Love for Life.

The premise.

A simple operating premise, held to be obvious until argued out of: the things worth doing are the things that produce more life — more living beings, more living relationships, more conditions in which living things can flourish. Not a metaphor; a criterion. Held against most decisions, it tells you which way to go.

Whitehead’s claim about novelty, taken at face value: the universe’s creative advance proceeds by the introduction of patterns that did not previously exist, and human beings are, by some accident, unusually well-equipped to introduce them. That’s the work. The rest of this page is what it looks like.

Method.

Look for leverage. Donella Meadows’ observation — that systems can be moved by very small interventions in the right places, and almost not at all by very large interventions in the wrong ones — has been a steady companion for years. Most of the work is figuring out which is which.

Then take Buckminster Fuller’s instruction about method seriously: don’t change things by fighting the existing reality, build a new model that makes the old one obsolete. The discipline is to keep doing that — patiently, in small cells, with people you trust — until enough of the new model exists that the old one quietly stops being the centre of gravity.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. R. Buckminster Fuller

Climate Cleanup.

Co-founded in 2018, with a small group of entrepreneurs who, rather than waiting for permission, had already started removing carbon with nature. Climate Cleanup Foundation now organises a connected network of removers across construction, agriculture, land, ocean and rock — operating against a frankly absurd target of 1,500 gigatons of CO₂ drawn down by doubling nature, on the reasoning that this is, while emissions are stopped, what is actually needed.

The class of solutions Climate Cleanup works on shares one property: the act of building and farming is the act of removing carbon from the atmosphere. Biobased buildings whose materials drew down carbon as they grew. Roads bound with grasses rather than refined fossils. Forms of agriculture and rock weathering that store carbon as a property of doing the underlying work well. The carbon arithmetic stops being a sacrifice and starts being a property of the architecture.

Some of the work happens in the policy layer — the European Commission’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming framework (the CRCF) and its Dutch implementation — because the rules that decide what counts as carbon removal will decide a great deal more than that.

Oncra.

Oncra — the Open Natural Carbon Removal Accounting initiative — is the piece of infrastructure that sits underneath that policy work. Built inside Climate Cleanup with ASN Bank as founding partner, on a deliberately Open, Simple and Symbiotic philosophy: a public registry, peer-reviewed methodologies, and certification protocols that anyone can read. Currently CEO; lead author on several of those protocols.

Removing a tonne of CO₂ is a physical act. Counting it, certifying it, and trading it is an institutional one — and unless that institutional layer is credible, the physical layer cannot reach the scale the atmosphere requires. Oncra now certifies removals across construction-stored carbon (most recently with a.s.r. real estate, for a hybrid timber building in Amsterdam’s Zuidas), land-stored carbon (bamboo, regenerative agriculture), and rock-stored carbon (enhanced weathering of olivine).

A third strand, not yet public.

The largest in ambition, and not yet ready to describe. What can be said now is the shape of the wager.

The most direct route through the climate crisis is not to fight the existing society into changing, but to grow a different one alongside it — one that is, by Buckminster Fuller’s plain measure, simply better at being a society. Better in the sense of producing more life and more love, with less violence done to either. The carbon arithmetic, on this approach, is not the goal but a consequence: a society whose buildings are made of plants and whose food systems leave the soil heavier in carbon than they found it removes carbon by the act of being built. Climate becomes a side-effect of civilisation done well.

A habit of starting.

The pattern across the years matters more, perhaps, than any single project. Each entry below began as something that didn’t yet exist, and was put into the world to see what it would do. Some aged into ongoing work; some were one-shot interventions; all of them taught something about the texture of the systems they touched.

• ongoing

  Climate Cleanup

  Foundation supporting natural climate solutions and the policy frameworks that allow them to scale. Co-founder and director. EU CRCF engagement; Dutch policy work; biobased construction; regenerative agriculture; rock weathering.

• ongoing

  Oncra

  Open Natural Carbon Removal Accounting — registry, methodologies and certification protocols for nature-based carbon removal. CEO; lead author on several protocols. Founding partner: ASN Bank.

• since 2017

  De Nationale Energiecommissie

  Secretary-general.

• 2018

  Drawdown Europe

  Brought Paul Hawken’s Drawdown — the first quantified inventory of climate solutions ranked by potential — into the European conversation, including the Dutch translation of the book and the work that followed it.

