(Grok:)

# Chapter 7: Drawdown and Regeneration – Reweaving the Web of Life in One Generation

## Introduction: A Bold Claim in a Time of Despair

In an era where headlines scream of tipping points and irreversible loss, Paul Hawken’s *Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming* (2017) arrives like a lifeline. Hawken, a lifelong environmentalist and entrepreneur, asserts not merely to slow or stabilize climate change, but to *reverse* it—drawing down atmospheric carbon to pre-industrial levels within a single generation, roughly 30 years. This audacious vision, grounded in rigorous analysis of 100 climate solutions, challenges the prevailing narrative of inevitable doom. But is it realistic? Can humanity muster the collective will and ingenuity to enact it? And how does Hawken’s subsequent work, *Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation* (2021), evolve this blueprint into a regenerative ethos? This chapter explores these questions, weaving in indigenous wisdom from the Achuar people via the Pachamama Alliance, critiques of modernity from Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti, and grassroots tools like Doug Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park. Ultimately, we ask: Can these threads—scientific, cultural, and communal—interlace to avert collapse, or at least soften its landing, birthing a bioregional, localized future where humans heal rather than harm?

## The Drawdown Project: Science Meets Solutions

Project Drawdown, launched in 2013 under Hawken’s leadership, represents a paradigm shift from mitigation to reversal. Unlike models fixated on emissions cuts, Drawdown quantifies the net carbon sequestration potential of existing technologies and practices, projecting a “drawdown” point by mid-century where greenhouse gases peak and begin to decline. The project’s research methodology is a model of collaborative rigor: Over 200 experts—scientists, policymakers, and practitioners—contributed to technical reports evaluating solutions across sectors like energy, food, land use, and transport. Each solution is scored on three metrics: feasibility (technical and economic viability), impact (gigatonnes of CO2 sequestered or avoided by 2050), and cost (net financial return). Data draws from peer-reviewed studies, satellite imagery, and global inventories, ensuring transparency via open-source models.

A standout contributor is Delton Chen, a civil engineer and research fellow with Drawdown. Chen’s work bridges engineering and policy, notably through his leadership in the Global 4C initiative—a proposed “World Monetary Union for Climate Change Mitigation” that treats carbon reductions as a global currency. In Drawdown, Chen co-authored analyses on blockchain-enabled carbon accounting and low-carbon project verification, emphasizing scalable, equitable finance mechanisms. His contributions underscore Drawdown’s holistic lens: solutions must not only sequester carbon but also lift communities out of poverty, as explored in the project’s *Lift* report linking climate action to education, health, and gender equity.

The top solutions? Reforestation (21.5 gigatonnes), reduced food waste (another 21.5), and plant-rich diets (18.9)—reminders that nature-based approaches often outpace high-tech fixes. Collectively, these 100 interventions could achieve 1,200 gigatonnes of drawdown by 2050, exceeding projected emissions and tipping the scales toward reversal.

## Realistic? The Feasibility of Reversal in a Generation

Hawken’s claim is intoxicatingly optimistic, but realism demands scrutiny. Proponents hail Drawdown as a “roadmap with a moral compass,” aggregating proven solutions into a feasible path forward. Its data-driven approach demystifies climate action, showing that 80% of solutions are deployable today at net profit. Yet critics argue it underplays political and social barriers. Eric Utne, in a pointed exchange with Hawken, contends that Drawdown’s techno-optimism glosses over entrenched power structures—fossil fuel lobbies, inequality, and consumerism—that block implementation. “We know what to do,” Utne writes, “but do we have the will?” Hawken counters that experiential warming (floods, fires) will catalyze action, shifting from conceptual dread to urgent response.

Feasibility hinges on scale and equity. Drawdown assumes global adoption rates akin to renewables’ boom (solar costs fell 89% since 2010), but nature-based solutions like silvopasture demand land reforms in the Global South. Recent updates, like the 2020 technical volume, refine projections amid COVID-19 disruptions, affirming that reversal remains possible if accelerated post-2025. Are we likely to succeed? Current trajectories—renewables at 30% of global energy, reforestation pledges faltering—suggest partial progress, but not full drawdown without a “great mobilization.” The claim is realistic in theory, improbable without cultural rupture.

## The Pachamama Alliance: Heeding the Achuar’s Call to Awaken

Enter the Pachamama Alliance, born in 1995 from an extraordinary invitation by the Achuar, an indigenous nation spanning Ecuador and Peru. Guardians of 2 million acres of Amazon rainforest, the Achuar issued a prophetic call: Western “dreamers” must awaken from the “dream of modernity”—a trance of endless extraction and separation from nature—lest it destroy their shared world. Through dream-sharing rituals, Achuar shamans envisioned oil rigs scarring their lands and urged allies to “change the dream” by transforming industrialized culture.

