Recently, in my studies of the-inspiring! amazing! grassroots!–soil solutions to global warming, as encapsulated by the movement toward regenerative organic farming and ranching (aka, carbon farming), I came across this video of environment author, activist, and entrepreneur Paul Hawken.

Hawken has quite a biography, starting in the 1960s when he started Erewhon, one of the first natural food companies in the U.S. that relied on sustainable agricultural methods, and worked with Martin Luther King Jr.’s staff in Selma, Alabama (Hawken was actually assaulted and seized by the KKK, but escaped with a little help from the FBI O_O).

Since then, he’s founded a number of other environmentally oriented companies (including one focused on ultra-low cost solar solutions now known as Energy Everywhere) and written a number of books, including The Next Economy (1983), Growing a Business (1987), and The Ecology of Commerce (1993) Blessed Unrest (2007), and most recently, in 2017, Drawdown, The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. 

The latter is based on an ambitious collective effort that brought together scientists, academics, and people from all walks of life from all over the world to develop real, actionable, and comprehensive solutions to climate change, which is known as Project Drawdown. Hawken and Amanda Ravenhill spearheaded the nonprofit behind it not only to address what Hawken saw as the lack of such solutions being addressed in the current conversation on climate but to change the language in that conversation.

Hawken, like me, was an English major, and when he speaks here to this fundamental disconnect in the language we use and the effect we actually want to have in the world, he’s speaking my language.

Consider, he says, the sorts of words we use when we talk about climate change: “mitigation” (a lot of people don’t even know what that means); “decarbonization” (huh?); “climate crusade” (did we fall asleep in high school history? the crusades were a genocide!). And how about all those war and sports metaphors: “tackle,” “fight,” “combat,” “slash [emissions]”? As he points out in this video, there’s no question of which gender was behind this sort of language.

Moreover, he points out that so many environmental projects and organizations note their goals in terms of verbs (you know, like mitigation, tackling, and slashing). But what are we actually aiming at? What are we trying to get to?

Hawken points out that “You need a noun to have a goal”–and while achieving 350 parts per million in greenhouse gases in our atmosphere has provided a baseline goal for many efforts, we’re currently at 495 ppm, not 415 (this according to NOAA). So if we’re going to reverse the effects of climate change, we need not just a number, but ambitious, actionable, and specific goals that will get us to that number.

He notes too that while much, if not most, of the conversation around climate change is focused on fossil fuels, we could switch to 100 percent green energy as an entire planet right now and it would not achieve the goal of reversing climate change–because in order to reverse climate change, we need to actually drawdown the amount of carbon that’s already in the atmosphere.

The solutions addressed in Project Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming go further, to say the least–and they fly in the face of the idea that there are only a few things we can do to address the climate crisis. They include strategies like improving the efficiency of refrigeration, reducing food waste, and integrating trees into cattle ranching in places like Brazil.

And the single most impactful path to reversing global warming right now? Educating girls and making family planning available worldwide.

These and the five other strategies addressed by Project Drawdown are the ones we need to focus on right now, and this is the language we need to communicate them in: the language of solutions.