the year about to begin for what will be our baselines.
How do we create the stories that will bring a whole new generation back to the web of life, that will help people find hope again, and lean into their heart’s yearning for connection, relationship, being and belonging?
What is an eco-civilisation? What are its values and what are the frames within which it works? Why do we need it in the first place and what will the Establishment do to maintain business as usual? Most importantly, what can each of us do to live an eco-civilisation into being?