Scan barcode
Reviews
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken
emiliemoeller's review against another edition
5.0
Amazing and empowering climate change solution read
mabersold's review against another edition
5.0
This book isn't about convincing people that climate change is real. If you need more convincing, read a different book. I'm sure there are dozens. What this book is, is the playbook for how we solve the problem. It presents 100 different solutions, some well-known, some more obscure, and some very speculative. It also assigns a value for how much carbon use it will reduce (or remove from the atmosphere) and how much it will cost (many of the solutions will actually save us money, it turns out).
The big surprise is some of these solutions are things one wouldn't normally consider. When I think of reducing emissions, the first things I think of are driving cars and burning coal for electricity. But this book rates the #1 most effective solution as refrigerant management, which we are already on the way to fixing. It does, of course, make the case for other things that are well-known such as wind, solar, and geothermal energy, and a few others you may not have heard of such as concentrated solar. Being a transit junkie, I loved the sections about public transportation, bike infrastructure, and making walkable communities (which included references to Jeff Speck's excellent book Walkable City).
The "coming attractions" section contains most of the speculative proposals, including some that may never really pan out such as Hyperloop. The most interesting to me was using more wood for construction instead of steel, a surprisingly simple but effective idea (since trees are the most effective carbon capture machines we have, coupled with the advent of cross-laminated timber).
Not all of the solutions presented in this book are necessarily going to pan out, but with a problem of this magnitude, everything needs to be considered. Ultimately, the most valuable takeaway I got from reading this book is that, while we have an enormous problem to solve ahead of us, and it's going to be incredibly challenging, things aren't hopeless yet.
The big surprise is some of these solutions are things one wouldn't normally consider. When I think of reducing emissions, the first things I think of are driving cars and burning coal for electricity. But this book rates the #1 most effective solution as refrigerant management, which we are already on the way to fixing. It does, of course, make the case for other things that are well-known such as wind, solar, and geothermal energy, and a few others you may not have heard of such as concentrated solar. Being a transit junkie, I loved the sections about public transportation, bike infrastructure, and making walkable communities (which included references to Jeff Speck's excellent book Walkable City).
The "coming attractions" section contains most of the speculative proposals, including some that may never really pan out such as Hyperloop. The most interesting to me was using more wood for construction instead of steel, a surprisingly simple but effective idea (since trees are the most effective carbon capture machines we have, coupled with the advent of cross-laminated timber).
Not all of the solutions presented in this book are necessarily going to pan out, but with a problem of this magnitude, everything needs to be considered. Ultimately, the most valuable takeaway I got from reading this book is that, while we have an enormous problem to solve ahead of us, and it's going to be incredibly challenging, things aren't hopeless yet.
jankatar's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.25
Very useful and inspiring, hopeful in a time of climate anxiety. Not a good book to read front-to-back, but nice to sometimes read a chapter of two from during the better part of a year. I think this will be a useful reference if I ever want to know anything about different solutions in the future.
There's an ongoing project relating to the book which gives even more reference material and keeps information up-to-date.
There's an ongoing project relating to the book which gives even more reference material and keeps information up-to-date.
ela_lee_'s review against another edition
5.0
Whew! That was a long one. And I hope to retain even a fraction of all I just read, but if not, that’s why I wrote down my saved notes.
This was frustrating to read at times. In the most respectful way…a lot of it is kind of common sense. Why DON'T we already do most of these things to help the planet?! (Of course I know why.) However, the book wasn’t just a long list of everything we suck at. It also showed how far we’ve come, the changes we’ve made, and data on how much of an impact we’ve had so far.
I mean, for what it is, I give it 5 stars. This book is exactly what it said it would be. I liked that the chapters are a general overview of each environmental topic. Each chapter was brief, concentrated, and only about 10 minutes long. I’d say I was more interested in the first half than the second, it got a little difficult to finish towards the end.
The book is separated into nine main sections:
Energy
Food
Regenerative agriculture (Grazing practices was super interesting to me)
Women and Girls
Buildings and Cities
Land use
Transport
Materials
Coming attractions
We take 100% responsibility and stop blaming others. We see Global Warming not as an inevitability, but as an invitation to build, innovate, and effect change. A pathway that awakens creativity, compassion, and genius. This is not a liberal agenda, nor is it a conservative one, this is the human agenda.
If all nations adopted a similar rate [referring to South Korea’s increase in education] and achieved 100% enrollment of girls in primary and secondary school, by 2050 there would be 843 million fewer people world wide than if current enrollment rates sustain.