The Alliance responded with the *Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream* Symposium, a transformative workshop blending Achuar wisdom, systems thinking, and calls to action. Delivered to millions worldwide, it reframes modernity not as progress but as a collective hallucination of dominance over Earth, urging participants to grieve losses, reclaim agency, and co-create regenerative futures. This indigenous-rooted pedagogy complements Drawdown’s solutions with soul-work: healing the human-nature rift to fuel sustained action.

## The Rift: Breakdown Between Pachamama and Drawdown

Pachamama initially amplified Drawdown through its Initiative, hosting free workshops since 2017 that engaged 15,000+ participants in local solution implementation—from community gardens to policy advocacy. But in April 2021, the Alliance discontinued the program, citing a need to hone its “unique contribution” to climate justice. Deeper tensions emerged under Drawdown’s new leadership, which prohibited Pachamama from using the “Drawdown” name, fracturing a symbiotic partnership. This split highlights diverging visions: Drawdown’s solution-centric focus versus Pachamama’s emphasis on decolonial awakening and equity, echoing broader debates in climate movements about top-down expertise versus grassroots indigeneity.

## Vanessa Andreotti: Hospicing the House of Modernity

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti, a Brazilian-Brazilian scholar and co-founder of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, deepens this critique in *Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism* (2021). Drawing on indigenous and decolonial thought, Andreotti portrays modernity as a “house on fire”—a colonial edifice built on extraction, white supremacy, and anthropocentrism—that activists unwittingly reinforce by seeking “fixes” within its walls. Her work calls for “hospicing”: not fighting the dying structure, but accompanying its dignified end through radical tenderness, unlearning dominance, and allowing Earth to “dream through us.”

Andreotti’s compass for decolonization integrates complexity theory, Black and Indigenous studies, and ontological humility—questioning modernity’s binaries (human/nature, progress/decline). In a collapsing world, she urges “living beyond meaning,” embracing grief as portal to emergent futures. This resonates with the Achuar’s dream-awakening: both demand we dismantle the trance before rebuilding.

## Regeneration: From Solutions to a Living World

*Regeneration* builds on Drawdown, expanding to 50+ nature-based solutions while centering “putting life at the center of every action.” Hawken’s background—as founder of Erewhon Natural Foods and author of *Blessed Unrest*—infuses the book with entrepreneurial grit and spiritual depth. It takes us beyond metrics to stories of soil regeneration, microbial alliances, and Indigenous fire practices, arguing that true reversal demands ecosystem restoration, not just carbon accounting. The companion website networks global actors, evolving Drawdown’s playbook into a regenerative movement.

## Movement-Building Tools: Doug Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park

Amidst these visions, practical tools proliferate. Entomologist Doug Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park (HNP), co-founded in 2020, transforms private yards into biodiversity corridors—collectively forming a “national park” larger than Yellowstone. With 85 million U.S. acres in lawns, Tallamy’s method is simple: Plant natives (e.g., oaks supporting 500+ caterpillar species), remove invasives, and map efforts via HNP’s platform. Keystone species guides and HOA toolkits democratize restoration, fostering community resilience and food security. HNP embodies bioregionalism: healing habitats where we live, one yard at a time.

## Tying the Threads: Toward Graceful Collapse and Bioregional Renewal

Can we weave these strands—Drawdown’s science, Achuar wisdom, Andreotti’s hospicing, Regeneration’s vitality, HNP’s grassroots—to evade collapse? Full avoidance feels improbable; systemic inertia and conflict loom. Yet graceful descent is possible: by localizing food and energy, restoring watersheds, and culturing reciprocity, we mitigate suffering and seed emergence. Bioregionalism—living within a place’s ecology, as Tallamy models—offers intelligence over abstraction, healing harms through permaculture guilds and Indigenous-led stewardship. Hawken’s generation-long arc aligns with Andreotti’s unlearning: reversal isn’t linear triumph but relational mending.

In *Possible Planet*, these pathways invite us to dream anew—not modernity’s fever, but a habitable weave where humans, humbled, co-evolve with kin. The Achuar called; will we awaken?

