Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.

We’re going to chat today about a book you’ve been reading - Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All by Jeremy Lent. Now I’ve been rather crafty here, nudging you to read this because I know you’ll read it much faster than I will! That way we can have this conversation and you can tell me what it’s all about!

Yes, it’s almost the book I wish I’d written myself. I’m staggered by the depth and breadth of his scholarship and his attention to detail.

It’s very much along the themes of quite a lot of things we’ve probably spoken about, and of my own book, The Letter from 2100: A Possible World for your Grandchildren. The idea is that we’re at a crisis point in human global society. We’re either going to pull through it into an unimaginably great situation, or we’re going to have a catastrophic collapse. There’s no real third alternative, as far as I can see.

Ecocivilization is not a rose-tinted spectacles job, saying everything’s going to be all right. It actually goes into a lot of detail and points out some possible pathways.

The overall structure of the book is in four sections.

The first one is “How Did We Get Here?”, pointing out that we as a society are careening towards a precipice. This is obvious to anybody who hasn’t been living in a hole in the ground for the last five years or so. There are crises of all sorts, and it looks as though if one doesn’t get us, another one will. He flags up “The History They Didn’t Teach You in School” - that’s the title of one of the chapters in this section, and it’s brilliant. There’s a whole bunch of insightful stuff there.

The second section is what he means by an ecocivilisation - a world that works for everybody. Obviously, that has to have respect for human beings as an absolute cornerstone of what’s involved, along with respect for the planet and the entire living systems, without which we won’t survive anyway. That section provides a theoretical outline of what to aim for.

The third section is the biggest part of the book. It’s called “Envisaging an Ecocivilisation”.

It has eleven or twelve chapters. One covers the world economy, and the other structures industry and enterprise to serve the common good. One is on agriculture, and the way that needs to be revised so it provides nourishing food for every human being, a fundamental necessity that the present system doesn’t achieve at all. He’s also got a chapter on wealth and what he calls the commonwealth, or the commons.

There was an important insight in that chapter about the royal seal being put on the Magna Carta by Henry the Third, a couple of years after the barons forced King John to acquiesce to it.

At the same time as the Magna Carta was sealed, there was also a Charter of the Forest, which is of personal interest to me. That charter reassigned to the common people the areas which had been fenced off as rural hunting grounds - the New Forest was one of them.

They’ve now introduced car parking charges all over the forest, even little two-line strips on the side of a lane outside the pub in the village. I don’t know how much impact that’s had on the pub’s trade, but it’s about time somebody reminded them that this was actually granted under royal seal.

We almost need a Magna Carta 2.0, don’t we? Just remind me, when was Magna Carta sealed? That was around the 1200s, wasn’t it?

1217. It was acknowledged in 1215, and actually put under royal seal in 1217. It’s quite interesting - I’m surprised nobody’s flagged up that the right to jury service has just been abolished by the government. Anyway, that’s another story.

If you go to legislation.gov.uk, you can look up Magna Carta, and it’s still there. So it’s a piece of active legislation.

That’s not much help if they’re ignoring it!

They can’t get rid of it, so they’re just ignoring it and gaslighting everyone.

Pretty much. Another point - there are all sorts of interesting sideways snippets of information in this book. One is that when the UN was established after the Second World War, Albert Einstein said it wouldn’t work. He said the trouble was that the Charter grants sovereignty to individual countries without providing a mechanism to make them adhere to it, which is exactly what’s been happening since.

The next chapter is on finance - transforming money to work for us all. We’ll probably have a detailed run-through of what he’s suggesting in another episode. It’s very much in line with a lot of the discussions we’ve had on this channel.

There’s a chapter on technology, and one on infrastructure - the networks of communication, physical and informational. On governance, there’s the obvious fact we’ve discussed at times: that democracy in its present form isn’t really delivering the goods, however great an idea it is in principle.

The law is a very interesting one, because it’s not something I’d given much thought to. We naturally assume the law is what it is, without analysing how it came about and who it’s designed to benefit. There’s a chapter on global governance, looking at a system that would integrate the entire global system. What’s written in the UN Charter would be a good starting point, if there weren’t the opportunity for any sufficiently strong actor to decide to ignore it.

There’s also a chapter on the living earth - mutually beneficial symbiosis with the rest of the biosphere - and a chapter on culture and community, talking about education.

There was a very interesting thing I didn’t know, flagged up in that chapter, about the way the education system we all take for granted was set up. The modern education system resulted from Prussia’s humiliation after being overrun by Napoleon. Did you know that?

I’d heard about this - they needed soldiers, didn’t they? People who follow orders and don’t think too much.

That was about it. In 1806, Napoleon conquered Prussia, and a philosopher called Johann Fichte said it was necessary to revise the entire education system. He said that “The new education, on the soil whose cultivation it takes over, completely annihilates freedom of will, producing strict necessity in decisions and the impossibility of anything else.“

That set the pattern for the way schools everywhere are run, and that we take for granted: you sit down, you do what you’re told, you don’t talk, you don’t decide what you want to learn, and you’re drilled into compliance. That produced enormous technical advances in Germany on the one hand and, just over a hundred years later, led directly to the First World War.

I would argue that being in business is a good antidote to the inability to think for yourself. It’s quite a long road, but an important one.

One of the insights in that first section, “The History They Don’t Teach You at School”, is how deliberate it was to impoverish the population at large as a way of disciplining them. There was a Scottish merchant and magistrate who actually wrote, without any sense of irony:

“Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”

You could apply that to today.

Absolutely. Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve seen how steadily leisure and space to think have been eroded.

There was another insight from George Kennan, the American diplomat - he was the ambassador to Russia for a while. One of the things he wrote was:

“We have about fifty per cent of the world’s wealth, but only six point three per cent of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relations which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.”

Which is pretty much still how the empire operates today.

Exactly. That was eighty years ago, and we’ve now seen the results of pursuing that incredibly narrow objective all around us. Before we get too gloomy, section four of the book is “How Changes Happen” - models of societal transformation, with examples of specific things where quite dramatic changes have come about. The other chapter in that section is “Making Changes Happen: Moving Towards an Ecocivilisation”. Once again, his main point is that it’s not a done deal. We’re in a very perilous situation.

The actual crisis thrown up by the logical working-out of the way we’ve been structuring things may well be the context within which there’s a possibility of transforming into something entirely different. He points out numerous little ways this is happening right now, and has been happening over recent decades. Any one of them might be regarded as small beer, impossibly out of scale with the magnitude of the problem, but taken all together, they’re building up a cumulative effect.

So, for an initial summary, how does that sound?

That sounds great. I was also thinking that the amo...