By Tom Braford
What if solving global warming and lots of other seemingly endemic challenges were as easy as teaching your dog to catch a Frisbee?
“In the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of researchers, professionals and scientists has come together to offer a set of realistic and bold solutions to climate change. One hundred techniques and practices described here… range from clean energy to educating girls in low-income countries to land use practices that pull carbon out of the air… If deployed collectively on a global scale over the next thirty years, they represent a credible path forward, not just to slow the earth’s warming, but to reach drawdown, that point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and begin to decline… giving us every reason to see this planetary crisis as an opportunity to create a just and livable world.”
This is a quote from the back cover of a new book, Drawdown, edited by Paul Hawken, who stresses that our biggest challenge is to transform from our individual, competitive “I” way of thinking and acting to cooperative, collective, communal “we” ways that allow us to rapidly implement land and ocean based technologies, policies and practices.
Many of the community based solutions themselves have existed in some form since there were human beings on the planet. What’s missing in modern society? Community.
We typically think of terraforming as making other worlds habitable by earth lifeforms, but the reality is that we have been terraforming and aquaforming this planet for millennia already, and now we need to identify current best practices and new innovations and take them to scale.
The Drawdown team says it is going to take community on the scale of a global movement, so we invite you to join us in launching a global communities movement to transform civilization and the planet, one reformed, terraformed and aquaformed community at a time.
Let’s get started with a tour of Arizmendi Ecovillage on Saturday, June 24, at 5:00 pm, followed by a potluck dinner and action planning session.
Contact: www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com,
braford@sbcglobal.net.