More native shrubs are essential

SUBHEAD: Shrubs grow much faster than trees and are powerful carbon sequestration engines in their own right.

By Adrian Fisher on 27 December 2018 for Ecological Gardening
(https://www.ecologicalgardening.net/2018/12/native-shrubs-and-why-theyre-essential.html)


Image above: Sand prairie merging into shrubland in southeast Wisconsin. From The Prairie Botanist

“Shrubbiness is such a remarkable adaptive design that one may wonder why more plants have not adopted it.” (H. C. Stutz, 1989)

In light of the newest IPCC and US climate change reports, coupled with reports of the ongoing declines of wild species—birds, insects—you name them, just so long as they aren’t human, I have turned to thinking about shrubs.

It is precisely their adaptive characteristics that give shrubs their potential to be powerful players in soil carbon sequestration and ecosystem regeneration in certain parts of the world, such as the Midwest.

Although alarming, the reports are not surprising to anyone who’s been keeping track. The IPCC report says human global society has 12 years to reduce carbon emissions to 45% below 2010 levels if there is to be any hope of holding overall average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F).

The US report, searchable by region, adds fairly detailed, equally dire scenarios for this country. No place on earth will be immune to the destructive consequences of our failure to act.

Since the world has already warmed approximately 1 degree C, even if we are able to keeping warming to 1.5 degrees—an almost insanely optimistic proposal, given the array of forces, from active malice to blind inertia, all backed by money, power and influence poised against success—there will still be massive, destabilized weather patterns and disruptive, destructive weather events similar to and worse than what we are already experiencing.

The resultant ecological destruction and human misery will only increase with each half a degree beyond 1 degree until large parts of the earth are literally uninhabitable by humans. We are, right now, on track to warm roughly 3.3 degrees by century’s end.

Despite the official reports’ newly grim tone, there are no new solutions. As we’ve known for decades, staving off disaster requires both cutting greenhouse gas emissions and helping earth’s biological systems regenerate, pull massive amounts of carbon from the air, and store it in biomass and soils.

For an overview of how all of this can be achieved, the book and companion website “Drawdown” remains an excellent compendium of strategies and tactics.

The IPCC report offers four scenarios by which rapid decarbonization and carbon sequestration could be achieved. Three of them rely heavily on so far non-existent or extremely small-scale technological carbon capture and sequestration methods.

Possibly the worst of these from an ecological point of view is BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), a technique involving growing and burning massive amounts of trees, shrubs and grasses while “magically” capturing and sequestering the resultant carbon emissions.

Relying on salvation by means of a fix we don’t actually have the ability, money or time to accomplish is a distracting, destructive form of magical thinking. Practiced at scale, BECCS would require appropriating farmland, destroying forests and wrecking ecosystems.

An analogous illustration of its potential for upending ecosystems and ways of life would be the destruction palm oil plantations have wrought in Borneo, devastation turbo-charged in part by an American law meant to get us off dependence on fossil fuels and well documented in the New York Times Magazine.)

Natural carbon solutions offer the most realistic way forward
The IPCC scenario that best comports with current reality and a genuinely sustainable, resilient future describes what carbon farmers, holistic managers, scientists, environmentalists and many others have been touting and practicing for 50 years.

That is, while we ramp up renewables, increase energy efficiency, and decarbonize our life styles, we should also do everything possible to enable worldwide carbon sequestration through biological processes.

We should restore and vastly augment our forests, grasslands and wetlands and overhaul agricultural practices along agroecological lines. Here in the US, the recently published paper “Natural Carbon Solutions for the United States” quantifies how much carbon can be sequestered through improved landscape and coastal wetlands management practices.

The authors calculate potential sequestration to be about 21% of total US emissions, or enough to equal taking all cars and trucks in the US off the road.

Unlike purely mechanical carbon sequestration methods, or schemes such as BECCS, natural carbon solutions would simultaneously help get global temperature rise under control while improving and enriching ecosystems’ functioning—thus helping ease the crisis of ecological destruction now sweeping the planet.

While nearly everyone has a pretty good idea of how to cut emissions, fewer are aware of how they themselves could implement natural carbon solutions beyond planting a tree or two. But simply plopping some trees in a lawn or along a parkway is not enough.

As I’ve written previously, serious natural carbon sequestration, at whatever scale, requires regenerative landscape management practices such as putting in a biodiverse palette of native trees, flowers and grasses and stopping the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizer.

Shrubs can be crucial to this kind of planting, especially in terms of the other ecological benefits they offer. Wherever there is a lawn, a tree and possibly a small garden, or even a tiny strip along the foundations of a building, there should be a native shrub or two, or possibly more.

Large properties and farms have nearly unlimited possibilities in the form of hedgerows, shelterbelts or even reconstituted shrub prairies.

Shrubs are a necessary part of landscaping for carbon sequestration
From a landscaping perspective, shrubs are sort of like the middle children in a very large family: necessarily adaptable, but little thought of or noticed.

This is true even scientifically. “Natural Carbon Solutions” explicitly omits shrublands from the calculations, and a 2016 review of scientific literature in “Why Be a Shrub” states that the least studied landscape types are shrublands, while the least studied plants are shrubs.

Yet shrubs flourish virtually everywhere and shrublands are increasing across the globe, possibly due in part to climate change.

In the American West the new severity of wildfires makes it difficult for forests to regenerate. The replacement is shrubland, or, to use an old term, “barrens.” Is the lack of notice and study because shrubs are so common and ubiquitous, but lack the majesty of trees and the show-offy beauty of flowering annuals and perennials?

This lack of notice carries through in our designed landscapes. The default for parks and private property alike is often faux open woodland or savanna, with widely spaced trees and plenty of grass—and few shrubs.

