The way forward: Hope! Action! Community!
Reversing global warming with community-based solutions

draw·down: the point at which global greenhouse gas concentrations peak and begin to decline

Consider a perspective shift: global warming is not an unstoppable catastrophe, but a solvable, reversible math problem. Instead of fearfully combating a crisis, let’s center ourselves in visionary thinking. Climate change is an opportunity for transformation, an opportunity to meet human needs in a more just, equitable, and healthy way. It is an opening to a new world, and we get to decide what that world looks like. In addition to re-stabilizing our atmosphere, climate solutions will make our societies more just, our planet healthier, our communities safer, our air cleaner, and our water more drinkable.

In 2019, Cook Inletkeeper decided to play a direct role in cultivating hope and empowering climate action. Our key issues: protecting clean water and healthy salmon - depend on us reversing global warming. For real impact, our solutions need to be actionable, inclusive, and Alaskan. In response, we launched the Drawdown Climate Action Series  in Soldotna, and this year we are using the same model in Homer. We use the book Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by Paul Hawken, to help our communities identify meaningful and well researched solutions that don’t just stabilize levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, but that actually draw emissions back down to sustainable levels.

Our Drawdown series is centered in the belief that community led, middle-out solutions, are the most influential solutions we can enact. The model is simple, each month we bring local experts and community members together to brainstorm solutions based on a chapter of Drawdown. After we finish the book we research, organize and implement solutions that affect our local institutions, that many people can play a role in, that are visible and scalable, and that can be implemented in a year. Enacting solutions to reverse global warming is not just hopefulness. It is hope grounded in data with achievable solutions.