Someone Should Stop This — Alec Leach

Alec Leach's Someone Should Stop This is thoroughly researched, compelling and at times uncomfortable. There’s good news, though: it leaves you with something increasingly rare when confronting the scale of the challenges around us: hope.

I first got to know Alec through RÆBURN Connects, when I invited him to join me for a conversation around Redefining Newness. I was already a great admirer of Alec's thinking and his ability to question some of the accepted behaviours and systems within fashion, which made him a natural person to have that conversation with. Five years later, it's incredible to see how his work and thinking have continued to evolve, and the scale and ambition of the questions he's now exploring.

Alec's first book, The World Is On Fire But We're Still Buying Shoes, used fashion and consumption as a lens through which to examine our relentless pursuit of more. Someone Should Stop This zooms out considerably, connecting climate change with economics, politics, technology, wellbeing and belonging, and asking a deceptively simple question: if we understand so much about the problems we face, why are we still struggling to change course?

What I particularly admire is Alec's ability to connect subjects that can often feel impossibly complex without oversimplifying them. The research is extensive, but the writing remains direct, accessible and human. Rather than simply documenting everything that's going wrong, the book asks us to consider what might actually go right, and whether addressing the climate crisis could also become an opportunity to build something fairer, healthier and ultimately more hopeful.

There's something equally inspiring about how Alec has brought the book into the world. Independently researched, written and self-published, it's the result of an extraordinary amount of curiosity, determination and conviction. There's an important lesson in that too: if you believe an idea needs to exist, sometimes you simply have to find a way to make it happen.

Buy a copy. Read it. Share it. Talk about it.