The Tuning of the World: Stepping Into Ecority

The Tuning of the World is a work of civilisational diagnosis and design. It argues that the cascading crises of our age - ecological collapse, institutional failure, and the erosion of meaning and security - are not separate emergencies but symptoms of a single, ageing operating system: a five-hundred-year-old story that treats the Earth as raw material and sovereignty as the highest political virtue.
Drawing on decades of advisory work across five continents, Richard Hames maps both the terminal exhaustion of that story and what is quietly rising to replace it. He calls this successor civilisation 'Ecority' - a portmanteau of 'ecology' and 'security' and a proposition that all genuine safety, wealth, and legitimacy must be grounded in the health of living systems rather than in the abstractions of the market or the state.
Moving from autopsy to alternative to inhabitation, the book traces how authority, governance, and wealth might be reanchored in the living world - not as utopian speculation, but as a reading of what is already emerging in watershed councils, bioregional commons, and the jurisprudence granting legal personhood to rivers. The Tuning of the World is a work for those who sense that the old story has reached its endgame and who want to think seriously about what comes next.