• 2015–2017

  Amsterdam Fossielvrij

  Initiator of the citizens’ movement that pushed Amsterdam to commit to a coal-free harbour and pressed ABP, the world’s fifth-largest pension fund, on fossil divestment. The Mayor wrote the divestment letter the campaign had asked for.

• 2012

  Global Crisis Guide

  An essay-with-footnotes on how to live in times of converging crises, written from inside complex-systems theory and structured around a Universal Declaration of Human Direction. Read back today, it’s where most of the present work first turned up in writing — the case for relationships over individuals, the wager on regenerative entrepreneurship, the conviction that empathic and biospheric consciousness is the move available to us.

• 2010

  Circular Migrants — Development or Kleenex Class?

  Master’s thesis in Political Science, International Relations track, University of Amsterdam, framed through complex systems theory: how African–European temporary labour migration is designed without migrants themselves at the table, and what that costs all parties. With field interviews in Mali, Mauritania, France and Spain.

• 2010

  REplace

  A documentary film. An early attempt to use cinema as a systems-mapping tool rather than a persuasion tool. Distributed via Culture Unplugged.

• co-founded

  Legendary Movie Orchestra

  Co-founder of the orchestra that grew into Het Nederlands Filmorkest, the country’s national film orchestra — fifty musicians, conductor Sander Vredenborg, programmes at the Concertgebouw and Theater Tuschinski. Long since flown the nest, which is the right ending.

Library.

The four foundations below sit underneath almost everything on this page. The shelves that follow are the wider reading.

• 1929

  Alfred North Whitehead — Process and Reality

  On novelty as the engine of the universe’s creative advance, and on why the metaphysics matters in practice.

• 1969

  R. Buckminster Fuller — Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

  The shortest book that contains the method. Build a new model; let the old one fall away.

• 1999

  Donella Meadows — Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

  Twelve points, ranked from least to most powerful, where small effort yields disproportionate effect. The marginal numbering through this page is hers.

• 2004

  Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis Meadows — Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

  The original modelling, three decades on, holding up uncomfortably well. Read alongside the leverage-points essay.

• 1979

  Gregory Bateson — Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

  ‘What pattern connects the crab to the lobster, the orchid to the primrose, and all four of them to me, and me to you?’ The opening question of a book that treats evolution and thought as the same process working at different scales. The image at the top of this page is built on it.

• 1987

  Gregory Bateson & Mary Catherine Bateson — Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred

  The posthumous sequel, finished by his daughter as a series of metalogues with him. Where Mind and Nature names the pattern, this one asks what it means to live as if the pattern is real — and what we owe it.

• 2008

  Donella Meadows — Thinking in Systems: A Primer

  The clearest introduction to systems thinking: feedback, stocks, leverage. The companion volume to the leverage-points essay, and the place to start if you’re starting.

• 2023 / paper

  Mealy et al. — Sensitive Intervention Points: A Strategic Approach to Climate Action

  Names three classes of leverage in climate policy — tipping points, network nodes, and windows of time — and argues for designing interventions around them. A quietly important paper.

• 2025

  Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson — Abundance

  The argument for a politics of building — housing, energy, infrastructure — against a politics of scarcity and refusal. Useful corrective to the ‘degrowth or doom’ binary.

• ongoing

  RethinkX — disruptive change in energy, transport, food, materials, information

  Tony Seba and James Arbib’s thinktank, mapping S-curves and combinatorial effects across foundational sectors. Linear thinkers consistently underestimate what’s in their work.

• 2013

  C. Otto Scharmer & Katrin Kaufer — Leading from the Emerging Future

  Theory U and the move from ego-system to eco-system economies. A practical grammar for sensing what wants to happen, instead of optimising what already is.

• 2018

  Bruno Latour — Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

  The case that the old left/right axis is exhausted, and that the real question is whether we’re siding with the ‘Terrestrial’ — the conditions that make life possible — or against it.

• 2017

  Kate Raworth — Doughnut Economics

  The economy bounded above by planetary limits and below by social foundations. The clearest single image of what an economy should be optimising for.

• 2024 / paper

  Jason Hickel & Dylan Sullivan — How Much Growth Is Required to Achieve Good Lives for All?

