Can the land regeneration and the solar advances of the last ten years make up for the fact that we have not reduced carbon emissions as much as we expected?
Circling Back
Ten years ago, I wrote one of my first columns for Impakter, “The Great Turning: From Mutant Capitalism to the Circular Economy.” I was interested in the idea that, though history has tended to alternate between good and bad times, we were not just circling around and around but spiraling forward both environmentally and economically. I was fascinated by concepts like Joanna Macy’s “Great Turning,” Van Jones’ “Green Collar Economy,” Jeremy Rifkin’s “Collaborative Commons,” and the “Circular Economy” proposed by the European Commission in 2014.
My hopes for the future of our beloved planet were raised by narratives of successful projects in which communities devised post-industrial ways of living in nature, often inspired by the pre-industrial nature stewardship of Indigenous Peoples. I was a big fan of Paul Hawken’s Project Drawdown and his 2017 book “Drawndown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming,” which provided 100 pragmatic, science-based ideas for reducing carbon emissions. (I was particularly taken by the Australian Coastal farmers who discovered that, when their cattle went down to the beach to browse on seaweed, they didn’t emit as much methane).
Circling Forward
Ten years later, baking in the hottest summer the planet has ever experienced, threatened by lung problems from PM 2.5 particulates loosed in massive wildfires, with disastrous tornadoes and floods pummeling the United States — all while our President rejects climate science as a hoax (Nero fiddling while Rome burns?) — I turned to Thomas Crowther’s “Nature’s Echo: Harnessing Ancient Feedback Loops to Heal a Changing Planet” in my desperate need to know whether there is still hope for the planet.
Crowther is a British (Welsh) ecologist and explorer with broad experience of ecological restoration. His basic premise comes from his observation that “the closer you look at nature, the more you notice this patchwork of infinitely divisible ecosystems, each formed by their own reinforcing feedback loops between organisms and the environment.” A stable ecosystem constitutes an interdependent web of beings sustaining themselves to their mutual benefit in a feedback loop. These loops are not stable, however, easily tipping from sustenance to impoverishment of resources, as when coral beds die off or land is tipped into desertification through over-grazing.
Crowther’s central question is whether human communities will degrade our ecosystems or find ways to regenerate them; his book is full of heartening examples of ecological restoration. He is no stranger, however, to environmental despair. In 2016, when he realized during his post-doctoral research that carbon emissions induced by global warming of high-altitude regions created a feedback loop “with the potential to accelerate global warming by an estimated 12-17 percent,” Crowther wrote: “This was the first time the results of a study tangibly shook my emotional state, tipping my anxiety toward despair. . . . The self-propelling nature of this global loop seemed to have the potential to erode any sense of agency we might have in the process.”
This experience convinces him that the emotion of climate doomerism is an obstacle to mitigating global warming. “As we face the greatest existential threats of our time, we must interrogate how this picture is forming in our minds and explore what implications it has for the way we react to the physical world.” In other words, how we feel about global warming creates a feedback loop that can impede our taking action.
“As we face our uncertain environmental future,” Crowther writes, “it will be these emotional reactions that we will determine the shape of things to come. Collective panic will propagate more of the same energy. But if we can find the courage, resolve, or even luck that allows us to act from a place of joy and enthusiasm for the rare and fleeting moment we have on this astonishing planet, the ripples we create will amplify more of those qualities.”
Crowlther’s solution is to develop a website and map so that isolated ecological restorers can benefit from each others’ technologies and innovations. As a result, he realizes that we are already combining “nature’s own capabilities and human needs” noting that “almost one-third of what has been lost might be able to recover without interfering with human-managed land.” His web page stands witness to this hopefulness, featuring 344,018 nature sites, 7,601 organizations, 37,642 nature stewards, and 246 countries engaged in ecological restoration.
The sheer number of these communities, organizations, land stewards and whole countries working on environmental generation provides Crowther “a solid foundation, [from which] we begin to realize that authentic belief is itself the foundation of sustained and effective action.”
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Spiraling Forward?
There is no question how disheartening it is that we are nowhere near the goals of the Paris Agreement to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. In fact, Climate.US (a private entity set up by fired employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate division after Trump gutted it) reports that in the United States fossil fuel still stands at 80-81% and clean energy at only 19-20%
On the other hand, the Solar Energy Statistics Association (SEIA) reported on June 10 that that 91% of new power generation capacity added in the U.S. in the first quarter (of 2026) was clean: 60% solar, 31% battery storage, and 5% wind.
Where to Crowther the factor weighing the scales moving us forward toward genuine climate mitigation is a worldwide plethora of successful land regeneration projects, McKibben finds his impetus in the recent (and quite sudden) affordability and deployment of new clean energy technologies, especially solar. In “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization,” he finds in new solar energy developments a variety and effectiveness sufficient to lower carbon emissions, despite determined efforts of the fossil fuel industry to maintain the (planetarily unsustainable) status quo.
His good news is that the cost of solar energy has dropped below that of fossil fuels and that these are now producing less than half of American electricity. Meanwhile, China is laying aside its reputation for fossil fuel consumption and pollution by moving swiftly towards being the first “electro-state” on earth, manufacturing not only solar panels but efficient and affordable electric vehicles (EVs) for an eager worldwide market (except in the United States, where Trump’s tariffs have priced them out of sight).
The replacement of fossil fuels by clean energy, like the land regeneration projects Crowther describes, is as often grounds-up community undertakings as state-administered policies. In Pakistan, for example, the government noticed an inexplicable dip in fossil fuel consumption and pollution, only to discover from aerial photographs that vast swathes of households had installed cheap (Chinese) solar panels on their roofs and on their balconies. Inevitably, people everywhere are buying EVs and heat pumps and even taking to private or community wind towers and wind farms. After all, human communities grew and civilizations were established when we human beings adapted new technologies to cope with our emerging needs, a tendency which is the basis of our social evolution. No wonder, as we come to realize that “the sun and the wind deliver the energy (are) for free,” we are eager to figure out how to use them.
When Mckibben (then in his twenties) wrote “The End of Nature“ in 1989, he plunged himself and his readers into pessimistic gloom about our planetary future. Now, almost four decades later, he maintains some of that “dark realism” in acknowledging that our exciting new energy capabilities have not stopped global warming. He is nonetheless encouraged by the plethora of energy innovations we have managed to come up with: “Our best hope is simply to stop the heating of the earth short of the point where it cuts civilization off at the knees, and even that will be a very close call.” McKibben rests this hope on an idea from The Economist that “in its radical abundance cheaper energy will free the imagination, setting tiny ferris wheels of the mind spinning with excitement and new possibilities.”
I concur with Crowther and McKibben that we are surrounded by solid evidence of effective and pragmatic clean energy and land regeneration projects that have the capability to prevent the worst-case scenarios for our planet; I also agree with them that public understanding remains gloomy and hence potentially ineffective because we simply have not realized that so many technological innovations are already taking place, functioning, and effective. A solid grasp of the facts from these two books should free us from both a helpless pessimism and a shallow kind of “positive thinking” in the psycho-pop sense of cheering ourselves up by ignoring what is real. Instead, they impel us to (a moderately hopeful) activism by insisting we take the whole range of what is real into account — not only the climate impact of the bad choices we made in the past but also the broad-reaching evidence of better choices that we have already taken and can expand upon for a better planetary future.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of impakter.com — In the Cover Photo: Forest in Japan, Dec. 9, 2022. Cover Photo Credit: Seiya Maeda.
