Jeremy Lent
Author and Integrator
About Jeremy Lent
Jeremy Lent, described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,” is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future.
His award-winning book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, examines the way humans have made meaning from the cosmos from hunter-gatherer times to the present day. His more recent award-winning The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe offers a solid foundation for an integrative worldview that could lead humanity to a sustainable, flourishing future.
Lent is the founder and host of the Deep Transformation Network, an online global community of over 5,000 members exploring pathways toward a life-affirming future on a regenerated Earth. Lent has written extensively about the vision and specifics of an ecological civilization, and is a founding member of the Ecocivilization Coalition, a worldwide alliance of changemakers coming together to act as a transformation catalyst in service of this potential future. He is president of the Coalition’s parent, the Institute for Ecological Civilization, and is a board member on the executive committee of the Global Compassion Coalition.
Lent is recognized as a leading authority on the theme of an ecological civilization. He has published numerous articles on this and related topics since 2018, in media such as Open Democracy, Salon, Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Alternet, Kosmos Journal, and YES! Magazine, where his article headlined an issue featuring ecological civilization. He has contributed several chapters on the topic to book-length anthologies exploring positive futures, as well as journal articles.
My Story
I’d recently taken public the internet company I'd founded in a successful IPO during the internet bubble year of 1999. But my wife was developing serious health problems and I quit the company to look after her. Within a couple of years, the company was collapsing, and my wife’s health deteriorated further, leading to her eventual death.
The structures that had given my life meaning had shattered. But along with the loss, I noticed a glimmer of possibility: here I was in midlife, with the ability to consciously redirect my future. To where?
I knew, above all, I wanted my life to feel meaningful – but based on what foundation? I was determined to sort through the received narratives of meaning until I came across a foundation I could really believe in.
My drive to answer these questions led me to write both The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning. It’s been a journey of many years, during which I dedicated myself full time to deep research in disciplines such as neuroscience, history, and anthropology, and to exploring the great traditions of Buddhism, Taoism, Neo-Confucianism, and Indigenous wisdom.
Over the past five years, I've been driven by the vision of an Ecocivilization: what the entire world could look like if it were organized around setting the conditions for all beings to thrive on a regenerated Earth.
The Patterning Instinct explores the different patterns of meaning that cultures through history, including our own, have constructed. It reveals the underlying layers of our current dominant culture that is rapidly driving to destruction.
The Web of Meaning takes up where The Patterning Instinct left off, by laying the foundations for an integrated worldview with the potential to steer humanity on a pathway of long-term flourishing."
Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All, is the result of the past five years of research and writing. It lays out the potential for a fundamentally different world system—an ecocivilization based on life-affirming principles rather than principles of extraction, exploitation, and wealth accumulation.
The book illustrates an alternative, positive future that's available for humanity, showing how every aspect of our world system could be redesigned as a coherent whole setting the conditions for all people to flourish on a regenerated Earth.