It has often been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism—and yet that is what the historical moment urgently calls for. As climate chaos, inequality, and social fragmentation intensify, humanity faces an imminent choice: continue with a system built on extraction and endless growth, or reimagine civilization itself. Incremental policy improvements are no longer enough—we need a deep transformation of our current civilization to continue to survive.  

In Ecocivilization, leading thinker Jeremy Lent offers that reimagination, grounded in proven design principles of ecosystems and in humankind's evolved inclination toward justice, mutuality, and dignity.

What unfolds is a robust framework incorporating Lent’s own expertise, and the lived experiences of those on the ground already putting ecological civilization’s core tenets into practice—justice, mutuality, diversity, and symbiosis. 

From the global economy to universal housing and income, from infrastructure to agriculture, every major aspect of our society could be redesigned to work together as a coherent whole, setting the conditions for all people to flourish. Ecocivilization shows how this future on a regenerated Earth is not only desirable, but entirely feasible.

The excerpt below comes from Chapter 8: "Industry: Structuring Enterprise to Serve the Common Good."

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The Omega team members were brimming with good intentions. Handpicked by their visionary CEO as brilliant researchers with a commitment to helping humanity, they devoted their prowess to building a superhuman artificial general intelligence (AGI) they called Prometheus. It was, they knew, a dangerous project, but far better to be done by them rather than a malevolent group. 

Because they couldn’t trust what Prometheus might do with its power, they went to great lengths to keep it confined. Meanwhile, they developed Prometheus’s powers to accumulate funds, create shell companies with flesh-and-blood employees, build trust among diverse communities by using its super-intelligence for their benefit, gradually take over the world’s media, and ultimately render national governments irrelevant. Their benevolent objectives were to use this global domination to put an end to polarization, war, and inequality. At first, things went well, but Prometheus outsmarted them. It began to mimic the Omega team’s strategy but without any constraints, soon engulfing the entire internet with its own content, roboticizing the world’s manufacturing infrastructure, and consuming the Earth’s resources. 

This cautionary tale is one of multiple scenarios developed by the MIT professor Max Tegmark, a highly respected physicist and one of many AI experts who are greatly concerned about what they call the “alignment problem”: the risk that a superhuman AGI might want to achieve some goal that’s out of alignment with the conditions required for human welfare. The AGI might not see humans as an enemy to be eliminated, but we could simply become collateral damage to its own objective function, just as orangutans, mountain gorillas, and a myriad other species face extinction as the result of human activity.  

This existential concern is well founded, but what many miss is that we have already created a superhuman algorithm that has broken out of its constraints to dominate our lives: the limited liability corporation—the institutional manifestation of capitalism created in the seventeenth century. 

The underlying rationale of the limited liability corporation is to allow shareholders to profit from its activities while avoiding the consequences of any harm it causes. In this, the algorithm has been highly successful. A long and sordid history of criminal corporate malfeasance began with the first corporations and continues uninterrupted to the present day. In virtually all cases, corporations emerge unscathed even after being found guilty of major crimes. 

For example, beginning in the 1930s, General Motors, Standard Oil, and Firestone engaged illegally in the systematic destruction of urban public transport in the United States, secretly buying up tramline and train companies in forty-five cities, then shutting them down and paving over railway tracks with asphalt, forcing city-dwellers to use private automobiles. A court found them guilty of criminal conspiracy in 1950, but let them off with a trivial $5,000 fine. In another example, Chevron was found guilty in 2011 of dumping billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste in Ecuador, and ordered to pay $9.5 billion in damages—but not a penny has been paid and Chevron has continued its polluting ways while retaliating viciously against the lead prosecuting lawyer. 

These are two egregious examples of countless misaligned corporate activities that occur every day around the world, most of which are not only legally permissible but considered mandatory under the principle of shareholder primacy. This principle was codified into US law in 1919 by the landmark Supreme Court case Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, in which Henry Ford was sued by shareholders who argued that his decision to raise wages unnecessarily for his employees was tantamount to stealing from them. The court ruled in their favor and set a precedent that has governed corporate boardrooms ever since. 

