Corporate capitalism has ravaged the planet the same way HIV ravages the human body, triggering a critical mass of cascading environmental, economic, social, and political crises. Economic and climate instability, collapsing ecosystems, peak fossil fuels, and devastating resource wars—if the Earth were a patient, her condition would be critical. Life Rules offers a comprehensive analysis of our present circumstances, combined with a holistic treatment protocol for restoring health to vulnerable human and natural communities.
Predicting that Life will last, but if we don't make some fundamental changes, life as we know it—and a lot of us—won't, Life Rules identifies natural laws that have allowed non-human communities to thrive and prosper for several billion years, including:
- Local self-reliance
- Mutual interdependence
- Reliance on non-fossil sources of energy
- Resource conservation, sharing, and recycling
- Radically democratic self-organization and governance
This sobering yet essentially optimistic manifesto is required reading for anyone concerned about our ability to live within Earth's means. A powerful tool for community transition and cultural transformation, Life Rules offers a solution to our global challenges that is at once authentically hopeful, deeply inspiring, and profoundly liberating.
Ellen LaConte is acting director of the EarthWalk Alliance, a contributing editor to Green Horizon Magazine and The Ecozoic, a frequent talk show guest, and publisher of the Starting Point online newsletter. She has written two books about Helen and Scott Nearing, homesteaders and best-selling authors of Living the Good Life, and she is the author of the upcoming environmental novel Afton.
Industry Reviews
Elegant and eloquent ... an important work. -- Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame, A Language Older than Words and Deep Green Resistance (with Aric McBay and Lierre Keith)
Life Rules brings fresh clarity and urgency to the serious, complex and interrelated issues and crises that we face as a species to either evolve or perish. Any faith unexamined means another life, another generation, unlived. This book examines those value systems and beliefs that have brought on what some see as the End Time, and offers alternative ways of being and doing that can help our species not only survive, but also evolve. As Albert Schweitzer advised, “Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace. — Dr. Michael W. Fox, veterinarian, author of Bring Life to Ethics: Global Bioethics for a Humane Society
While Deep Ecologists explore ways humans can break through to a new level of consciousness in harmony with life, LaConte offers us a compelling reason to provide for ourselves in ways that mimic life: our survival as a species on a livable planet. In a critically challenged world, sustainable means not just Earth-friendly but also lifelike.... A very important attempt to wake us up before our global economy “puts us and life as we know it — as well as itself — out of business.”— John Seed, Founder/Director, Rainforest Information Network, co-author of Thinking Like a Mountain: Toward a Council of All Beings
Ellen LaConte is the steward of the kind of holistic mind that we humans were born into but that, amid the myriad fragmentations of mass global society, so many have lost. She applies her elastic intelligence to the most important topic we face: the destruction of life and the means by which we may survive. Life Rules is a tour de force and a book to carry with you in the years to come. — Chellis Glendinning, author of Off the Map: An Exploration into Empire and the Global Economy
It is the genius of this book that its hard-hitting diagnosis of our global crisis provides the groundwork for its prescription. What we can and must do for the survival of complex life-forms shines ever clearer, as we follow Ellen LaConte’s invigorating portrayal of life’s systemic principles. Crackling with intelligence and verve, Life Rules immediately became required reading among colleagues in the Work That Reconnects.
— Joanna Macy, author, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy
I am SO enjoying every word of Life Rules and learning from you. You are carrying the ball now! I will tell many about it and wish you a wonderful new year from my paradise on Mallorca. — Elisabet Sahtouris, evolution biologist, author of EarthDance, A Walk Through Time and Biology Revisioned (with Willis Harmon)
It’s as if LaConte googled the world’s environmental and economic woes and distilled them down into a construct that we can all easily understand and digest. Critical reading for anyone who cares enough about our planet to try to save it.—Miles Frieden, Director, Key West Literary Seminar
A very valuable and important book. I will gladly recommend it to colleagues in the Great Work. It anticipates readers’ questions and makes the vast complex of present problems comprehensible.— Herman Greene, Director, The Center for Ecozoic Studies, publisher of The Ecozoic
Wonderful summary of what’s wrong and what we need to do, not just economically and ecologically, but also politically.... The logic is very persuasive. By the time I put down the book, I was laughing at myself for ever thinking that broad national or global policies would be any use in getting us out of this mess. — Edmund “Terry” Fowler, author of From Galileo to the Greens: Our Escape From Mechanical Thinking and Building Cities That Work
Looking back with more than seventy years of experience, I’m of the opinion that LaConte’s conception of democracy, as both characteristic of living systems and the ultimate objective of humanity’s political enterprise, is the most inspired and comprehensive I am aware of. — Lloyd P. Wells, co-founder, The Center for Consensual Democracy, author of Recreating Democracy: Breathing New Life into American Communities
