The following piece by Paul Hawken is excerpted from the interview by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers CEO and Co-Founder, for his forthcoming film, “Changing of the Gods: Planetary and Human Revolutions.” Details at www.changingofthegods.com and on Facebook.
We are faced with a crisis caused by our separate minds — we believe we are distinct from other individuals and other forms of life. That has created brains, minds and intentions that reify the self. Media, advertising, and every TV program we see pretty much reinforces that point of view.
The core of that crisis is a sense of aloneness and separation. That creates a sense of threat. Even though the world is more benign, prosperous and less violent than it ever has been, you wouldn’t know that from looking at the headlines or talking to people.
As the crisis of Western civilization weighs more heavily, the science of climate change has arisen — the relationship between the atmosphere and life on Earth. It is now the gorilla in the room.
The solution is often described in terms of decarbonization, low carbon strategies, and reduced carbon footprints. That makes sense when it refers to fossil fuels, but carbon is not the bad boy. Carbon is sacred. Carbon is an element that holds hands and collaborates, or we wouldn’t be here. It makes up the majority of every single plant, animal, mineral, rock, vitamin, fat and protein. Carbon is ubiquitous, contained in 90 percent of every compound on Earth because it’s gregarious; it loves to mix it up.
What climate change tells our separate, siloed minds is that we have to give up the illusion of separation — that instead we have to hold hands and collaborate with each other, our neighbors, the community, and others we may not understand or agree with. We have to listen and actually be a part of humanity as opposed to judging it or trying to create a kind of a ghettoized self that has identities that are reinforced by social media, belief systems, politics and self-aggrandizing pursuits.
The opportunity in this crisis is to merge into a way of being that’s quite exquisite; that we are connected to everything on earth in ways that are profoundly complex, and beautiful, a way of being that creates a lifetime of joy, gratitude and astonishment.
Making the Transformation
The Industrial Revolution was a sea change in economics and production. Up until the Industrial Revolution, there was no concept of GDP, there was no such thing as a pay raise, and nobody tracked national income because it rarely changed.
The Industrial Revolution harnessed coal and other forms of fossil fuel energy in order to increase people’s ability to produce goods and services.
When you produce more, the cost goes down. And when costs go down, income goes up. When income goes up, demand goes up. When demand goes up, you produce more. When you produce more, you strive to increase productivity with machinery and mechanized equipment, and you require more energy. As the price of energy goes down, the price of goods goes way down and income goes way up.
Because of the success of the Industrial Revolution, there are many people — 7.2 billion. We’re now doing the opposite of what we need to do: we are using more and more of what we have less of, Earth’s natural resources—water, minerals, and soil,— in order to use less and less of what we have more of, which is human beings. We have an environmental crisis and one of social justice.
One of the beautiful opportunities with respect to climate change is to achieve drawdown. Drawdown refers to a time when on a year-to-year basis carbon in the atmosphere goes down. It is the only goal that makes sense at this time in human civilization. It is a more interesting and meaningful goal for humanity than ending war, terrorism and the marginalization of the poor.
A critical problem right now is that money is running away with the spoon. Income and capital are concentrating into a small number of hands. Power is concentrating, while billions of people have marginal or no jobs. Some see that as a different issue than the environment, but I don’t.
Environmental education is not about the environment. It is about inseparability, the fact that everything is minutely connected in this extraordinary thing we call life, but may never understand.
Children who can grow up in forest schools or with curricula that stitch the silos of modern life into something that approximates reality are not just sensitive to living beings and they don’t only take better care of the environment, their minds are completely different.
Environmental curriculum is connected to a broader set of problems and crises, because it is connected to the core of imagination and innovation. Innovation is not separate from sustainability.
If we examine systems: immune systems, ecosystems, economic systems, we see one very distinct principle common to all. To heal and optimize a system, you connect more of it to itself. It is that simple. When we stream disinformation to people, we disconnect them. When we create systems that deepen income inequality, we disconnect people. Inclusion and commonality (commonwealth) are core principles of democracy. Income inequality breeds fear, and fear breeds bad choices.
Project Drawdown
Climate change is the transformation that transforms everything. We can fight it, resist it or go numb. Or we can take this extraordinary transformation and employ it, extend it, innovate with it, and transform everything — our social institutions, our economic institutions, our education, our governing systems, our materials…everything.
Project Drawdown is a coalition of over 200 scientists, analysts, advisors, politician, business people, universities, colleges, teachers, PhD, and post-docs who are coming together to map out the 100 most substantive solutions to climate change that are extant; that is, solutions that are already in place, already scaling, already happening. Nothing needs to be invented. These existing solutions will get better, more efficient, and less expensive to be sure, but they’re also here right now to be analyzed and measured.
We are calculating the impact these solutions will have on the mitigation of carbon emissions, and the sequestration of carbon into the soil. We’re modeling the solutions over a 30-year timespan to see if we can achieve or closely approach drawdown within that period. We’re modeling it in terms of carbon, and we are also totaling how much it will cost and the return on investment that will accrue over 30 years.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and scientists have done the math on what’s going to happen if CO2 levels and greenhouse gas equivalents increase in the upper atmosphere. Bill McKibben called it the “Terrifying New Math” in his Rolling Stone piece three years ago. However we have not done the math on the full list of substantive solutions that are at hand and scaling right now, and what their impact would be over 30 years as they continue to grow and be implemented.
What we have also not done is name the goal. Our goal is not stabilization of carbon in the atmosphere at 450 or 500, or any ppm you name. Our goal is not 2 degrees C. Our goal is drawdown. The goal is to bring the carbon back home where it belongs, eventually back to pre-industrial levels. Until we name the goal, we’re not going to achieve it.
In the climate movement today there’s much activity and concern, so many brilliant minds, but we also need to make a universally accessible and doable shopping list.
Looking at the situation we are in, there are many who believe humanity is failing. I see it differently: Humanity knows what to do and they’re doing it. It’s our leaders who don’t know what to do, and they’re not doing it. It’s our corporations, in most cases that don’t know what to do and are not doing it. But humanity? I believe we are on the case.
Project Drawdown (www.drawdown.org) is about how to measure and amplify solutions through books, open interactive databases, and the production of sophisticated modeling software.
The solutions in nature surpass what we think or know is possible. If you put those two together, you’re looking at not just a scientific Renaissance but at a Renaissance of doing, being, creating, inventing and innovating. There’s no limit, really, because this Renaissance embraces complexity instead of marginalizing it.
