Scan barcode
A review by ela_lee_
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken
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.