REGENERATION

Along with a host of researchers, scholars, and other contributors, Hawken assesses our “dying planet—a phrase that may have sounded inflated or over the top not long ago.”

In order to mitigate the disastrous effects of climate change, we must figure out ways to contain carbon and reduce the surface temperature of a rapidly overheating globe. It also requires rethinking how we make our livings in an extractive economy governed by short-term thinking. “Regeneration,” as Hawken conceives it, is a project that restores every corner of the world to health. The process involves replanting overlogged forests, cleaning up the oceans, bringing sustainable power to consumers, and inculcating a new attitude of respect for all forms of life on the planet, among other goals. Hawken and a phalanx of contributors—including novelists Richard Powers and Jonathan Safran Foer and ecologists Carl Safina and Isabella Tree—examine carefully pinpointed strategies. One is to develop marine preserves around the world that are “absolute no-take zones,” forbidding fishing in large swaths of what is essentially a “lawless commons.” These marine preserves and other areas would be subject to “marine reforestation,” building kelp forests that have been depleted by chemical pollution and shifting oceanic currents. Another is to build sustainable food chains. A Japanese farmer, for instance, raises ducks that eat invasive snails and fertilize paddies of a plant called azolla, which, in maturity, becomes a wonderfully productive “green manure” for other plants. If you haven’t heard of azolla, you’re to be forgiven: As Hawken observes, we consume only a small fraction of the edible plants available to us, and we can be weaned from large-scale industrial agriculture in order to make use of the plants that “grow best where people live and help meet their nutritional needs.” The prescriptions are attainable and clearly stated, without jargon or hectoring.

Pie-in-the-sky visions meet gritty practicality in a book of interest to all environmentally minded readers.