Civilization Works.
Let’s face it: Western civilization is in crisis. Governments around the world demand censorship of their political enemies, activists have taken over education and academia, and the media and medical organizations have created a gender dysphoria epidemic. Cities are being crushed by crime and homelessness, and drug deaths have dramatically increased.
Behind the war on civilization is a nihilistic and dehumanizing ideology. Against Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” vision, our schools and universities are promoting racialist and oppressive dogma. Against the anti-stereotype “Free to Be You and Me” vision, the scientific establishment claims that children were born into the wrong body. And against a vision of universal abundance, anti-human environmentalists promote food, energy, and resource scarcity.
Enter Civilization Works. Our mission has expanded beyond the environmental advocacy that defined our beginnings. Since our founding in 2016 by Michael Shellenberger, we have developed bold ideas while nurturing innovative leaders—all dedicated to the ideals of nature, peace, and freedom. We created Civilization Works to defend the pillars of civilization and liberal democracy: meritocracy, law and order, affordable energy, freedom of speech, free and fair elections, equal justice under the law, and childhood. Together, we will build a pro-civilization majority by appealing to reasonable liberals, progressives, conservatives, and libertarians. Our strategy involves rigorous investigations, impactful videos, and movement-building to drive real change.
Our investigations include the Twitter Files, the WPATH Files, and other extensive research. Our documentaries include “Thrown to the Wind” and forthcoming films on gender and censorship. And movements include those that save the North Atlantic right whales from extinction, rescue nuclear power from decline, and put in place a recovery-based response to addiction and homelessness.
And we’re just getting started. We are defying categorization. We are liberal in our compassion for the vulnerable. We are libertarian in our passion for freedom. And we are conservative in our defense of civilization. We will continue to break boundaries and shatter paradigms. Join us.
civilization works staff
Board of directors
Founder and President
Michael Shellenberger is Founder-President of Environmental Progress, a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment," Green Book Award winner, Dao Journalism Prize Winner, and CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin.
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Shellenberger is a leading investigative journalist who has broken major stories on crime and drug policy; homelessness; Amazon deforestation; rising climate resilience; growing eco-anxiety; the U.S. government’s role in the fracking revolution; and climate change and California’s fires. And he testifies and advises governments around the world including in the United States, Brazil, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the Netherlands.
Michael has been called a “environmental guru,” “climate guru,” “North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy,” and “high priest” of the environmental humanist movement for his writings and TED talks, which have been viewed over five million times.
Shellenberger has been a climate and environmental activist for over 30 years. He has helped save nuclear reactors around the world, from Illinois and New York to South Korea and Taiwan, thereby preventing an increase in air pollution equivalent to adding over 24 million cars to the road. In the 1990s, Shellenberger helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, inspired Nike to improve factory conditions, and advocated harm reduction policies.
Michael offers testimony as a journalist and policy expert to the U.S. Congress on a range of issues covering free speech, censorship, and the environment. He has testified on censorship in Brazil (May 2024); Censorship Industrial Complex, Part 2 (November 2023); AI and censorship (September 2023); climate change and public health (April 2023); Big Tech censorship (March 2023); the Censorship Industrial Complex, Part 1 (March 2023); climate change and the global energy crisis (September 2022); Texas & California electrical grid failures (April 2021); climate change and agriculture (February 2021); climate change and health (August 2020); climate change and energy (July 2020); and nuclear energy (January 2020).
Michael lives in Berkeley, California. You can follow him on X.com (formerly Twitter) or email him by clicking here.