  Decent lives for 8.5 billion people would take roughly 30% of current global energy and material throughput — if production were organised around needs rather than capital accumulation. A clarifying number.

• 2023

  Kees Klomp — Ecoliberalisme

  An argument, in Dutch, for ‘ecoliberalism’ and a meaning economy — freedom redefined as life lived in harmony with the earth, rather than as freedom from limits.

• 1973

  E.F. Schumacher — Small is Beautiful

  Economics as if people mattered. Half a century on, still the most useful indictment of scale-for-its-own-sake.

• 1977

  E.F. Schumacher — A Guide for the Perplexed

  His quieter book, on the hierarchy of being and the kinds of knowing that materialist science cannot reach. Held by many serious people as a private favourite.

• 2014

  David Bollier — Think Like a Commoner

  The commons as a real, working third path between market and state. Short, lucid, and quietly subversive.

• 2016

  Daniel Wahl — Designing Regenerative Cultures

  Sustainability is the floor; regeneration is the goal. A handbook for designing relationships, processes and economies around wholeness rather than around extraction.

• 2018

  Charles Eisenstein — Climate: A New Story

  The case that the climate crisis is downstream of a worldview of separation, and that no number of carbon-accounting tools alone will get us out of it.

• 2011

  Charles Eisenstein — Sacred Economics

  Money, gift, and reciprocity as the spiritual substrate of an economy. Read with caution and read in full.

• 2021

  Willem Ferwerda / Commonland — The 4 Returns Framework for Landscape Restoration

  Four returns — inspiration, social, natural, financial — on a 20-year horizon, across three landscape zones. The most practical framework around for doing landscape-scale regenerative work and getting paid for it.

• 2024

  Samantha Power & Leon Seefeld — Bioregional Financing Facilities

  The BioFi Project / Dark Matter Labs proposal for new financial institutions sized to bioregions and aligned with their living-systems logic. Where carbon registries should eventually meet community capital.

• 2025 / paper

  Triodos Bank — A System That Serves: Financial System Vision

  A bank explicitly arguing for the dismantling of its own peers’ business model. Strong on diagnosis, deliberately less concrete on the path. Worth reading because of who is saying it.

• 2013

  Joanna Macy — Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth

  Buddhist, indigenous, and Western threads woven into a vision of restoration that begins with reverence. With World as Lover, World as Self: among the most important contemporary writing on what it means to belong here.

• 2017

  Ervin Laszlo — The Intelligence of the Cosmos

  Quantum physics, systems theory and consciousness research woven into a single proposition: the universe has direction, and we are part of how it knows itself.

• 2020

  Ervin Laszlo — The Survival Imperative: Upshifting to Conscious Evolution

  The argument that humanity stands at a bifurcation point and that the upshift available to us is not biological but conscious — a change in how we think and relate.

• 2014

  Klaas van Egmond — Sustainable Civilization

  An ‘integral worldview’ that holds individual and collective, market and state, material and meaning in conscious balance — and treats imbalance as the deep cause of our converging crises.

• 1938

  Vladimir I. Vernadsky — Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon

  The original noosphere argument: human knowing as a planetary geological force, continuous with the biosphere rather than alien to it. Eighty-five years on, it reads like the assignment we’ve been given.

• 2020

  Koert van Mensvoort — Letter to Humanity

  A short address to humans across time on what it means to grow up as a planetary force, and to ask of every technology: does this increase my humanity?

• 2013

  Koert van Mensvoort — Next Nature

  Technology is itself natural; the ‘back to nature’ reflex is the wrong move. The right move is forward, with care.

• 1978

  Edward O. Wilson — On Human Nature

  Sociobiology brought to bear on ethics: biology prepares, culture performs. The book that broke a lot of arguments in both directions, and remains essential.

• 2009

  Jeremy Rifkin — The Empathic Civilization

  A reframing of human history around energy revolutions and the corresponding expansions of empathic consciousness. Long, ambitious, and indispensable for the third strand of work on this page.

• 2016

  Edward O. Wilson — Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life

  The proposal that half the planet should be set aside, strictly, for non-human life. A moonshot that has aged better, not worse.

• 2015

  Tim Flannery — Atmosphere of Hope

  The case for a ‘third way’ beyond mitigation and adaptation: actively removing greenhouse gases, with technologies and ecosystems that already exist.

