Month: September 2019

“The default mode of all land is regeneration.”[i] Land is resilient: when degraded, it rebounds, regaining its ability to sustain life. Over the last century, however, land degradation—defined by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization[ii] as “any diminishment of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning that negatively impacts the provisioning of ecosystem services and ultimately impedes…

When we say the wind blows, we’re actually referring to the currents of a vast and powerful ocean of air. Unlike its watery counterpart, however, wind can be found—and thus harnessed—everywhere across the Earth’s surface. In the specific language of the wind power industry, it’s found both on and offshore. On Drawdown’s list of top…

Food nourishes human life, but cooking can be deadly. That’s the stark reality for 3 billion people[i]—40% of the world’s population—because of their stoves. In much of the developing world, households still use rudimentary stoves powered by charcoal, coal, and manure, and these fuels release deadly particulate matter. Household air pollution, in fact, is the…

HBO’s critically-acclaimed miniseries Chernobyl has recently brought nuclear energy back into the limelight, to mixed[i] reviews[ii]. Although the show’s creator Craig Mazin stressed in a tweet[iii] that “the lesson of Chernobyl isn’t that modern nuclear power is dangerous,” some viewers[iv] have taken away that message regardless. There’s no question, however, that nuclear power has a…

We have already briefly encountered managed grazing, #19[i] on the Drawdown organization’s top 100 solutions to reverse climate change[ii], in our post on regenerative agriculture[iii]. Managed grazing is one of the four core practices of regenerative agriculture, because it can improve soil health, increase biodiversity and water retention, and sequester atmospheric carbon. In fact, Drawdown…

Humans have harnessed the heat within the Earth for millennia, perhaps most notably in the ancient Roman baths that served as centers of city life. Far more recently, we have begun to draw upon this geothermal energy—from the Greek roots geo (‘Earth’) and thermos (‘heat’)—as a renewable source of power. The planet contains an astronomical…

Trees—those tall, stately plants that provide shade from the sun in summer, crunchy fall leaves to traipse in during the fall, and evergreen garlands and holiday symbols that remind us of the warmth of spring in the depths of winter—are one of our most important allies in the work to reverse climate change. We need…

Conservation agriculture has much in common with regenerative agriculture, which we covered earlier in our breakdown of the Drawdown Organization’s top 100 solutions to reverse climate change. The primary reason why conservation agriculture is five spots lower on Drawdown’s rankings—#16 to regenerative agriculture’s position at #11—is that conservation agriculture allows for the use of synthetic…

We’ve already discussed the importance of tropical forests to mitigating the effects of climate change: though these beautiful ecosystems cover just 5% of the Earth’s surface, they store as much as one-quarter of the world’s carbon. This awesome ability is the primary reason the Drawdown Organization ranks tropical forests #5 on its top 100 solutions to…