100 Books That Defined the Decade

Paul Hawken, Drawdown (2017)

We see global warming not as an inevitability but as an invitation to build, innovate, and effect change, a pathway that awakens creativity, compassion, and genius. This is not a liberal agenda, nor is it a conservative one. This is the human agenda.

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Essential stats: The bestselling Drawdown lays out 100 potential solutions for climate change, as complied by Project Drawdown, which itself was founded by the legendary, highly influential environmental writer Hawken.

What is “drawdown” anyway? According to Hawken, it is “the point in time when greenhouse gas concentrations peak in the atmosphere and begin to go down on a year-to-year basis.”

What’s the significance of the book? As David Roberts put it in Vox:

For all the hand-wringing on climate change over the years, discussion of solutions remains puzzlingly anemic and fractured. A few high-profile approaches, mainly around renewable energy and electric cars, dominate discussion and modeling. Until 2017, there was no real way for ordinary people to get an understanding of what they can do and what impact it can have. There was no single, comprehensive, reliable compendium of carbon-reduction solutions across sectors.

Now there is.

Listen to Hawken talk about it: