In a conversation published in the September/October 2026 issue of Resurgence & Ecologist, economist Kate Raworth and author Jeremy Lent explore a radical proposition: that humanity’s greatest strength may be cooperation rather than competition. Their starting point is evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson’s metaphor, in which our cooperative self resembles the soft body of a turtle: it emerges from its shell only when conditions are safe. The discussion seeks to show which institutional, economic and cultural conditions would make this possible.
Raworth explains that when she began writing "Doughnut Economics" in 2014, she aimed to change the economics curriculum at universities, but little has changed there: students tell her they are still being taught 20th-century ideas, and new lecturers hesitate to teach differently because of the pressure to secure tenure. Her ideas have instead spread to other fields—law, health, urban planning, engineering, fashion—and to practitioners: municipalities, schools, companies and communities. More than 50 cities, towns and regions have placed doughnut economics at the heart of their policies, Raworth says, even though they know they will come up against the wider financial system that constrains them.
Lent adds that individual ideas are not enough: basic income, the triple bottom line (people, planet, profit), the legal rights of Nature and deliberative democracy could work only as part of a broader fabric. He uses ecologist C.S. Holling’s adaptive cycle—growth, conservation, release, reorganization—to argue that we are at the end of the conservation phase or the beginning of the release phase. At that point, according to Milton Friedman, the actions chosen in a crisis depend on the ideas available; this is why, the two speakers say, alternatives must not simply exist on paper, but already be working.
In response to Margaret Thatcher’s slogan "there is no alternative," Lent presents his book "Ecocivilization" as a rebuttal of that myth. He gives the example of citizens’ assemblies: people selected by lot to deliberate on complex issues. Many people’s first reaction is that this is a ridiculous idea, but in practice, when the process is properly facilitated, participants respect one another, shift their polarized views and arrive at more considered solutions than political parties do. He stresses that humans evolved to thrive through cooperation and community, rather than through systems that divide them.
Raworth criticizes the model of "rational economic man" taught in economics: alone, with money in his hand, selfishness in his heart, a calculator in his head and Nature at his feet. Research, she says, shows that the more students are taught this model, the more they imitate it. Humans, by contrast, are among the most social mammals; we have both the dove and the serpent within us, as Hume put it, and the room we enter determines which part is activated. Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for the commons and the turtle metaphor show, in Raworth’s view, that we need institutions that make cooperation safe and allow us to rebuild the commons.
Lent refers to David Bollier, who describes "commoning" as an ontological shift: from the outlook of an individual who sees others and the world as resources to exploit, to a sense that we belong to groups and care for one another. Examples already in operation include Wikipedia, which surpassed commercial encyclopedias without a commercial incentive, and the Dutch home-care network Buurtzorg, organized as a commons around the caregiver–patient relationship, with greater job satisfaction and fewer hospital admissions. He also cites evolutionary psychologist Darcia Narvaez’s work on the "evolved nest": infants in nomadic hunting societies are raised in ways almost opposite to those in dominant societies, which explains some of the distress and antisocial behavior.
The discussion turns to digital technology and artificial intelligence. Raworth worries that, just as we are coming to understand the need to connect with Earth’s living networks, digital networks are absorbing our attention. Lent speaks of "epistemic chaos" and a form of collective psychosis, but clarifies that the problem is not technology itself, but the incentives of those who control it: shareholders demand maximum profits, data that belongs to everyone is enclosed in the hands of a few, and algorithms have an incentive to promote lies, since these spread faster and are shared more. The system, he says, is not broken; it is doing exactly what it was designed to do: extract wealth and attention for a small elite.
On the issue of finance, Raworth speaks of "corporate psychotherapy": instead of discussing only product design, she asks about a company’s purpose, governance, ownership and financing. Shareholder-owned companies face pressure to deliver returns of 15–20% to the market, making a regenerative shift almost impossible. Lent notes that money is created as debt by private banks rather than governments, and that there are proposals for it to be created directly by the state where it is needed. He also points out that cooperatives—such as Mondragon and the network in Emilia-Romagna—can operate at a large scale, and that a good idea should not start out as a for-profit company, because the more successful it becomes, the more it will be swept along by that same system of extraction.
The two speakers reject both complacent optimism and paralyzing pessimism.
Their message is that ideas for an ecological civilization are not a utopia, but a patchwork of practices already in operation, waiting to be connected.
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