• 2005

  Tim Flannery — The Weather Makers

  The accessible synthesis of how the climate system actually works, and why the path through it is both moral and technical.

• 2017

  George Monbiot — Out of the Wreckage

  A ‘politics of belonging’ against a politics of competition. Practical proposals for restoring ownership and agency to the local.

• 2015

  David C. Korten — Change the Story, Change the Future

  From the ‘Sacred Money and Markets’ story to a ‘Sacred Life and Living Earth’ story. Direct, useful, occasionally beautiful.

• 2022

  Club of Rome — Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity

  Five ‘extraordinary turnarounds’ (poverty, inequality, women, food, energy), with proper modelling underneath. The current heir to Limits to Growth.

• 2017

  Fred Magdoff & Chris Williams — Creating an Ecological Society

  The unromantic Marxist case that ecological crisis and capitalist logic are the same crisis, and that an ecological society requires more than reform.

• 2020

  Kim Stanley Robinson — The Ministry for the Future

  The rare novel that functions as policy literature: messy, plural, slow, hopeful. Read it for the texture of how a transition actually feels from inside.

• 2011

  Lester Brown — World on the Edge

  A sober blueprint that connects food, energy, water, and economic instability into a single picture — and a single set of moves.

• 2023

  Patrick J. Deneen — Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future

  Read in opposition. A serious post-liberal argument from the right that’s worth grappling with for what it gets correct about the failure mode of liberalism, even when the prescription doesn’t hold up.

• 2005

  Paul Stamets — Mycelium Running

  How fungal networks restore ecosystems, and why mycorestoration is one of the cheapest and most underused interventions on the planet.

• 2017

  Paul Hawken (ed.) — Drawdown

  The first quantified inventory of climate solutions, ranked by potential. The book Drawdown Europe was built around.

• 2021

  Paul Hawken (ed.) — Regeneration

  The sequel that puts life at the centre instead of carbon — biodiversity, justice, dignity, soil — as the actual agenda. Closer to the framing of this page than Drawdown ever was.

• 2024

  Roman Krznaric — History for Tomorrow

  A thousand years of cases where societies actually navigated similar crises. Less ‘cautionary tale’, more ‘working library of moves’.

• 2005

  Jared Diamond — Collapse

  How societies choose to fail or succeed. Long, occasionally polemical, often correct.

• 2010

  Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway — Merchants of Doubt

  The history of how a small network of industry-funded scientists manufactured public uncertainty about settled science — from tobacco to climate. Required reading on how delay actually works.

• 2022

  Babette Porcelijn — Het Happy 2050 Scenario

  A positive future vision in Dutch, grounded in seven foundations of wellbeing and wired together with infographics, data, and practical handles.

• 2024

  Rob Hopkins — How to Fall in Love with the Future

  The argument that imagination is a strategic resource we’ve let atrophy — and a workbook for re-growing it. ‘Thrutopia’ as a working concept.

• 2024 / paper

  Vega-Tracy & Moscardi (EPIC) — Blueprint: Transforming Climate Narratives Through Health & Wellbeing

  A communications framework that swaps apocalypse for the eight dimensions of personal wellbeing. Useful for anyone wanting to talk about climate without losing the room.

• 1988

  Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman — Manufacturing Consent

  The propaganda model. Older than the internet, still the right diagnostic for most of what shows up in your feed.

• 2020

  Andreas Kinneging — De Onzichtbare Maat

  An archaeology of good and evil from the European tradition — Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas — and a case for measure as an objective property of reality. Read as a counterweight, not an endorsement.

• 2015

  Per Espen Stoknes — What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming

  The five Ds — Distance, Doom, Dissonance, Denial, iDentity — and the five counter-strategies. The best primer on why more facts haven’t worked.

• 2020

  Convivialist International — The Second Convivialist Manifesto

  Three hundred intellectuals from thirty-three countries on the post-neoliberal principles a livable century would need. Mutual self-limitation as a political programme.

• 1978

  Ivor Wilkins & Hans Strydom — The Super-Afrikaners

  Two journalists exposing the Afrikaner Broederbond and its quiet capture of every major institution in South Africa. Read as a study of how small, networked elites actually exercise power. Sobering.