Claude:

From Drawdown to Regeneration: Weaving Solutions into a Culture of Place

The Audacious Claim: Reversing Global Warming in One Generation

When Paul Hawken published Drawdown in 2017, he made an unprecedented claim: that humanity possesses the means to reverse global warming, not merely slow it, within thirty years. The goal itself was revolutionary—Hawken noted that for forty years, climate discourse had focused on verbs like “mitigate,” “fight,” and “combat,” but no one had ever named the actual goal: drawdown, the point when greenhouse gases peak and begin to decline.

Is this realistic? The mathematical modeling suggests yes—if we act. Project Drawdown’s research showed that eighty technologies and practices, when scaled appropriately, could eliminate one trillion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2050, enough to prevent crossing the dangerous threshold of two degrees Celsius warming. Every solution presented was already operational, economically viable, and scaling somewhere in the world.

Are we likely to achieve this? That’s a harder question. As of 2021, 182 of 188 countries that made climate commitments had failed to meet them, with even G7 nations falling far short of their targets. Meanwhile, ninety-eight percent of the world remains disengaged from what Hawken calls the greatest danger civilization has ever faced. The gap between technical possibility and political will remains vast.

Yet Hawken’s approach offers something transformative: not despair-inducing warnings about future catastrophe, but a comprehensive blueprint of what we can do right now, with what we already have. Rather than constantly focusing on the problem, Hawken asks us to focus on solutions, noting that after forty years of climate discourse, no one had mapped, measured, and modeled the top solutions to global warming.

The Research Behind Drawdown

Project Drawdown brought together over 230 researchers, fellows from 22 countries with extensive academic and professional experience, to map, measure, and model the one hundred most substantive solutions to reversing global warming. The methodology was rigorous: identify only solutions currently in place and scaling, then model their potential impact through 2050, including costs, savings, and carbon reduction in gigatons.

The resulting ranking surprised even the researchers. Solutions addressing women and girls—education and family planning—ranked prominently alongside renewable energy. Regenerative agriculture, plant-rich diets, and food waste reduction all proved more impactful than many hoped-for technological fixes. The book organized these solutions into broad categories: energy, food, women and girls, buildings and cities, land use, transport, materials, and “coming attractions”.

Delton Chen’s Contribution: Carbon Currency and Monetary Policy

Among the researchers contributing to Drawdown was Delton Chen, an Australian civil engineer who analyzed the mitigation potential of fly-ash cement and low-flow water taps for the project. But Chen’s most significant work emerged from a different angle entirely.

Since early 2014, Chen collaborated with the Center for Regenerative Community Solutions on developing the “Global 4C Risk Mitigation Policy” (Complementary Currencies for Climate Change). His insight was profound: traditional carbon pricing treats the market failure as a social cost, but Chen reclassified it as a “thermodynamic market failure” requiring two explicit prices on carbon—one for the negative externality of emissions and a second for creating a positive externality to manage systemic risks.

Chen’s proposal envisions an international body creating carbon coins—a digital currency backed by verified carbon dioxide reductions, with value guaranteed to grow over time. When oil reserves are left in the ground, forests are restored, or machines filter carbon from the air, coins are generated. Kim Stanley Robinson featured Chen’s concept as a central pillar of climate strategy in his novel The Ministry for the Future, bringing the idea to wider attention.

The elegance of Chen’s approach lies in addressing risk rather than mere efficiency. Just as you buy car insurance based on risk probability rather than route optimization, carbon currency would incentivize climate action as risk management for civilization itself. The proposal suggests pumping money into carbon drawdown projects through “green quantitative easing,” spreading costs across the world economy at roughly 1-2% added inflation while attracting the estimated $90 trillion in private investment needed over fifteen years.

The Achuar Call: Awakening from the Dream of Modernity

While Project Drawdown developed technical solutions, the Pachamama Alliance addressed something deeper: the cultural operating system driving our crisis in the first place.

In the early 1990s, Achuar shamans and elders in the Amazon rainforest between Ecuador and Peru began having dreams of an imminent threat to their land and traditional way of life. The Achuar, whose culture has always been guided by dreams shared each morning, understood these visions as warnings. Oil concessions in the Amazon had been granted since the early twentieth century, with exploration and development accelerating dramatically in the 1960s.

Rather than simply defending their territory, the Achuar made a courageous decision: to reach out to the modern world that threatened their existence. In 1995, they invited a group including John Perkins, Bill Twist, and Lynne Twist to the rainforest. The request they made was extraordinary. The Achuar asked for allies who would “change the dream of the modern world,” shifting Western culture from consumption and accumulation toward honoring and sustaining life.

