Drawing Carbon Down! Integration of DrawDown Book! #DDI
Greetings friends! Earth Day is two days from now: Sunday April 22, 2018. While pretty environmentally 'woke already, we hosts learned a lot from our first four DrawDown bookclub meetings. We paused before DrawDown bookclub #5 to integrate our new knowledge - we're calling it "DrawDown Integration" with hashtag #DDI on twitter.
Tomorrow is also Wrecka Stow Day, Record Store Day. And today is "Four Twenty Day," some holiday the tokers plan to celebrate today. Monday is the Goldman Environmental Prize ceremony at San Francisco Opera House, and Wednesday is the Goldman prize ceremony in Washington, D.C.
Fourteen years ago, I secured a poster of the six Goldman Prize winners from that year's ceremony. Goldman awards a prize to one person or group per continent. I mounted the poster inside of my apartment door and many visitors commented on it, uttering the word "reforestation." Next to the winner from Africa I wrote "reforestation." The ceremony and that specific winner voiced something I'd longed to hear from environmentalist voices: a means to reverse the damage.
Yes we need to arrest CO2 emissions. But are there also activities we can do to reverse emissions? Thirteen years later I heard "reversal" activities mentioned a second time when DrawDown author Paul Hawken talked about his book on Bill Maher's show, in 2017. 2017!
I had no plans to buy the book myself. But when people were feeling so hopeless about the state of the world, the country, our politics, and especially when my friend's 10-year-old son showed me his National Geographic issue on the melting polar ice-caps, I persuaded some friends to join me for one month of DrawDown bookclub meetings.
Engaging in the bookclub made some behavior changes so innate they required very little willpower. It also re-trained our eye to read the news differently. And we noticed increased web traffic from Poland and France when we posted bookclub notes. We'll post more about that this weekend. This is a post to kick off Earth Day weekend with some direction.
A few quick #DDI observations to start:
Check back through the weekend for the longer view on integrating DrawDown lessons from bookclub meetings 1-4. DrawDown Integration = #DDI.
---------------
Further Reading:
Catch up:
Tomorrow is also Wrecka Stow Day, Record Store Day. And today is "Four Twenty Day," some holiday the tokers plan to celebrate today. Monday is the Goldman Environmental Prize ceremony at San Francisco Opera House, and Wednesday is the Goldman prize ceremony in Washington, D.C.
Fourteen years ago, I secured a poster of the six Goldman Prize winners from that year's ceremony. Goldman awards a prize to one person or group per continent. I mounted the poster inside of my apartment door and many visitors commented on it, uttering the word "reforestation." Next to the winner from Africa I wrote "reforestation." The ceremony and that specific winner voiced something I'd longed to hear from environmentalist voices: a means to reverse the damage.
Yes we need to arrest CO2 emissions. But are there also activities we can do to reverse emissions? Thirteen years later I heard "reversal" activities mentioned a second time when DrawDown author Paul Hawken talked about his book on Bill Maher's show, in 2017. 2017! I had no plans to buy the book myself. But when people were feeling so hopeless about the state of the world, the country, our politics, and especially when my friend's 10-year-old son showed me his National Geographic issue on the melting polar ice-caps, I persuaded some friends to join me for one month of DrawDown bookclub meetings.
Engaging in the bookclub made some behavior changes so innate they required very little willpower. It also re-trained our eye to read the news differently. And we noticed increased web traffic from Poland and France when we posted bookclub notes. We'll post more about that this weekend. This is a post to kick off Earth Day weekend with some direction.
A few quick #DDI observations to start:
- Only a few more people now know what the phrase "DrawDown" means. Googling "DrawDown" still returns links to financial services sites.
- PBS' NOVA ran a great program two nights ago we swore was cribbed from our DrawDown bookclub notes: Decoding the Weather Machine. Like us, NOVA asserts cooling the planet is possible. Like us, NOVA asserts the experts cannot do this alone. We need more lay people on board so they can vote in, or consume, better energy sources. Like us, NOVA asserts cooling the planet can be exciting, even prosperous $$.
- Dirt and soil were surprising "big rock" piece of this climate-cooling task ahead of us.
- We in the DrawDown bookclub need to re-emphasize that these lifestyle changes can be very life-affirming behaviors. For some reason a small very small subset of environmentalists mistakenly project an image of: we have to stop everything that's enjoyable, stop living, stop having children, maybe eliminate the human race entirely, to save this planet we call home. We in the DrawDown bookclub, and the author Paul Hawkin himself, disagree. We humans are breaking the planet, we humans can fix it. It makes you feel alive!
Check back through the weekend for the longer view on integrating DrawDown lessons from bookclub meetings 1-4. DrawDown Integration = #DDI.
---------------
Further Reading:
Catch up:
- March 01 DrawDown Bookclub is Here!
- March 09 DrawDown Bookclub #1: Reading 'Why Bother' Was a Wise Choice
- March 16 Meatlover's DrawDown Bookclub #2: Can We At Least Have Fish?
- March 24 DrawDown Bookclub #3: Future Energy Storage More Fascinating Than First Appears
- March 30 DrawDown #4: MicroGrids and Industrial Recycling
