Book Review: The New Green Activist Bible?
Review Catherine de Neergaard
In DRAWDOWN: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, Paul Hawken and his team of scientists have identified the 100 most effective actions to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
They define “drawdown” as “… that point in time when the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere begins to decline on a year-to-year basis.”
This book gives me hope. If the top 80 solutions were to be done optimally, we could achieve drawdown: draw carbon down out of the atmosphere, and begin the reversal by 2050.
Given the stalemate in Washington over responding to the increasingly severe climate disaster, this book’s research suggests many ways that we as individuals, families, communities, counties, and states can take action now to save the Earth’s many ecologies and many species, including our own.
National positive action is difficult right now, but there is so much we can do to take the next steps toward a balanced home planet.
Here are the top ten things we can do in order of effectiveness in the most plausible scenario. You may find some of them surprising.
1. Phase out and properly dispose of harmful HFCs (refrigerants used in refrigeration and air conditioning)
2. Increase onshore wind energy with turbines
3. Reduce food waste
4. Eat a plant-rich diet
5. Protect and restore tropical forests
6. Educate girls and women
7. Secure women’s right to voluntary, high-quality family planning
8. Create more solar farms
9. Increase silviopasture (mixing trees, bushes, and grasses together in a natural pasture)
10. Support rooftop solar
Find more information about these and other solutions in the book or website, drawdown.org.