Bill and Lynne Twist, along with John Perkins, co-founded the Pachamama Alliance to carry out this commitment, with a two-fold mission: to preserve Earth’s tropical rainforests by empowering Indigenous peoples as natural custodians, and to transform the worldview of the modern world. The partnership succeeded magnificently on the ground: the Achuar gained full title to nearly 1.8 million acres of rainforest, with the Alliance expanding to work with other Indigenous groups in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and Bolivia.

But the mandate to “change the dream” proved more complex. For the first three to four years, Pachamama focused almost entirely on projects in Ecuador, while the question of how to transform modernity itself remained elusive. Eventually, they developed the “Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream” symposium, designed to leave participants in a state of “blessed unrest”—deeply aware of the pain of the future we’re headed toward yet fiercely committed to bridging the gap to the more beautiful future our hearts know is possible.

The Breakdown with Drawdown

The Pachamama Alliance initially embraced Hawken’s Drawdown work with enthusiasm. In 2017, they launched the Drawdown Initiative, a series of workshops based on Project Drawdown’s research, with over 15,000 people participating and hundreds in 19 countries spreading the word.

However, Pachamama noticed that while people appreciated learning about reversing global warming, they didn’t necessarily engage in actions with others in their community to actually do the work. The educational model wasn’t translating into the kind of transformation the Achuar had called for.

In April 2021, Pachamama Alliance discontinued the Drawdown Initiative workshop to focus resources on mobilizing people into action on climate justice solutions at the local level. This wasn’t a rejection of Drawdown’s solutions but a recognition that technical knowledge alone doesn’t change the underlying cultural patterns. The separation reflected different theories of change: Hawken’s approach through comprehensive solutions mapping versus Pachamama’s focus on consciousness transformation and community mobilization for justice.

The two paths aren’t contradictory—they’re complementary threads in the larger tapestry. We need both the practical blueprints of what to do and the cultural transformation of who we are and how we relate to each other and the living world.

Vanessa Andreotti’s Work on Modernity

Brazilian educator Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti has become one of the most incisive voices examining the deep structures of modernity that perpetuate our crisis. In her book Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, Andreotti uses the metaphor of hospice—caring compassionately for something dying—to describe how we might consciously let old, harmful structures wither away.

Andreotti defines modernity as a ubiquitous story of linear progress, development, evolution, and civilization that informs how we think, imagine, hope, and desire—even our neurobiology, including where we source pleasure and what we fear. She identifies six Cs that modernity conditions us to desire: Comfort, Control, Convenience, Certainty, Consumption, and Coherence.

For Andreotti and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, colonialism doesn’t start with subjugation of people or occupation of lands but with a fundamental sense of separation between humans and the land, traced back to separations between humans and cosmos, and between creature and creator. This is not an informational problem but a “harmful habit of being,” an onto-metaphysical issue at the root of our consciousness.

She describes WEIRD traits of modernity: Western, Entitled, Individualistic, Reductionist, and Delusional—a colonization of mind and body and a deep separation from the living Earth. The problem isn’t simply that we have the wrong ideas; it’s that the neurophysical, neurochemical, and neurofunctional configurations that created the problem won’t get us to a different space. We must expand our neurobiological capacities to even begin to imagine, want, and hope for something different.

Andreotti’s work illuminates why technical solutions alone won’t save us. If our desires themselves are shaped by modernity’s operating system, we’ll simply use new tools to pursue the same destructive ends. Indigenous communities she works with call the collapse “the collapse of the house that was built through colonialism”—and they’re preparing to leap back to older ways of being before it falls on everyone’s heads.

Regeneration: Where Hawken Takes Us Next

Published in 2021, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation offers Hawken’s evolved vision, weaving justice, climate, biodiversity, equity, and human dignity into a seamless tapestry of action, policy, and transformation. This isn’t simply Drawdown 2.0; it’s a fundamental reframing.

Hawken flipped the narrative, bringing people back into the conversation by demonstrating that addressing current human needs rather than future threats is the only path to solving the climate crisis. Instead of war metaphors that frame climate as an enemy to fight, regeneration recognizes climate as part of our living system.

Solutions now explicitly include concepts like fifteen-minute cities, bioregions, azolla fern, food localization, fire ecology, decommodification, forests as farms, and the number one solution: electrifying everything. The scope broadened dramatically: from marine preserves as “absolute no-take zones” to marine reforestation building kelp forests, from sustainable food chains to promoting the diversity of edible plants we’ve ignored.

Regeneration emphasizes that what’s good for wildlife is good for climate change—restored landscapes, recovering fish stocks, rising biodiversity, expanding forests, flourishing towns and cities all lead us in the right direction. The book describes how an inclusive movement can engage the majority of humanity, with climate solutions that directly serve our children, the poor, and the excluded.

