Lean Logic

The life’s work of David Fleming, an economist, cultural historian, and environmentalist. As the book‘s subtitle, “A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It”, hints at: it has an unorthodox structure very much like a personal wiki, most evident in the online version: https://leanlogic.online/guide-lean-logic/

The book takes a systems thinking approach to navigating energy descent and the collapse of the current economic order that depends unsustainably on on infinite growth. The book inspired the Transition Towns movement.

To survive the collapse of the world as we know it, Fleming focuses on the two things that sustained human societies before the discovery of fossil fuels and the global supply chains they gave rise to: the natural world and informal (as opposed to formal/market) gift economies. community plays a big part as well.

Further Learning

• I learned of it from the book’s editor, Shaun Chamberlin, in his appearance on The Permaculture Podcast.
• The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation? is a 2020 film based on Fleming’s work