A review of “ Ecocivilisation: Making a World that Works for All ” - Melville House Publishing, Jeremy Lent, New York, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2026

Ecocivilisation is Jeremy Lent's third book, and a departure from his first two, The Patterning Instinct and Web of Meaning.While those diagnose how our worldview emerged and what a better one could look like, Ecocivilisation tries to build a civilisation on it.Lent is careful to distinguish this work from utopian imaginings through backcasting.Whereas forecasting uses research and current efforts to predict trajectories, backcasting focuses on genuinely desirable futures and works backward to see what is needed to achieve them.The book is a series of civilisational areas that, woven together, create the tapestry for human flourishing.The book begins by asking the question "how did we get here?"It approaches historical unfolding through the emergence and spread of capitalism across its different stages: the enclosure systems in Europe that created the conditions for urban industrialisation, the colonisation of lands and peoples and the hegemony of the transnational corporation.Lent then makes the case for systems change by comparing modern capitalism to the Windigo, the Algonquian cannibalistic spirit that grows hungrier the more he eats.As capitalism pervades our physical and mental existences, Lent evokes the different levers that bring on systems change, from lower-level levers that fix political problems (e.g.taxes, subsidies, efficiency improvements) to civilisational paradigm shifts.Ecocivilisation uses two anchors to ground its levers: Three Horizons and human flourishing.The Three Horizons model reads change across three coexisting timeframes: H1 the present system sustained by managerial habit and short-term planning, H2 the entrepreneurial middle where innovation either props up H1 or bridges toward what's next, and H3 the visionary seeds of a new paradigm still marginal today.Each chapter is structured as a sequential walk toward each horizon, through the ideas and existing works of practitioners and organisations across the world.What might governance, the economy, technology, infrastructure, wealth and other areas look like over the three horizons in the service of human flourishing?Ecocivilisation is a bold move of the Overton window.It was written with unapologetic intentions to normalise the marginal through the telling of existing ideas, initiatives and data to show what is already happening as well as sketch what might be possible.Education, for instance, is framed within the systems of neoliberalism within which it is embedded.Lent describes how EdTech and STEM-based education prepare students to become effective contributors in the growth economy, a First Horizon contour.