Education equips women to face the most dramatic climatic changes. A 2013 study found that educating girls is the single most important social and economic factor associated with a reduction in vulnerability in natural disasters. The single most important.
“What Works in Girl’s Education” maps out of 7 areas of interconnected interventions:
1. Make school affordable
2. Help girls overcome health barriers
3. Reduce the time and distance to get to school
4. Make schools more girl-friendly
5. Improve school quality
6. Increase community engagement
7. Sustain girls education during emergencies
Thinking has come full circle on cities from blaming them for environmental destruction, to considering that urban environments, properly designed and managed, can be a kind of biological as well as cultural arc. Places where human beings can have the lowest impact on the planet and be educated, creative, and healthy.
In October 2016, San Francisco became the first US city to adopt a green roof mandate. As of this year, 15-30% of roof space on new buildings must be green, use solar power, or both. Other cities should follow suit. By attending to life both in buildings and on top of them, the world’s current patchwork of barren roofs can flower, transforming cities into life supporting systems.
Addiction to air conditioning is the most pervasive and least noticed epidemic in the US. Where the amount of electricity used to keep buildings cool is equal to what the whole of Africa uses for everything.
Preventing loss of forest is always better than trying to bring forest back and cure raised land. Because a restored forest never fully recovers its original biodiversity, structure, and complexity, and because it takes decades to sequester the amount of carbon lost in one fell swoop of deforestation, restoration is no replacement for protection.
Scientists in the Harz Mountains in Germany have discovered that trees rely on interdependence; most individual trees of the same species growing in the same stand are connected to each other through their root systems. It appears that nutrient exchange and helping neighbors in times of need is the rule. And this leads to the conclusion that forests are super organisms with interconnections much like ant colonies.
The capacity of trees to synthesize and sequester carbon through photosynthesis as they grow has made afforestation an important practice in the age of warming. Creating new forests where there were none before in areas that have been treeless for at least 50 years is the aim of afforestation.
A great irony of global warming is that the means of keeping cool make warming worse. As temperatures rise, so does reliance on air conditioners.
The age of plastic. Globally, we produce roughly 310 million tons of plastic each year; that is 83 pounds per person. Plastic production is expected to quadruple by 2050.
How cars are owned and utilized today could not be any less efficient. About 96% are privately owned. Americans spend $2 trillion per year on car ownership. And cars are used for percent of the time. The contemporary car is not a driving machine, but a parking machine for which 700 million parking spaces have been built-the equivalent to the state of Connecticut.
Simard’s work was amongst the first to prove that fungi branch out from the roots of a single tree to connect dozens of trees and shrubs and herbs. Not only their relatives, but also to entirely different species. The Wood Wide Web, as Simard calls it, is an underground internet through which water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and defense compounds are exchanged.
More people in the US, as of 2016, are employed by the solar industry than by gas, oil, and coal combined. Restoration creates more jobs than despoliation. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future rather than stealing it.
This was frustrating to read at times. In the most respectful way…a lot of it is kind of common sense. Why DON'T we already do most of these things to help the planet?! (Of course I know why.) However, the book wasn’t just a long list of everything we suck at. It also showed how far we’ve come, the changes we’ve made, and data on how much of an impact we’ve had so far.
I mean, for what it is, I give it 5 stars. This book is exactly what it said it would be. I liked that the chapters are a general overview of each environmental topic. Each chapter was brief, concentrated, and only about 10 minutes long. I’d say I was more interested in the first half than the second, it got a little difficult to finish towards the end.
The book is separated into nine main sections:
Energy
Food
Regenerative agriculture (Grazing practices was super interesting to me)
Women and Girls
Buildings and Cities
Land use
Transport
Materials
Coming attractions
We take 100% responsibility and stop blaming others. We see Global Warming not as an inevitability, but as an invitation to build, innovate, and effect change. A pathway that awakens creativity, compassion, and genius. This is not a liberal agenda, nor is it a conservative one, this is the human agenda.
If all nations adopted a similar rate [referring to South Korea’s increase in education] and achieved 100% enrollment of girls in primary and secondary school, by 2050 there would be 843 million fewer people world wide than if current enrollment rates sustain.
Education equips women to face the most dramatic climatic changes. A 2013 study found that educating girls is the single most important social and economic factor associated with a reduction in vulnerability in natural disasters. The single most important.
