This is a book about where we choose to stand, both as individuals and as a human species, at this critical juncture in our planet’s history. Both literally and metaphorically, where we stand largely determines what we can see—and what we are likely to do. Our dominant ideologies, paradigms, mindsets, and unconscious assumptions are leading us toward ecological catastrophe. Only a profound reorientation in our thinking can lead us to see a way forward through an increasingly narrow opening into a sustainable future.
Humanity stands at a pivotal moment in Earth’s history, where our choices will determine the future habitability of our planet. Our perspective—both literal and metaphorical—shapes our understanding and actions. While human achievements in architecture, literature, science, and technology are remarkable, the past few centuries, particularly the last seventy to eighty years, have seen us inflict significant harm on Earth’s systems.
Recent analyses, such as the Planetary Health Check led by Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, reveal that human activities have breached six of the nine planetary boundaries. These boundaries include climate change, biodiversity loss, and the overuse of natural resources, which have pushed Earth’s systems into a state of global unsustainability.
Compounding this, scientists warn of over 25 critical climate tipping points—thresholds beyond which environmental changes become self-perpetuating and potentially irreversible. Surpassing these tipping points could lead to catastrophic shifts, making it exceedingly difficult to restore the stable climate and rich biodiversity that have supported human civilization.
Efforts to reduce carbon emissions, while essential, are too little too late. To avert the worst outcomes, a comprehensive regeneration of Earth’s biosphere is imperative. This book explores pathways to a habitable future, emphasizing the restoration of nature and the revitalization of healthy ecosystems and bioregions.
Our perspective has evolved over several decades of working on energy and the environment, through both for-profit and nonprofit efforts, stints in government and academia, ordinary jobs, and years of community engagement.
Our journey has taken us to many places over the course of our remarkable and, at times, improbable lives. Like others of our generation, we’ve lived through cultural revolutions, technological upheavals, and political sea changes, as well as the dawning realization that humanity’s impact on the biosphere threatens the very systems that support life on Earth.
Over the last dozen years, our focus has increasingly shifted to identifying and advancing real solutions to the climate crisis and to the accelerating loss of biodiversity—an issue that, while less publicly recognized, may prove even more harmful in the short term. In 2012, shortly after Superstorm Sandy devastated communities along the East Coast, we founded the Center for Regenerative Community Solutions to help communities chart a new course—toward greater resilience, self-sufficiency, and reconciliation with nature.
One of the most promising tools we encountered was an innovative form of financing known as Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE. At the time, it was being heralded as a game-changing approach to funding clean energy and resilience upgrades. Unlike most financial mechanisms in our extractive and exploitative economy—where profits are generated by externalizing harm—PACE offered the rare prospect of generating positive financial returns by doing the right thing: reducing energy waste, cutting carbon emissions, and investing in long-term environmental and economic value.
The idea was initially developed in the mid-2000s by Cisco DeVries, then Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Berkeley, California. DeVries. Inspired by local interest in solar energy, he was looking for a way to help homeowners afford clean energy upgrades. His breakthrough was to propose a new model: adapting the strategy used to fund public works, cities could float revenue bonds to provide long-term, low-cost capital, which homeowners could then access for energy efficiency and renewable energy improvements. The repayment mechanism was an assessment added to their property tax bill, linked to the property rather than the owner. Because the upgrades would reduce energy bills over time, most projects could pay for themselves while generating environmental benefits.
This model offered numerous advantages: low default risk, secure returns for investors, long-term benefits for property owners, and local job creation. While revenue bonds are distinct from general obligation bonds (which pledge the municipality’s full faith and credit), they are tied to a highly reliable repayment mechanism: the property tax system. Over time, private capital providers began to replace municipal bond issuers as the primary funders of PACE projects, streamlining transactions and expanding the market.
Inspired by the potential, we threw ourselves into advancing Commercial PACE (C-PACE) in our home state of New Jersey. It took more than a decade of legislative advocacy, coalition building, and negotiation to finally pass enabling legislation, which was signed into law and placed under the auspices of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA). However, a last-minute legislative amendment imposed Prevailing Wage requirements on all C-PACE assessments—something the original legislation had exempted projects from. While we support fair wages and organized labor, this blanket requirement is expected to effectively price out more than 80% of otherwise viable, smaller-scale clean energy and efficiency upgrades.
Of course, during this period, we’ve yet to see a single C-PACE or PACE-like project completed in New Jersey. A similar story has unfolded in neighboring New York, albeit for different regulatory and market reasons. This outcome has been deeply frustrating. Our intention was to help communities lower emissions, improve building performance, reduce long-term costs, and create good local jobs—all using a market-based tool that aligns capital with public benefit.
The larger problem, however, is that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise across all sectors. We are approaching planetary tipping points—such as melting ice sheets, thawing permafrost, and forest diebacks—that threaten to unleash feedback loops beyond our ability to control. We are at the brink of entering what scientists call a Hothouse Earth scenario, where natural systems begin to amplify rather than absorb human-caused warming.
Recognizing this, we’ve turned increasingly to the other side of the carbon ledger. If we can’t prevent all emissions, then we must do everything we can to draw carbon back down into living systems—soils, forests, wetlands, and oceans. This is the central insight of ecological regeneration: it’s not enough to do less harm. We must actively heal what has been damaged and strengthen its capacity to flourish.
This leads us to the basic structure of this book.
Part I describes our predicament and how we are living through climate and ecological overshoot and collapse.
Part II examines the feasibility of restoring the Earth’s carbon balance by cutting emissions. Theoretically, it’s still possible—and even economically rational—to do so. But in practice, we are not doing it at the scale or speed required. The renewable energy transition, once accelerating, is now slowing under political and financial headwinds. In the United States, a fossil-fuel-influenced political apparatus continues to deny climate science, subsidize destruction, and prioritize short-term gain over long-term survival.
Yet the science is unequivocal: climate disruption will intensify—with increasingly disastrous effects on food systems, water supplies, infrastructure, and geopolitical stability. Direct air capture and other high-tech carbon removal solutions are still marginal. The only viable large-scale solution available today is to restore nature: to regrow forests, revive soils, rehydrate landscapes, and protect ecosystems that absorb and store carbon.
Part III of the book explores the remaining pathways to a habitable future—a future where humanity learns to live within planetary boundaries while restoring what we have degraded. We no longer have the luxury of half-measures or superficial reforms. The idea that we can continue business as usual, with only marginal improvements, is not only false—it is dangerous. Toxic materials are accumulating in ecosystems and our bodies. Species are disappearing. Water cycles are disrupted. Capital continues to flow toward industries of extraction, speculation, and war.
Yet there is hope—and even joy—in the alternatives. Around the world, people are building regenerative economies, creating right livelihoods, reimagining governance, and restoring landscapes. We are seeing the emergence of bioregional movements, Indigenous land stewardship, community finance, and place-based resilience strategies. These solutions are not only possible—they are already happening. And they offer a much more satisfying, meaningful, and life-affirming vision than the extractive model that has brought us to the brink.
Part IV includes several chapters detailing some of the conclusions we reached from examining the possible pathways, and Part V has a Postscript and Epilogue, sharing some ideas and our hopes for a human future beyond our lifetimes and that of our children’s children’s children.
In this book, we share what we’ve learned—and what we are still learning—about how to move from collapse to regeneration, from disconnection to belonging, from crisis to possibility. We invite you to join us in this journey.