Towards the Symbiocene: Building an Eco-Civilisation with thought-leader, Jeremy Lent

April 1, 2026·1 hr 13 min·5 clips

Jeremy Lent explains GDP actually measures how fast the system converts living Earth into monetized economy—oil spills boost it, home gardens hurt it.

It begins at planetary scale. The cold open imagines citizens looking past borders and asking what people actually need, instead of what one power bloc wants to protect. The hope here is not neat. There is fear in it, and grief, because the episode sits with the possibility that systems may unravel before enough people demand another way to organize the world. Amanda Scott welcomes listeners as fellow travellers, which gives the politics a warmer edge without softening it. She holds possibility beside collapse and does not pretend the future can be made tidy. The conversation then turns to wealth. The guest challenges the familiar story that self-made billionaires deserve what they have because entrepreneurship supposedly gives back to everyone. The question becomes whether anyone still buys that story. His answer is less about individual billionaires than the culture around them, because he treats that myth as one reason resistance to extreme wealth stays weaker than it could be. Then the ground moves underneath the argument. Wealth is not described as a private miracle. It is something built over millennia through farming, seed knowledge, electricity, the Internet, nature, and the living Earth. That changes the moral frame. Being born on Earth today, the guest argues, gives each person an equal claim to what he calls the common wealth. The episode keeps circling back to reorganization. Citizens' assemblies appear as early signs of a different planetary governance, though nobody pretends they will arrive in five or ten years. The mood is grave, but not beaten. Amanda's closing thanks widen the work beyond the microphone, naming the people carrying transcripts, video, family pressures, ideas, and the fragile machinery of the show. Listeners are treated less like an audience than participants. The final invitation is to share the link with anyone trying to understand how an eco-civilisation might be built, with future carrying both weight and promise.

As heard by us

A grounded case for common wealth, collective repair, and a future worth building.

Accidental Gods asks a blunt question: what would it take to build an eco-civilisation while the old system keeps collapsing under its own weight?

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Why you'd press play

If you want a calm route through collapse thinking that points toward citizens' assemblies and common wealth, this episode gives you one.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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