The nonprofit Regeneration Organization launched alongside the book, with streaming video series, curriculum, podcasts, teaching videos, and climate action software—infrastructure for a movement, not just a book.

Doug Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park

While Hawken scaled up to civilization-level transformation, entomologist Doug Tallamy scaled down to something every property owner can do: practice conservation not only in protected wildlands but outside parks and preserves—where we live, work, farm, and play.

Tallamy confronts us with a truth: we’ve never thought of our gardens as wildlife preserves representing the last opportunity to sustain plants and animals once common throughout the country, but that’s exactly the role built landscapes now play. U.S. development continues sprawling over two million additional acres per year—the size of Yellowstone National Park.

Tallamy co-founded Homegrown National Park to encourage individuals to restore biodiversity by reducing lawns, planting native species, and removing invasives to rebuild ecological networks. The initial goal: plant natives in place of just half the green lawns of privately-owned properties, equaling twenty million acres—more than all our national parks combined.

The beauty of Tallamy’s approach lies in its accessibility. Even without a yard, city dwellers can participate through container gardening with native plants on balconies or patios. Native plants require no fertilizer and no extra water once established, saving money while supporting ecosystems. More than 29,000 individuals have registered on Homegrown National Park’s interactive map, documenting where they’ve added native plants.

Tallamy offers four ecological functions for every landscape: provide food for wildlife, sequester carbon, manage stormwater, and support biodiversity. His “No Yard, No Problem” campaign proved that participation doesn’t require property ownership—a pot of native plants on an apartment balcony counts.

Tying Threads Together: Can We Avoid Collapse?

We face a profound question: can we tie enough threads together to avoid collapse, or at least collapse more gracefully with less conflict, while building a new culture of localism and bioregionalism?

The honest answer is: we don’t know. But we can see the threads that need weaving:

Technical Solutions: Drawdown proved we have the technologies and practices. We don’t need magical future breakthroughs—we need to scale what already works.

Systemic Redesign: Chen’s carbon currency and similar financial innovations suggest we can redesign economic systems to reward regeneration rather than extraction.

Consciousness Transformation: The Achuar’s call and Andreotti’s work remind us that changing our relationship to the living world requires changing ourselves—our desires, our sense of identity, our neurobiological patterns.

Community Action: Pachamama’s shift toward local climate justice mobilization and Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park demonstrate that individual and community-scale action matters profoundly.

Bioregional Futures: All these threads converge on something crucial: we must learn to inhabit places again, not as conquerors or consumers but as members of ecological communities with responsibilities to the whole.

The bioregional vision offers a way forward. Instead of the placeless abstraction of modernity—where everything comes from “away” and goes to “away”—bioregionalism roots us in watersheds, ecosystems, seasonal rhythms, and community networks defined by living systems rather than political boundaries.

This means:

• Food localization: Not just farmers’ markets but fundamentally restructuring food systems around regional capacity
• Regenerative land stewardship: Restoring what’s been damaged, protecting what remains, and managing lands as participants in ecosystems rather than property to exploit
• Energy descent and resilience: Building capacity to meet needs locally as global systems become less reliable
• Cultural renewal: Creating stories, rituals, and meaning-making appropriate to our actual ecological embeddedness

Graceful Collapse or Regenerative Transformation?

Whether we call it “hospicing modernity,” “regeneration,” or “the Great Turning,” we’re witnessing the death of one way of being and the potential birth of another. The industrial-capitalist model of endless growth on a finite planet is ending—the only question is how painful the transition will be.

We can make choices that reduce harm:

• Building solidarity across divisions
• Developing resilience at community scale
• Preserving knowledge and skills for simpler, lower-energy ways of living
• Protecting the ecological systems that will need to regenerate
• Creating networks of mutual aid and support
• Letting go of destructive attachments to comfort and control

The threads are there to be woven. Chen’s monetary innovation could fund massive regeneration. Hawken’s comprehensive solutions mapping shows what’s possible. Andreotti’s decolonial pedagogy helps us transform consciousness. The Achuar’s wisdom reminds us what matters. Tallamy’s practical approach lets everyone participate. Pachamama’s community mobilization builds the social fabric.

No single thread will hold. But woven together—technical, economic, cultural, spiritual, practical, and political—they become a net that might catch us as we fall, or even a tapestry showing us a more beautiful world.

The choice isn’t between utopia and apocalypse. It’s between dozens of degrees of collapse—from soft landings with strong communities and living ecosystems to hard crashes into conflict, suffering, and ecological devastation. We’re already in the collapse of modernity. What emerges depends entirely on the choices we make today, in our homes, neighborhoods, watersheds, and communities.