There are many books that focus on one aspect of the ecological problems that mankind is generating, but it is rare to find a book like Life Rules that looks at the whole picture. It is a sobering read, and leads to the conclusion that there is a systemic problem in our treatment of Gaia that can justly be compared to a disease process. The current individualistic paradigm can be summed up as “Blow you, Jack, I’m all right.” Paradigms can change, and Ellen LaConte shows in which direction our present mind-set should move if humanity and Gaia are to recover from the present disease. — Dr. Richard Lawson, Parliamentary candidate, Green Party UK
This is not just one more cultural, economic and ecological Jeremiad. Rather, LaConte accomplishes a brilliant synthesis of the work of visionary economists, environmentalists and social critics alike. She’s done our homework for us. But she’s much more than an artful synthesizer of others’ work. Her perspective, “big picture” observations, guiding metaphors and incisive, scrappy prose are all her own. She deftly manages to speak to young people and scholars with equal clarity and force. She tells it like it is, but never leaves us feeling helpless. It’s rare to find a book that tells the dark truth about our current human and planetary condition while simultaneously motivating us to re-think, re-act and step toward the light. This book does. — Rebecca Kneale Gould, Associate Professor of Religion and Environmental Studies, Middlebury College, author of At Home in Nature
Life Rules is a powerful call to action that Americans in particular and all global citizens need to heed for humanity’s survival and transformation. Highly recommended. — Wanda Urbanska, “Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska” (PBS), author of Less is More (with Cecile Andrews)
An important book with a compelling argument: that we must be able to see the myriad threats facing the planet, not as discrete problems, but as interconnected issues that must be addressed as a single crisis. — Walter Fox, Professor of Journalism, Temple University (ret.), Writing the News: A Guide for Print Journalists
Life Rules shows that more of us are beginning, in the nick of time, to recognize ourselves, our creations and our natural communities and ecosystems as inextricably interdependent. We see that it is no longer OK that our way of life requires that others’ ways of life be diminished. It is no longer OK that the preservation of our land, health and jobs requires that others’ be destroyed. This book validates those individuals, organizations and movements that are helping to shift the human paradigm from extreme competition, perpetual growth and private gain to cooperation, sustainability and the common good. — Mary Beth Steisslinger, Integral Systems Biologist, Global Commons Group, Sky Trust
LaConte sounds depths from which will spring new ways to see cities and buildings become tools for healing our planet. Her book may help to inspire a global movement towards a rediscovery of our sacred commitment to serve as loving Earth stewards. — Tim Watson, Eco-Restorative architect and teacher, President, EarthWalk Alliance
LaConte’s well-crafted analogies tie together many environmental and economic issues to show why the world is between a rock and a hard place ... and why millions of us need to get up and serve in the world. — Dwayne Hunn, The People’s Lobby; The American World Service Corps, author of Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things
In proposing that the earth’s rapidly cascading and interlocked symptoms of environmental and social malaise constitute a syndrome analogous to HIV/AIDS, Ellen LaConte aptly explains how we managed to arrive at thresholds that could bring down life as we know it in rapid order. This is a chilling synthesis. But not hopeless.... It comes down, she says, to tending things in the places we live and work. This is the way out — a return to deep local economies nested in limits and potentials given by nature. She has come up with a book that could change the shape of things to come. — Ted Bernard, Professor, Environmental Studies Program, Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs, Ohio University, author of Hope and Hard Times and The Ecology of Hope
I found LaConte’s analogy in re AIDS fascinating…. an approach that may make the earth’s crisis more plausible and understandable. It is the kind of analogy that even the simplest among us can understand and may be the kind of marketing “tool” that could catch on in ways other approaches cannot. — Fred Berger, Vice Chairman (ret.), Hill & Knowlton, Inc.
The key features of LaConte’s deeply green vision for the future are economics rooted in sustained commitment to earth, especially to the particular places we live on earth, and politics rooted at the local level in the dialogue of persons in a process she calls “Organic Democracy.” Her vision is synchronous with what I believe the Green Party vision must be for its second quarter century. — John Rensenbrink, co-founder of the Green Party USA, founding director of the Green Horizon Foundation, publisher of Green Horizon Magazine
Nothing is more radical and more necessary for this moment of conscious social invention and conscious human evolution than to return life itself to center stage of human political economy and human spiritual cosmology. By doing this here in her book, Life Rules, Ellen LaConte is showing the courage, character and wisdom of other leaders whose vision of the possible future changed history. ... — August T. Jaccaci, Founder of Communiversity, author of General Periodicity: Nature’s Creative Dynamics