“What Works in Girl’s Education” maps out of 7 areas of interconnected interventions:
1. Make school affordable
2. Help girls overcome health barriers
3. Reduce the time and distance to get to school
4. Make schools more girl-friendly
5. Improve school quality
6. Increase community engagement
7. Sustain girls education during emergencies
Thinking has come full circle on cities from blaming them for environmental destruction, to considering that urban environments, properly designed and managed, can be a kind of biological as well as cultural arc. Places where human beings can have the lowest impact on the planet and be educated, creative, and healthy.
In October 2016, San Francisco became the first US city to adopt a green roof mandate. As of this year, 15-30% of roof space on new buildings must be green, use solar power, or both. Other cities should follow suit. By attending to life both in buildings and on top of them, the world’s current patchwork of barren roofs can flower, transforming cities into life supporting systems.
Addiction to air conditioning is the most pervasive and least noticed epidemic in the US. Where the amount of electricity used to keep buildings cool is equal to what the whole of Africa uses for everything.
Preventing loss of forest is always better than trying to bring forest back and cure raised land. Because a restored forest never fully recovers its original biodiversity, structure, and complexity, and because it takes decades to sequester the amount of carbon lost in one fell swoop of deforestation, restoration is no replacement for protection.
Scientists in the Harz Mountains in Germany have discovered that trees rely on interdependence; most individual trees of the same species growing in the same stand are connected to each other through their root systems. It appears that nutrient exchange and helping neighbors in times of need is the rule. And this leads to the conclusion that forests are super organisms with interconnections much like ant colonies.
The capacity of trees to synthesize and sequester carbon through photosynthesis as they grow has made afforestation an important practice in the age of warming. Creating new forests where there were none before in areas that have been treeless for at least 50 years is the aim of afforestation.
A great irony of global warming is that the means of keeping cool make warming worse. As temperatures rise, so does reliance on air conditioners.
The age of plastic. Globally, we produce roughly 310 million tons of plastic each year; that is 83 pounds per person. Plastic production is expected to quadruple by 2050.
How cars are owned and utilized today could not be any less efficient. About 96% are privately owned. Americans spend $2 trillion per year on car ownership. And cars are used for percent of the time. The contemporary car is not a driving machine, but a parking machine for which 700 million parking spaces have been built-the equivalent to the state of Connecticut.
Simard’s work was amongst the first to prove that fungi branch out from the roots of a single tree to connect dozens of trees and shrubs and herbs. Not only their relatives, but also to entirely different species. The Wood Wide Web, as Simard calls it, is an underground internet through which water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and defense compounds are exchanged.
More people in the US, as of 2016, are employed by the solar industry than by gas, oil, and coal combined. Restoration creates more jobs than despoliation. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future rather than stealing it.
trippalli's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
I read those in July and again in September. It's full of short chapters on coral information. It's full of good pictures and graphics and it's easy to read. It has valuable information and data but is also reassuring in the facts on what we can do and the impact different coaches can have to help climate change issues
dashius's review against another edition
5.0
This book lists the solutions to the climate crisis, ranking them in terms of their impact. There are many eye-opening insights that put things into perspective. The most effective measure? Properly disposing of air conditioning units. The 4th most effective? Educating girls. It is inspiring and makes it clear that we have ALL the answers. We know what to do. We just need to start doing it.
tamaralgage1's review against another edition
4.0
I am going to give this book 4* due to the quality and quantity of material available. It loses a lot in the way the information has been organized in my opinion. Given the title of the book "The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming", it should have started with the summaries the editor chose to place in the back of the book on pages 221 & 222. Afterall, the reader should know immediate what is # 1 on the list and be able to find it. Instead Refrigeration (#1 on the list) is buried on page 165 in a section titled "Recycling". My spreadsheet brain is working overtime on columns and organization of the excellent data... ... ok, that's not going to happen. But you see my point..
For this reason, I found this book difficult to read and retain over a short period of time. If I owned copy, I might be tempted to tear the pages out a reorganize.
For this reason, I found this book difficult to read and retain over a short period of time. If I owned copy, I might be tempted to tear the pages out a reorganize.
sebswann's review against another edition
5.0
“We see global warming not as an inevitability but as an invitation to build, innovate, and effect change, a pathway that awakens creativity, compassion, and genius. This is not a liberal agenda, nor is it a conservative one. This is a human agenda.”
If you care about the planet, this should be required reading.
If you care about the planet, this should be required reading.