Paul Hawken on Regeneration

"Now is the time to act"

Salutations, Generation Regeneration!

This week on the Soul Boom Podcast, Rainn sits down with Paul Hawken—visionary environmentalist, entrepreneur, and author—to discuss what it truly means to heal our planet and ourselves. Paul’s wisdom and unwavering commitment to ecological and social renewal offer not only insight but a call to action. The two discuss the profound and urgent necessity of regeneration, revealing how we can each play a role in addressing the climate crisis.

As a companion to this week’s podcast, we’re honored to share an excerpt from Paul’s transformative book, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation*. At its heart, this book invites us to step beyond despair and into possibility. Paul reminds us that regeneration is about reimagining life, both personal and planetary:

“Regeneration recreates what has been lost. It applies to all life on earth—grasslands, farms, insects, forests, fish, wetlands, human lives, coastlands, and oceans. It applies equally to our own life, who we are and what we do in communities, cities, where we worship, schools, governments, and commerce.”

Paul connects our personal and collective well-being to the health of our ecosystems, underscoring the vital relationships that sustain both humanity and the natural world. This severance of connections, he argues, lies at the root of the climate crisis:

“Our planet and youth are telling us the same story. Vital connections have been severed between human beings and nature, within nature itself, and between people, religions, and cultures.”

But Paul’s message is not one of despair—it is one of possibility. In Regeneration, he illuminates a path forward, grounded in action, equity, and a shared responsibility for the Earth. His call is not only to address the symptoms of climate change but to reimagine our role as caretakers of this interconnected web of life:

“The ultimate power to change the world does not reside in technologies. It relies on reverence, respect, and compassion—for ourselves, all people, all life. This is regeneration.”

This excerpt challenges us to reflect on how our choices—whether individual, communal, or systemic—either contribute to the degradation of life or the possibility of renewal. It’s an invitation to act with courage, reciprocity, and a clear-eyed vision for a regenerative future. As Marshall McLuhan reminded us: “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.“

In solidarity with all life,

The Soul Boom Team

*By the way, for the first time in Soul Boom history, next week we’ll be sharing a second excerpt from the same author—an exclusive chapter from Paul’s brand-new book Carbon: The Book of Life, which just came out yesterday!

Regeneration

From Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation

By Paul Hawken

Small photovoltaic project adjacent to rice fields, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan.

Regeneration recreates what has been lost. It applies to all life on earth—grasslands, farms, insects, forests, fish, wetlands, human lives, coastlands, and oceans. It applies equally to our own life, who we are and what we do in communities, cities, where we worship, schools, governments, and commerce. Nature and humanity are comprised of complex networks of relationships—without which forests, lands, oceans, peoples, societies, and cultures die. Our planet and youth are telling us the same story. Vital connections have been severed between human beings and nature, within nature itself, and between people, religions, and cultures. This is the origin of the climate crisis, its very root. We live on a dying planet, a phrase that may have sounded inflated or over the top not long ago. However, it is exactly what is happening. The Earth can come back to life. Civilizations cannot.

The proximate cause of the climate crisis are cars, buildings, wars, deforestation, poverty, corruption, coal, industrial agriculture, overconsumption, fracking, and more. All have the same origin and impact: how we maintain and support human civilization degenerate life on earth, creating loss and suffering. Planetary liquidation is a short-term source of financial wealth and a longer-term source of biological impoverishment. Life is not only diminishing—it is vanishing on land and sea creating knock-on effects upon human health, society, cities, politics, and most plainly, the atmosphere. Regeneration reverses that.

For the past forty years, the most powerful way to reverse global warming was largely overlooked. Without question, fossil fuel combustion is the primary cause of warming and must cease rapidly without which there is no cure. However, in order to truly stabilize the climate, we need to draw down carbon dioxide and bring it back home. The most effective, timely, and least costly solution to reverse a heating planet is the regeneration of life in all its manifestations, human and biological. It is also the most compelling, prosperous, and inclusive way. It encompasses oceans and equity, forests and favelas, grasslands and ghettos, mountains and migrants. We and all living beings thrive by being actors in the planet’s regeneration, a civilizational goal that should commence and never cease. We practiced degeneration as a species and it brought us to the threshold of an unimaginable crisis. To reverse global warming, reverse global degeneration.

The Motiatse River Canyon, located in Mpulmalanga Province in South Africa, covered by lush tropical foliage, is the possibly the largest “green” canyon in the world.

