Book Reviews: Drawdown

Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. Paul Hawken.

Drawdown.org.

Kirkus Reviews.

Drawdown and global warming's hopeful new math. Joel Makower, GreenBiz. Apr. 17, 2017.

A new book ranks the top 100 solutions to climate change. The results are surprising. David Roberts, vox. May 10, 2017.

Reversing Climate Change: An Interview with Paul Hawken. Amy Brady, Chicago Review of Books. Apr. 18, 2017.

from a reviewer on GoodReads

This has some great stuff in it but unfortunately the "most comprehensive plan" includes a lot of really stupid crap. About half of the book is a pretty good summary of real solutions and the other half is basically a bunch of crazy techno-fixes. On the good side are things like ecosystem restoration (with particular emphasis on the importance of maintaining healthy oceans, peatlands and mangroves), agroecology, managed grazing systems, silvopasture, indigenous land management, lower methane-emitting approaches to rice cultivation and ruminant raising, replacing cotton with hemp, educating girls, empowering women, etc. The crazy techno stuff includes not only the typical electric cars, high speed rail, "green" cities, wind turbines, tidal energy, nuclear plants (how anyone can still support these I have no idea) and automated "smart" grids but also things like roads paved with solar panels, giant machines that suck carbon out of the air, vacuum tube trains and the possibility of nuclear fusion plants. To be fair there are caveats for a lot of these "solutions" but they really shouldn't even be considerations at this point.

I know global industrial civilization can be less destructive, that if we'd used the most efficient technologies and developed perfect recycling, stopped using planned obsolescence and shared things that we rarely use instead of all having our own possessions that sit idle 99% of the time then we could have gotten away with this for a pretty long time. Ignoring the fact that manufacturing these technologies at even a much reduced scale would still depend on horribly unethical behavior, it could technically be a lot better than it currently is. We're already on such thin ice though. If you're going 200 miles per hour towards a cliff that's only a few miles away then it doesn't make much difference if you reduce your speed to 50 miles per hour. Even 1 mile per hour in the same direction won't give you much time. Techno-fixes rely on too much infrastructure to ever be truly sustainable. Therefore better isn't necessarily good enough. What we really need is to wean ourselves off all this high-tech crap by losing our dependence on it. The low-tech solutions, like diversifying farmland with perennial crops and different species of grazing animals, can create human habitats where people are able to get everything they need from close by and without machines. And we're never going to see that happen without adopting degrowth economics (producing and consuming less crap without people being impoverished by job losses, etc.). This book doesn't just leave out a discussion on how inherently unsustainable our economic system is, it actually promotes certain solutions BECAUSE they contribute to economic growth.

I can agree with some of the "bridge solutions" and "regrets solutions" that are brought up. Clearly during a transition stage between the status quo and something sustainable we'll still be required to do some less than ideal things (like typing angry rants on internet sites). But there's a difference between things like properly disposing of HFC's from existing refrigerators and air conditioners and continuing to promote the manufacture of new refrigerators and air conditioners ("refrigerant management" is listed as the number 1 solution). A real solution for that problem long-term would be to use drying or root cellars for food storage and maybe PASSIVE cooling for houses. Cooling boxes can even be made with clay pots and sand, where evaporating water significantly cools down the contents without any power at all. Also capturing methane from landfills makes sense since it causes more damage if allowed to float away into the atmosphere but without addressing the growth imperative of our economic system it just becomes one more thing that people depend on for their livelihoods rather than something that can be intentionally phased out. Ignoring economic growth is just totally unforgivable for a book like this.

Part of me wants to give it a better rating for the good half at least (It's actually kind of surprising that with so much techno-utopian logic it doesn't promote GMOs, vertical urban farms with hydroponics and LED grow lights, more tech-based geoengineering schemes, etc.). I expect most people who read this book to just get excited by the wrong things though. Let's face it, science fiction tends to be a little sexier than farm animals. Overall, the good just can't make up for the bad.