Click here to listen to “Drawdown”
I’ve been telling friends about a truly important new book, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by Paul Hawken in close collaboration with hundreds of consulting climate scientists, mathematicians and pioneering experts from a broad range of fields. Seldom are heard such encouraging words about climate change reversal these days.
Project Drawdown plan is fast being accepted, adopted and creatively adapted, including by members of the planning circle commissioned to create a climate change reversal plan for the 52 nations of the British Commonwealth, whose citizens make up over a quarter of the world’s population. Change is in the air.
In early July while on a windy walk I started to hear a song about Drawdown. First a single phrase came to mind, then a melody. You can click on the link to the song to hear it, but I’m also posting these lyrics because the information in this best-selling book is so very encouraging to me and many other people:
Drawdown
We’ve created a vast vicious circle of CO2 pollution warming oceans, land and air.
We’ve got to break the cycle, get some corporate divorces, and give our Mother Earth a lot more tender loving care.
Now we’re trying to birth a more auspicious circle, reversing global warming is on many awesome minds.
As we find new ways of living more lightly on Gaia, we will leave our sad old fossilized fuel blues behind.
To cool the biosphere we can draw down CO2, adding carbon to the soil produces much more food.
No need to feel helpless or listless we can cool it, there’s a growing list of grassroots ways we’re already doin’ it!
A book titled Drawdown tells 100 things now being done to lessen carbon levels, here are just a few:
there’s managed grazing, biochar, regenerative agriculture, clean inexpensive cookstoves and silvopastures too.
Developments in geothermal, wind and solar, microgrids, wave and tidal systems to power our homes and towns;
in-stream hydro, biomass from methane gas digesters…Old King Coal will be a bygone as new sources abound.
There’s 100 ways in Drawdown to undo global warming, 80 absolutely proven and presently in use.
Many experts did the math, estimating costs and savings and the gigatons of CO2 that each way will reduce.
Top ranked include less food waste and managing refrigerants, as well as plant-rich diets, family planning you will view, temperate and tropical forest preservation, and better education for girls and women too.
Yes we’re drawing a virtuous circle, reversing global warming in a grassroots turnaround.
Mothered by necessity and human ingenuity, this book evokes a surge of hope, empowering drawdown.
Geoff Oelsner