Publishers Weekly
08/02/2021
“Regeneration is not only about bringing the world back to life; it is about bringing each of us back to life,” writes environmentalist Hawken (Blessed Unrest) in this comprehensive guide to combating the climate crisis. With a strategy that puts “life at the center of every action and decision,” Hawken calls for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and for the protection of natural habitats globally. The author divides his guidance into several broad categories—“Oceans” introduces “seaforestation,” or growing marine forests “where they would not normally occur,” and makes a plea for “marine protected areas.” “Forest” looks at the versatility and sustainability of bamboo, and explains such concepts as proforestation (allowing and encouraging trees to recover and grow) and afforestation (“planting trees where none grew before”). The “Industry” section is the most engaging, and in it Hawken tackles the environmental impact of processed food, health care, fashion, war, and plastics. An “Action and Connection” chapter is filled with reasonable real-world steps: there’s a 12-point climate checklist that readers can apply to their lives, and a list of things to do to make one’s lifestyle greener. Urgent but never tipping into doom and gloom, this will be a boon to readers worried about a warming world. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"Regeneration covers an impressively broad range of topics from food safety to the war industry, electric vehicles to mangroves, which serves to demonstrate how all-encompassing the challenge is… those of us who feel the weight of the crisis will find the book both clarifying and helpful as is his final exhortation: ‘It’s not your job to save the planet.’ Rather, it is all of our jobs."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"Regeneration is honest and informative, a rebuttal to doomsayers who believe it is too late."
—Jane Goodall
"Regeneration is brilliant! Encouraging, inspiring, with the best science and a big heart. Wow! It is a direct practical path to save and transform the earth that we can actually do!"
—Jack Kornfield, PhD, Founder of Spirit Rock Center
“This may be the single most important book for the human future.”
—Daniel Goleman
"A robustly practical book. . . . Paul Hawken’s challenge to our conventional ways of thinking is subtle, but hugely effective. . . . There is no voice more important than Paul Hawken’s."
—Sir Jonathon Porritt
"Life-empowering! Paul Hawken has once again provided us timely and visionary leadership in this earth-saving compendium of insights from a team of experts sharing the transformations we are now carrying out as well as those we need to enact across a spectrum of human activities. Filled with hope, and agency, Regeneration is an inspiring and practical guide for a healthier world, uplifting our spirits and showing us exactly how together, we can do this!"
—Dan Siegel, M.D., New York Times bestselling author
"Paul Hawken has delivered a must-read manifesto on the climate crisis. Feel both the urgency and agency as he lays out with crisp photos and equally crisp prose, the task at hand. Now is our moment. Let's seize it."
—Michael E. Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, Penn State University
"Paul Hawken has done it again. With immense intellectual clarity and an abundance of simple, yet brilliant ideas, Regeneration shows us how to go beyond a net zero future by restoring the vital link between human and planetary health."
—Paul Polman, Co-Founder and Co-Chair, IMAGINE and former CEO, Unilever
"Regeneration is descriptive and prescriptive. It is a candid assessment and a clear and inspiring path forward, educating and inviting all of us to participate in this incredible opportunity for change."
—Robyn O'Brien, Food Activist & Author
"Regeneration means restoring our relationship to the planet by restoring our relationships with one another."
—Rachel Gutter Hodgdon, President and CEO of the International WELL Building Institute
"Regeneration means the innate process of nature which, when unimpeded, will beeget its own splendor."
—Jeff Krasno, author of Wanderlust
"Regeneration means the essential practice of restoring balance and health to humanity and the earth."
—Dr. Mark Hyman, physician and New York Times bestselling author
"Regeneration is not just putting carbon back into the soil, it is about putting reciprocity back in our relationship with life."
—Ryland Engelhart, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Kiss the Ground
Kirkus Reviews
2021-07-10
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.
