Open your fridge, cool the planet
This photo of my unusually neat refrigerator represents some of the best environmental news I’ve ever heard. It started with a question environmentalist Paul Hawken posed. What can we do to reverse global warming? The standard research is devoted to ways to slow it down. But, Paul reasoned, if you’re on the wrong road, what’s the point of just slowing down? No one had an answer, so he assembled a team to spearhead the research. Project Drawdown is now a worldwide coalition of scientists finding approaches to cooling the planet. They came up with eighty things we can do today, and twenty that are still in the design stage. There were jaw-dropping surprises.
There are two things you can do with the airborne chemicals that cause global warming. You either prevent their emissions or sequester them. Sequestering means pulling them from the air into the ground. To prevent emissions, we need to rethink many of the ways we conduct business. Agriculture, land use, waste management, transportation, energy production, and building are all included. Project Drawdown addresses each of them.
The solutions rank from one to one hundred, in order of the amount of atmospheric carbon each reduces. Costs are measured against estimates for business as usual for the next thirty years. They aren’t ranked in the order of importance, because they are all crucial steps. And they upend a lot of presuppositions. After all, who knew? No one was asking.
You might think transportation — cars, trucks, airplanes, shipping — would be in the top ten. Not at all. They start in the thirties. To everyone’s amazement, refrigerant management was number one. “We were so disappointed,” Paul says. “So unsexy!” Which could also be said of reducing food waste, coming in at number three. A huge surprise: educating girls and access to family planning are numbers five and six. They would be number one if combined. There are sixteen solutions that pertain to food. Add in food transport and they would dwarf the rest in the amount of carbon reduced.
Which brings us back to my refrigerator. A plant-rich diet is #4. Managed grazing (milk, eggs) is #19. Indigenous land use is #39. Tropical forests (shade grown coffee, fair-trade chocolate, heritage grains like quinoa) is #5. Growing food among trees shows up in four solutions. New approaches to rice farming cover two. In fact, this refrigerator connects so many solutions, I made a map:
Thirty-six solutions involve a common household item and what we put in it. What we eat, how we grow our food, how we transport it, whether we waste it. How we power our refrigerator, how we get rid of it when it no longer works. The plastic we use when we buy our groceries. Whether we recycle and compost. Whether our population will outpace our ability to care for it. Our relationship with our refrigerator is so important that the top ten solutions are all there.
These interconnections around something so simple and common are one of the things that I love about Project Drawdown. The solutions aren’t complex and esoteric. They are all within our reach and some, like solar and wind power, are well underway. In fact, all are in use to some extent somewhere in the world. That was one of the guiding principles behind the research: what’s happening now? What do we already know? Scaling up is doable. The challenge is convincing ourselves, our representatives, and the companies we deal with to move in these directions.
Last spring, I finished a five-session Drawdown course given by the Pachamama Alliance. Like the Drawdown website (drawdown.org) and book, the workshop was fascinating and full of enthusiasm. There is something for everyone. Things that make my eyes glaze over, like refrigerant management and green cement, fire other people up. Being a plant person, I immediately gravitated to agricultural and land use issues. But they all interconnect, so every solution will meet at one intersection or another.
The passionate excitement around the project is a huge blessing. Per Espen Stoknes, a Norwegian psychologist and economist, studied climate change framing. He found that people have less faith and interest in climate disruption now than in the 1980s and 90s. Thirty years of scary, hard-to-understand scientific evidence hasn’t worked. People feel helpless and resistant when faced with apocalyptic messages. So, it’s important to know that there are meaningful steps we can all take. Installing solar panels. Supporting organic farmers, especially local ones. Buying LED lights. Composting and recycling. Promoting causes like educating girls, saving forests, and preserving indigenous land. Each step matters.
These solutions are also important social justice issues and therein lie more connections. We have the opportunity to rethink the way we operate in the present, for the sake of the future. Along the way, we will redress profound injuries done to the earth and many of its people. The abrogation of rights, lands, and cultures. The dumping of toxic waste, especially in poor areas. The contamination of air, water and soil. The decimation of forests and wetlands. The sky-rocketing extinction of species.
A wonderful bonus of all these interconnections is that by furthering one cause, we help further many more. We have a ready-made to-do list. In our class of sixteen, each of us chose a solution to pursue, and none overlapped. One man is taking a green cement proposal to his local school district, which has a building plan in the works. A chef is working with a landscape designer on a concept called agrihoods. One woman is pursuing tropical forests and regenerative agriculture. Another is planning to raise money for girls’ education. One of my plans is to pursue the various threads involving trees.
Paul Hawken is well known in the environmental and green business world. But he heads no large, clout-bearing organization. The first Drawdown office was the Zoom internet conference app. A tiny team with a tiny amount of money sent out word to academics the world over. Passionate responses flooded in. Seventy highly trained people from twenty-two countries were chosen. As the information started to come in, a 128-member Advisory Board formed to review it. Paul and his team wanted the science behind the recommendations to be impeccable.
There is so substitute for community. One man with a question no one else is asking becomes a small community. They reach out and add seventy more. Soon over two hundred people are involved. Other communities — organizations, businesses, universities, governing bodies — come on board. Their members then reach out to create communities. That’s exactly what I’m doing now, hoping you will bring the news to your communities. This is how we transform an existential crisis into an opportunity. We have the chance to reimagine how we want to preserve and share the beauties and bounties of the earth.
I post photos and write about nature, ecology, wildness and spirit at The Soul of the Earth. I’d love to have you join me on the journey!
Related ideas:
If we recognize that nature has rights on her own, then a river, a forest, a panther, an owl, the atmosphere would have ‘standing’ in court, the ability for a guardian or group to sue on behalf of the entity itself.
A version of this essay was originally published at thesouloftheearth.com on April 19, 2018.
