An 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.