The question isn’t whether we can save industrial civilization—we likely can’t, and shouldn’t want to preserve systems built on exploitation and extraction. The question is whether we can midwife something better through the transition, drawing on the wisdom of those who never lost connection to place, and the tools of those learning to reconnect.

That’s the work. That’s the hope. That’s what makes getting up every morning and tending our small patches of earth meaningful, even in the face of civilizational breakdown. We plant not knowing if our gardens will survive, but planting anyway, because that’s what people who love their places do.

Perplexity:

1. https://drawdown.org/solutions/methods
2. https://earth.org/project-drawdown/
3. https://deco.lydion.com/story/review-of-paul-hawkens-regeneration
4. https://impact-investor.com/book-review-regeneration-ending-the-climate-crisis-in-one-generation-by-paul-hawken/
5. https://drawdown.org
6. https://drawdown.org/explorer
7. https://theorg.com/org/project-drawdown/teams/research-and-science-team
8. https://globalcarbonreward.org/our-vision/team/dr-delton-chen/
9. https://sites.psu.edu/rachelbrennan/drawdown/
10. https://www.gcseglobal.org/gcse-essays/research-action-science-drawdown

GPT-5:

Chapter: Drawdown, Regeneration, and the Possibility of Reversing Warming in a Generation

When Paul Hawken and a team of more than two hundred researchers set out to map the “hundred most substantive solutions” to global warming, they named the project Drawdown with a deliberately ambitious implication: not merely slowing or stabilizing the rate of warming, but reversing the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — returning the planet to a trajectory that would permit cooling and ecological recovery. That framing is at once scientific, moral, and rhetorical: it asks a practical question (what works?) and a psychological one (can we imagine a future in which our species intentionally draws down the heat-trapping burden we have placed on the atmosphere?). The Drawdown book and the ongoing Project Drawdown research have become a touchstone for people who want answers that are both technical and actionable. (Project Drawdown®)

This chapter examines three linked questions. First: is Hawken’s claim — that we could “end the climate crisis in one generation” or reverse global warming within a generation — realistic? Second: what was the research process behind Drawdown, and who (including contributors like Dr. Delton Chen) made it possible? Third: how does Drawdown intersect with deeper cultural work — the spiritual and decolonial invitation from the Achuar and the Pachamama Alliance, scholarly critiques of modernity such as Vanessa Andreotti’s, and grassroots movement tools like Doug Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park — in shaping a strategy that is both technically rigorous and culturally transformativ e? I’ll argue that Drawdown’s numbers are credible but incomplete without social transformation; that reversal is technically possible but politically and ethically fraught; and that the most resilient pathways combine hard mitigation with deep changes in story, governance, and place-based practice.

What Drawdown actually modeled — and what it did not

Project Drawdown’s methodology was methodical: catalogue known practices and technologies (from wind power and refrigerant management to reforestation and dietary shifts), estimate present and plausible future adoption, and model the cumulative greenhouse-gas reductions and sequestration those solutions could deliver. The results are not a single “plan” with a single pathway but a portfolio of interventions, each with modeled climate impact, costs, and co-benefits. The central, provocative claim is framed as possibility: if these solutions were deployed at scale, humanity could halt and begin to reverse the buildup of atmospheric greenhouse gases over the coming decades. That claim depends on two things: (1) very rapid deployment of proven technologies and practices at global scale, and (2) meaningful amounts of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) — both nature-based and technological — to offset residual emissions. (Project Drawdown®)

Drawdown’s language—“the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming”—helped mobilize attention because it translated complexity into a menu of options people could grasp and act on. But the modeling intentionally assumed optimistic adoption curves for many solutions; it also treated policy, finance, and political will as inputs rather than guaranteed outcomes. In short: Drawdown shows what is physically and technically possible; it does not by itself ensure the political will, governance innovations, or social transformation required to realize those scenarios. (crisrieder.org)

Is “reversing warming in a single generation” realistic?

