Searching for the path towards ecological civilization

Ecological Civilization - in Chinese

The idea of ecological civilization is gaining traction—not least in China, where it has become a national strategy. But what exactly is taking root? In the wake of failed policies, false urgencies, and economic myths, this post continues the thread: what might truly grow when the old scaffolding falls away?

For three decades, sustainable development was the framework of choice for policy, philanthropy, and business. Those two words formed the scaffolding of summits and strategies, the common language that tried to hold together economics, environment, and equity. The development-related numbers have been rising: wealth, growth, people out of poverty, literacy, life expectancy – and this is great. But the sustainability-related numbers have been rising as well: emissions, extinctions, pollution, material throughput, inequality – and this is awful. The grand equation of "sustainable development" has tipped. Development won. Sustainability lost.

The dominant systems still try to tackle our challenges with the very tools that caused it: growth, extraction, exploitation, control. They speak of green transitions while approving new oil fields. They celebrate innovation while soils erode and watersheds crack. They fund carbon markets and call them climate solutions. Just this week, the largest bank in the Nordics, Nordea, quietly abandoned restrictions to their corporate lending policies so that they now can finance shale oil production, tar sand extraction or Arctic oil drilling.

But the problem isn't a lack of insight. It's not that we don't know what to do. It's that we're still asking the wrong questions, and we’re still clinging to the “house that modernity built”, even as the foundations splinter and the roof starts to sag. What's missing is not data. It's courage. And clarity.

This is the context in which the idea of ecological civilization is emerging. Not as a single blueprint, not as a shiny slogan, but as a deeper invitation. To shift the story. To live differently. To imagine again. It's not a masterplan. It's not a rollout strategy. It's a different posture. One that begins in humility, and in relationship.

Many often assume that transformation must begin with vision, that a compelling, well-defined picture of the future is necessary before people can act. But civilizations don't pivot because a story is persuasive. They shift when the story falters. When the scaffolding no longer holds. When the compost starts to steam. So it's tempting to search for the one right model of an alternative future. But that too repeats the logic of control. The future will not arrive as a single system. It will grow through plural expressions, shaped by place, culture, and struggle.

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In China, ecological civilization (生态文明, or shēngtài wénmíng) has been elevated to national strategy. The state has embedded environmental goals into law, planning, and public discourse, drawing on ancient notions of harmony and systemic governance. But still, the result is deeply centralized and coupled to industrial growth. It shows what ecological integration might look like at scale, but not necessarily what flourishing requires. And of course, China is still (by far) the world’s largest CO2 emitter…

Elsewhere, different seeds are taking root. In Laudato Si', Pope Francis called not for a plan, but for a transformation of heart. Indigenous resurgence movements invite a return to relationality and place. Post-growth economists speak of care, repair, and sufficiency (“lagom”, as we say in Sweden). Regenerative farmers, local energy co-ops, teachers, elders: all experimenting with how to live within limits and still flourish.

The task now is not to pick a winner among these seeds, or to make them compete. It is to learn from these experiments, to protect what is fragile and to nourish what might grow.

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So what might ecological civilization be built on? It won't be built on growth. Or on fossil fuels. Or on "net zero by 2050." It won't be designed in a capital city. And it won't be measured in GDP. But we can begin to sketch its outlines. Here are some of the threads that seem to matter:

• Stop digging for oil and gas. No civilization that keeps expanding fossil fuel infrastructure can claim to be ecological. Period.

• Reweave human and more-than-human life. The health of people, places, ecosystems, and economies is not separable. We are not on the Earth, “we are the Earth’s” (Vi är jordens), wrote the great poet Tomas Tranströmer.

• Practice harmony, not heroism. Triple harmony between self, society, and nature is not a fixed state, but a rhythm to be attuned to.

• Reclaim the commons. Land, water, knowledge: these are not assets to privatize. They are relations to tend.

• Redistribute value and care. An ecological economy must regenerate ecosystems, reward care work, and replace output metrics with well-being and sufficiency.

• Acknowledge injustice. There is no ecological civilization without reckoning, with colonial legacies, racial hierarchies, and with the global asymmetries that still shape our world.

• Govern across scales and boundaries. Sovereignty alone cannot safeguard the planet. We need governance architectures that hold both parts and wholes.

• Tell new stories. Of kinship instead of conquest. Of humility instead of dominance. Of place and reciprocity.

• Honor many ways of knowing. Science matters, but so do Indigenous cosmologies, spiritual practices, local experience.

• Rebuild institutions that heal. Legal codes, school curricula, financial flows must support resilience, reciprocity, restoration.

These are not theoretical ideals. They are already being practiced in gardens, classrooms, forests, and councils. The work now is to connect them, to make them live and grow together and learn how to complement each other.

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Civilizational shifts rarely begin in the center, they start at the edges. And underground, in the tangled networks of mycelium. In forgotten stories, quiet experiments, overlooked places. They begin with refusals, with people who say, "this must end," even when they don't yet know what comes next.

That's how slavery was undone. That's how apartheid fell. That's how suffrage began. Not because a perfect roadmap was ready, but because enough people stopped cooperating with harm. They walked away. They disrupted. Rosa Parks took a seat in the bus. Greta Thunberg sat down outside parliament in Stockholm.

That's how ecological civilization will begin too. Not with a master plan and a grand vision, but with acts of care and courage. With teachers, farmers, poets, organizers. With people tending soil, reweaving kinship, restoring old pathways. With those who compost what no longer serves and those who notice what's already sprouting beneath.

This is the shift. The quiet one. The not-yet-named one. The leap of faith from one worldview to another. Ecological civilization is not a destination or a roadmap. It is a direction, a commitment to live as if life matters and as if other beings matter.

If that feels vague, maybe that's the point. This is not a project to be implemented. It's a posture to be inhabited. Not scaled, but practiced, again and again, in small groups, in local economies. And in different ways of being human.

Let's not ask: Where is the plan? Let's ask: What am I already part of, and what is mine to tend?

I’m very grateful for enriching conversations on this subject with my friends and co-travelers at the Aurora Borealis Foundation - Bo Ekman, Rebecca Oliver, Anders Wijkman, Göran Carstedt, Simon Jones, Wang Wei, Christopher Chuang.