We stand at a threshold. Our professions and work either bring about the end of the world as we know it, or the beginning of a regenerating world. Our savings and investments are the same. Which will it be? When one steps back and looks at the current global economy, it is clear that we are stealing the future and calling it GDP. Another word for our economy is extractive. We take, we dam, we enslave, we exploit, we frack, we drill, we poison, we burn, we cut. There is not a single economic sector in the world that is not destroying people and the environment. However, we can work to heal the future; that is regeneration, and that too is GDP. This path creates employment that builds affordable green housing, brings forests, lands, and oceans back to life, transforms cities and neighborhoods into life giving environments, reverses soil erosion and water pollution, creates food webs and productive farms, brings renewable microgrids to impoverished rural communities, and uses its genius to reimagine transport, mobility, and healthcare. These are not mere jobs, or even “green” jobs. Planetary regeneration creates livelihoods, occupations that bring life to people and people to life. It is work that links us to each other’s wellbeing, that provides those in poverty with purpose and meaning, worthy involvement with their community and children, a living wage, and a future of dignity and respect.

It is a watershed moment in history where all of humanity has come together, whether we realize it or not. The heating planet is our commons. It holds us all. To address and reverse warming requires connection and reciprocity. It calls for moving out of our comfort zones to find a depth of courage we may have never known. It doesn’t mean being right in a way that makes others wrong; it means listening intently and respectfully, stitching together the broken strands that separate us from life and each other. It doesn’t mean either hope or despair; it is action that is courageous and fearless. We have created an astonishing moment of truth. The climate crisis is not a science problem. It is a human problem. The ultimate power to change the world does not reside in technologies. It relies on reverence, respect, and compassion—for ourselves, all people, all life. This is regeneration.

Borana mother with toddlers in the N'Gotu Village, Nakuprat-Gotu Community Conservancy, Kenya.

Agency

The agent that can head off the climate crisis is reading this sentence. Logically, this seems like nonsense. Individuals are powerless to counter the drivers or impacts of global warming. That is a fair conclusion if we assume institutions could do it for us. There is anxiety about global warming because governing institutions seem frozen, ponderous, risk adverse, and too often corrupt. Since 1995, nations of the world have conducted annual UN sponsored climate conferences dedicated to solving the problem. The atmosphere hasn’t noticed. We are much worse off today than when they began. There is no agency at that level of confluence. Conferences begin and end. Governments come and go. Commitments are words.

Because the majority of humanity is disengaged from the climate crisis, far-reaching changes are unlikely. Human beings are intelligent and hardwired to focus on survival and well-being. Are we truly disinterested in our collective well-being? Not likely. The path to solving the crisis is counter intuitive: in order to reverse global warming, we need to address current human needs, not an imagined future. If we want to get the attention of humanity, humanity needs to feel it is getting attention. To address the extraordinary threat of global warming, we will need to create a world worth saving. If we are not serving our children, the poor, the excluded, the disenfranchised, we are not addressing the climate crisis. If fundamental human rights and material needs are not met, efforts to stem the crisis will fail. The needs of people and living systems are often presented as conflicting priorities, biodiversity versus poverty or forests versus hunger, when in fact the destiny of human society and the natural world are inseparably intertwined. Social justice is not a sideshow to the emergency. Social injustice is the cause of it. Providing every young child with education, providing abundant renewable energy to all, erasing food waste and hunger, sharing productive regenerative agricultural techniques, ensuring gender equality, economic justice, and shared opportunity, restoring watersheds and fisheries, reversing income inequality, providing clean water, recognizing our responsibility to the myriad forgotten communities of the world and making amends for the past—these and more are at the very heart of what can turn the tide for all of humanity, rich and poor and all between.

This requires a worldwide, collective, committed effort. Collectives do not emerge from the top of institutions. They begin within one person and another, the invisible social space where commitment and action join and come together to become a dyad, a group, a team, a movement. To put it simply, no one from above is coming to help. There is not a brain trust that is going to work out the problems while we ponder and wait. The most complex, radical, climate technology on earth is the human heart and mind, not a solar panel. Just as we stand at an abyss of a climatic emergency, we stand at another remarkable threshold. The rate of understanding and awakening about climate change is increasing exponentially, if not skyrocketing. Greta Thunberg’s lonely “school strike for climate” vigil started August 20, 2018. In just over a year after her school strike, the largest climate march in history occurred. Why? Because millions of students around the world had been educated about climate and knew exactly what she was striking for. As climate change becomes experiential rather than conceptual, the movement to reverse the climate crisis will become, without doubt, the largest movement in the history of humankind. It took decades to create this moment. Now is the time to act.

– Paul Hawken and The One Generation Team

---

Excerpted with permission from "Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation" by Paul Hawken (Penguin Random House, 2020). Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist dedicated to ecological sustainability and social justice. He has authored several influential books on climate change and regenerative practices, advocating for holistic approaches to restoring the planet's health and fostering resilient communities.¹

1. The book, website and media, plot a pathway to achieve goals outlined by the Special Report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October 2018. The report calls for successive 50 percent reductions in global emissions in each of the next two decades if we are to avoid exceeding 1.5C rise in global temperatures.

So, what do you think? What does it mean to create a world worth saving—and what is your part in that vision?