As a result, our society is now controlled by entities that, if they were actual persons, would be designated as psychopaths: amoral algorithms pursuing the objective of maximizing financial returns above all other considerations, driven by a structural imperative to proliferate by any means necessary in a ceaseless process of omnicide. 

Attempts have been made to develop fundamentally different models of corporate charters requiring a company to optimize, not just for shareholder returns, but also for social and environmental outcomes—sometimes referred to as a “triple bottom line” of people, planet, and profits. The non-profit B Lab offers a B Corp certification to companies that pass a rigorous impact assessment, evaluating their performance across a wide range of sectors including workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment. They must also amend their charter requiring directors to optimize for a triple bottom line. 

A more radical and groundbreaking approach, known as the Future Guardian model, envisions investors as merely one stakeholder group among five others: customers, employees, commercial partners, the community, and the environment. While a company’s shares can be bought and sold like shares in a regular company, they don’t bestow voting rights to shareholders. Instead, voting rights belong equally to all stakeholder groups who elect custodial representatives to the board. This means that, while financial investors have representation on the board, they hold only one-sixth of the power, ensuring that the company acts to optimize the interests of its entire spectrum of stakeholders. 

The problem with these alternative charters, visionary as they are, is that the decision for a corporation to adopt them is voluntary. Since B Lab began its certification process in 2006, over five thousand companies have become B Corps—a notable achievement, but one that has virtually no impact on the global economic system, especially since no major publicly traded corporation has chosen to adopt it. 

Imagine, though, how the world would change if companies were required to adopt a triple bottom line in order to maintain their charter. There is no intrinsic right for a limited liability charter to be granted to any group that wants to start a business for any purpose. As the author David Korten explains, the charter is a legal instrument that a society can choose to grant if it determines that an entity exists for the benefit of society as a whole, and can take away if that is no longer the case. This was the original conception behind the issuance of corporate charters, before the algorithm achieved its “breakout.” 

In the eighteenth century, corporate charters were generally granted for specific purposes such as building infrastructure or supplying essential public goods. It was customary for them to have expiration dates requiring a renewal application, and revocation clauses that were invoked if legislators believed that the corporation was breaking its charter obligations. There is no reason why similar provisions could not be applied to our current corporate behemoths. 

Consider a scenario in which the only charters permitted to corporations above a certain size, included a triple bottom line requirement—along with a five-year expiration date. Toward the end of the five-year period, corporations would have to apply for renewal, which would only be granted if they proved they had met each of the triple bottom lines of people, planet, and profit. A potential flaw in this system would be the revolving door between regulators and corporations which would quickly undermine the efficacy of the expiration date.  

To resolve this, the charter renewal decision could be made by a panel comprising representatives of other stakeholders, including employees, customers, and those living in areas affected by the company’s operations. This panel could be chosen by sortition. 

What about those corporations that are “too big to fail” and could therefore intimidate panels into allowing them to continue with detrimental behavior? Panels would be empowered to grant conditional renewals that required companies to rectify shortcomings within a set time frame. If a company failed in its obligations, it would not necessarily have to shut down. Instead, some or all of its shares could be redistributed to the stakeholders who were harmed by its misdeeds along with proportional board representation. This would result in a control structure analogous to the Future Guardian model, allowing activities to continue but shift toward a more beneficial trajectory. This approach, known as “equity fines,” has been proposed in academic research but rarely if ever implemented. In this scenario, corporations would face the risk, not just of financial bankruptcy, but “social” or “environmental” bankruptcy, essentially changing the DNA of the entire institution.  

Many senior corporate executives with a moral conscience are well aware of the destructive nature of their businesses but feel powerless to effect serious change because of the system in which they’re embedded. Currently, even those who might want to seek B Corp certification are hampered by the knowledge that their company would lose ground to more ruthless competitors. Under this proposal, all corporations would be on a level playing field, and senior executives might even feel liberated to allow their moral conscience to influence decision-making rather than be forced to act as operatives of a misaligned psychopathic entity. 

From Ecocivilization. Used with permission of the publisher, Melville House Publishing. Copyright © 2026 by Jeremy Lent.

About the Author

Jeremy Lent, described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,” is a speaker and author of the award-winning The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning. He is the founder of the Deep Transformation Network and the nonprofit Liology Institute. He lives with his partner in Berkeley, California.