Eco-Civilisation: the future we deserve and how we will get there with Jeremy Lent

October 29, 2025·1 hr 13 min·5 clips

A billion dollars growing at 5% generates $1 million per week — do nothing, and in 10-15 years they own everything.

The promise is plain. Jeremy Lent describes ecological civilisation as a simple but demanding shift: set up the conditions for people, communities, and the more-than-human world to thrive together. Most people can feel the sense in that. Put beside the current system, though, the gap is hard to ignore. Amanda Scott keeps returning to a rougher question: what happens if the old order falls before anything humane is ready to catch people? That is where the conversation gets heavier. Lent warns that people cut off from ordinary food and sustenance would face breakdown, devastation, death, fear, disaster, and violence. No one here is romanticising wreckage. The hope is more practical than that: new structures taking root in the detritus, or compost, of what is already coming apart. History then pushes in. Amanda points to a deliberate architecture of exploitation, reaching back at least half a millennium, and even wonders about Roman antecedents. The cruelty is not hidden. Patrick Cahoon's argument treats poverty as necessary to civilisation because it supplies labour, riches, refinement, comfort, and benefit for the wealthy. Amanda hears the mask slip. What shocks her is not that the logic exists, but that it can be said so plainly and still pass for social order. The episode does not offer purity. It rejects the current system, but it also rejects the casual wish for collapse, because vulnerable people would pay first. Near the end, the conversation turns spiritual, circling death, Shaowain, and the strange work of loving life by facing mortality without pretending it can be avoided.

As heard by us

A steady, demanding case for building a different future inside the present wreckage.

Jeremy Lent and Amanda Scott anchor the episode in a clear, unsettling proposition: set the conditions for all beings to thrive on a regenerated earth.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a climate conversation about ecological civilization that treats collapse as a danger, not a fantasy.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Accidental Gods