Short answer: possible, but improbable under current political and economic trajectories.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the canonical voice for scenarios and the timing of warming. Its assessments make two linked points that are crucial: first, stabilizing global temperatures near lower thresholds (e.g., 1.5°C) requires reaching net-zero CO₂ emissions in the coming decades (centered around mid-century for many scenarios); second, carbon dioxide removal will be necessary in those pathways to bring greenhouse gas concentrations down if we overshoot or to achieve net-negative emissions thereafter. The technical point is clear: drawdown is physically possible, but it requires enormous, rapid coordination across energy, land, industry, finance, and society. The political point is sharper: the window to make that coordination less painful is closing; the later large-scale action comes, the more social tension and disruption we can expect. (IPCC)

In practice, reversing the climate within one generation depends on (at minimum): sustained and rapid reductions in fossil fuel combustion, global policy that prices and redirects capital at planetary scale, massive deployment of both nature-based and engineered CDR, and social shifts that change consumption patterns and political priorities. Drawdown supplies the “what” and many of the “how,” but its scenarios are most credible when paired with aggressive finance and governance innovations — including ideas like Delton Chen’s work on carbon reward mechanisms and monetary instruments that seek to mobilize massive funds toward verified climate action. Dr. Chen’s scholarship and policy thinking — from analysing mitigation potential for specific measures within Drawdown to proposing systemic finance mechanisms like global carbon rewards — remind us that the missing hinge is not always technology but how we mobilize money and governance for planetary repair. (cdn.bookey.app)

The research behind Drawdown — who did the work?

Drawdown was not a single author’s manifesto; it was an edited compendium, grounded in hundreds of scientific papers, technical reports, and datasets. Paul Hawken acted as editor and public face, but the research engine included researchers, modelers, sector experts, and partner organizations. Contributors ranged from academics modelling sequestration to practitioners estimating adoption pathways for rooftop solar, dietary shifts, or coastal restoration. Names like Katharine Wilkinson and many others are associated with the book; and the organizational infrastructure of Project Drawdown has continued as a research hub and outreach platform. Importantly, researchers with specific technical backgrounds — such as Delton Chen, who served as a research fellow and whose engineering and modeling expertise contributed to the project’s quantitative foundations — played important roles in vetting assumptions, estimating potentials, and linking intervention-level outcomes to broader carbon budgets. The Drawdown platform has continued to iterate: updates, regional adaptations, and online Explorer tools keep the accounting transparent and open to revision as data and adoption change. (Project Drawdown®)

Where the Pachamama Alliance fits — and where it parted ways

Project Drawdown also entered a less technical, more cultural space through early partnerships with organizations like the Pachamama Alliance. Pachamama — born from an alliance with the Achuar people of the Ecuadorian Amazon — has long balanced two calls from their partners: protect indigenous lands and cultures; and “change the dream of the modern world” — the invitation to shift the consumerist story that drives extraction. Pachamama seeded Drawdown workshops and used Drawdown’s material as a bridge between rigorous solution-mapping and the Alliance’s work in consciousness-raising and civic engagement. Over time the organizations’ emphases diverged: Drawdown stayed primarily a research and policy-oriented platform; Pachamama re-centered spiritual, cultural, and justice-oriented programming rooted in the Achuar call, eventually discontinuing the Drawdown Initiative workshops to explore its unique contribution to climate work — one focused more explicitly on love, cultural change, and mobilizing people from a place of relational commitment rather than technical strategy alone. That split is not a failure so much as a specification of different roles: one actor focuses on the toolbox; the other on the heart, the story, and the worldview shifts that make durable toolbox adoption possible. (pachamama.org)

The Achuar request — to awaken us from the “dream of modernity” — is not merely poetic. It names the deep epistemic and ethical roots of the crisis: extractive metaphors, endless growth paradigms, and human exceptionalism. Answering that call requires more than better machines; it asks for education, ritual, decolonial practice, and structural justice, so that transitions do not simply replicate patterns of dispossession under a green sheen.

Hospicing modernity: Vanessa Andreotti and the cultural work

Vanessa Andreotti’s work is instructive here. Her framing — which includes ideas like “hospicing modernity” — urges us to treat our current global system as a dying patient: we need to tend it, witness its passing, and shepherd the emergence of alternatives without clinging to illusions that prolong suffering. Andreotti’s scholarship helps us see that technical solutions, however essential, will founder if they fail to engage the educational, psychological, and political work of pluralizing knowledge, recognizing colonial histories, and making space for relational modes of being. In practical terms, this means embedding Drawdown-style solutions within curricula that center relational epistemologies, within municipal governance that respects indigenous rights, and within community practices that reimagine prosperity. (resilience)

Regeneration (the book) and the arc beyond Drawdown

Hawken’s later book Regeneration picks up both emphases: the technical and the cultural. While Drawdown offered an inventory of solutions, Regeneration is a call to collective practices that restore people and ecosystems together. It sketches a moral orientation — care, reciprocity, repair — and highlights initiatives that show how to live differently in place. The arc is clear: first map what works (Drawdown); then situate action within practices and politics that build regenerative relationships (Regeneration). The hope is to move from isolated interventions to resourced movements, and from market fixes alone to civic and bioregional practices able to sustain and scale those fixes. (Regeneration.org)

Movement tools: from policy to the yard — Doug Tallamy and Homegrown National Park

Movement building requires both top-down and bottom-up levers. One of the most elegant bottom-up tools is Doug Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park (HNP): a decentralized, homeowner-driven approach to rebuilding habitat by planting native species at scale. Tallamy’s work anchors the abstract notion of biodiversity recovery in everyday practice: each yard becomes an act of ecological citizenship. HNP complements Drawdown-style solutions because it is low-tech, immediate, and culturally resonant — and because it connects global goals to local action in a tangible way. Combining municipal incentives (for native plantings in parking strips or development codes) with homeowner outreach and bioregional seed networks could multiply impact rapidly — and create the social substrate for broader changes. (Homegrown National Park)

Can we tie these threads together to avoid collapse — or to collapse more gracefully?

There are two levels to this question. On the technical level, Drawdown and subsequent work show that we have the tools to avert the worst physical outcomes — if we deploy those tools at unprecedented speed and scale, and if we pair mitigation with robust CDR and adaptation. The IPCC’s synthesis is a sober companion here: reversal is feasible only alongside aggressive mitigation and deployment of removals — and with governance to manage trade-offs and risks. (IPCC)

On the cultural level, the faster transitions happen without addressing justice, power, and worldview, the more likely they are to provoke backlash, geopolitical conflict, and uneven outcomes. That’s where Pachamama’s spiritual invitation, Andreotti’s decolonial critique, and Tallamy’s place-based mobilization converge: a durable transition will require (a) fair governance that centers vulnerable peoples, (b) educational work that changes the stories we live by, and (c) millions of local acts of repair that rebuild ecosystems and civic trust.

Put differently: Drawdown supplies the map and estimate; Delton Chen and other systems thinkers supply finance and macroeconomic levers; Pachamama and Andreotti supply the ethics and epistemic correction; Tallamy supplies the practice of repair at household scale. Together they form a multipart strategy that is technically sufficient and socially plausible — but only if financed, governed, and narrated wisely.

A pragmatic conclusion and an invitation

Is reversing global warming in a single generation realistic? It is technically possible, and morally mandatory, if we interpret “realistic” to mean “feasible given the laws of physics and current knowledge.” It is politically and socially unlikely without rapid, large-scale changes in finance, governance, and culture. Project Drawdown gives us a durable, evidence-based menu of interventions; the Achuar and Pachamama Alliance remind us that the most effective interventions will be those rooted in humility, reciprocity, and justice; Vanessa Andreotti reminds us to hospice the failing structures of modernity so we can birth new ones; and Doug Tallamy reminds us that millions of small, place-based acts can become a global movement.

If this chapter has a modest thesis, it is this: reversing warming is not only a question of technology and money. It is an existential project of re-storying and re-grounding human life in place. The practical pathways are clear enough that policy and philanthropy can act; the cultural pathways are less tidy but no less necessary. Drawdown gave us the blueprint. The next chapters of human history will be written in the sweat of implementation and the slow work of cultural repair. The good news is twofold: the science tells us what to do; and people — guided by indigenous wisdom, grounded scholarship, and backyard habitat restoration — are already beginning to do it. The real test is whether we can weave those strands into movements that are powerful enough, just enough, and loving enough to carry us through.

---

Selected sources and further reading

• Project Drawdown — Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. (Project Drawdown®)
• Paul Hawken — Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation and related commentary. (Regeneration.org)
• Delton Chen — research fellow and contributor to Drawdown; work on carbon reward/finance mechanisms. (THE ORG)
• Pachamama Alliance and the Achuar origin story; Pachamama’s role in awakening the dream of modernity. (pachamama.org)
• Vanessa Andreotti — writings and interviews on “hospicing modernity” and decolonial education. (resilience)
• Doug Tallamy and Homegrown National Park — practical, yard-scale biodiversity recovery. (Homegrown National Park)
• IPCC — AR6 synthesis and discussion of carbon dioxide removal and mitigation timelines. (IPCC)

---

If you’d like, I can expand any subsection into a longer essay (for example: a dedicated deep dive on Delton Chen’s finance proposals; a historical vignette about the Achuar–Pachamama relationship; or a practical “how-to” addendum for municipalities wanting to pair Drawdown solutions with Homegrown National Park-style programs). Which thread should we pull next?