Farms are faux prairies where shrubs that formerly would have flourished wild and later in hedgerows and fencerows and along waterways have been largely extirpated.

What shrubs there are might be a few non-native ornamentals ranged in a row along a building foundation, kept as a low hedge along a sidewalk, or grouped in a small island of mulch.

Humans love these savanna-ish landscapes that now cover millions of acres. For us, they are comfortable and attractive. They look very green on Google Earth and from the air to migrating birds.

But for birds and other animals, they function as “death traps,” as a US Fish and Wildlife employee once told me. Birds looking for habitat in such a place find it inhospitable. There is neither ground-level shelter, nor, for some kinds of shrub-dependent birds, good nesting habitat.

Nor is there much in the way of flowers for pollinators or host plants for insect herbivores or caterpillars, which means few of the native insects and berries that birds forage for in massive quantities for their own needs and to feed their young.

Finally, what should be a complex underground web of fungal species and soil dwelling microbes is, instead, simplified and depauperate.

Because they are missing shrubby layers, what seem to humans like well structured environments are, in fact, missing the complex structure that creates the capacity for higher order ecological relationships—that is, the relationships among three or more species (including plants, animals, fungi and bacteria) that tie an ecosystem together and enable carbon sequestration.

The adaptive characteristics of shrubs
Shrubs are the woody plants with multiple stems that branch close to the ground and may be erect but might sprawl. Usually they are less than 15 feet in height; anything taller than that is usually, but not always considered a tree. In general, deciduous shrubs are spring (sometimes fall) flowering and yield small fruits such as berries, drupes or nuts.

Crucially for wild landscapes of all types, their adaptability means they can re-sprout easily after fires or other disturbances, grow to mature size much faster than trees, and have self-spreading habits such as suckering or rooting where branches touch the ground.

It’s often hard to kill a shrub without digging out the roots. Their many leaves and stems make them efficient photosynthesis factories, pulling carbon out of the air, and their roots hook up with the underground biome as contributing partners.

They share nutrients and information with other plants, engage in the carbon-sugars-for-nutrients trade with fungi, shelter microbes in return for nitrogen and other nutrients, and thus contribute to a healthy, biodiverse, carbon-sequestering soil system. Some kinds of shrubs even act as nurse species, so that young trees grow better in their company.

The Midwest was once a very shrubby place
It’s hard to visualize what the landscape in the Midwest looked like prior to the European invasion down through the first half of the 19th century.

There were, of course, towns and trade routes, especially along the rivers, but it was a land with few fences or readily marked boundaries in the sense that we know them.

A broad area of the country around the western Great Lakes and running south to Texas functioned as the transition zone between the Eastern forest and the Western prairies. It was a landscape of great diversity, an intricate mosaic of landscape types, all of them highly dependent on fire to maintain their distinctive characteristics.

Overall, the land ranged along a continuum from mostly treeless open prairie to shrub prairie to savanna to woodland to, rarely, closed-canopy forest. The native peoples used fire as a management tool and maintaining and shaping the diversity.

Yet this management was holistic, non-linear, intuitive, spiritual, and tended to enhance biodiversity, unlike most of the control-prioritizing methods we employ today.

Surveyors’ notes from the early 19th century often include mentions of shrubs such as American hazelnut. A typical comment might read, “scattering timber, principally burr and white oak, hazel and hickory undergrowth.”

That is, they were traveling through shrub prairies and savannas where shrubs intermingled with trees and prairie plants.

Other noted shrub species included New Jersey tea, four species of dogwood, wild crabapple, wild plum, sumac species, roses, prairie willow and prickly ash.

Species prevalence depended on soil type and moisture availability, but all—more than thirty species— were adapted to fire, with the shrubby adaptive ability to easily spread vegetatively and to rapidly regenerate post-fire.

In areas of very frequent fires where shrub barrens developed, even some species of oak took on a shrubby form. The vanishingly few modern examples of shrub prairie also demonstrate their value as wildlife habitat.

These remaining landscapes tend to be on moist, sandy soil and include not only some of the species listed above, but also chokeberries, huckleberries, blueberries, grasses such as big bluestem, and flowers such as prairie violet. They are home to shrub-dependent birds, pollinators and wildlife such as herptiles, amphibians and mammals, including some rare or endangered species.

Disappearing native shrubs
Our cultural landscape amnesia is so great that, during the time much of this landscape was being physically erased by farms and towns, memories of it were concurrently erased, or if spoken of, were disputed or even disbelieved.

Unless we learn otherwise, we tend to think that the current landscape is how it should be. I’ve talked with farming people who have lost their history, can’t call native shrubs and prairie plants by their names and think of them as weeds to be mown down. Conventional farming policy and practice exacerbates this tendency.

 Only very old people, mostly long dead now, have told me of hedgerows full of shrubs in bloom, and remembered homemade wild plum preserves, gooseberry pies and elderberry wine.

Today, as a result, wild native shrubs are in decline in the Midwest. To the knowledgeable eye it is odd, even jarring to see farmhouses landscaped with nursery standardized non-native barberries and privets in one of the great shrub producing regions of the world.

It is sad to realize that shrubs with scant to no ecological value are favored over the Midwest species that could be such a boon to wildlife, soil health and to the farmers themselves.

And our cities, suburbs and towns are no better for many native shrubs, which don't easily conform to the constraints imposed by extremely manicured landscapes. Luckily, this has been slowly changing as cultivars have been selected and developed.

Viburnums and hydrangeas have long been of value and these days, many residential street have their serviceberries, chokeberries, dogwoods and oak leaf hydrangeas.

Even in natural areas, often created in less desirable, less farmable land than the great open prairies, fire suppression ensured that what were shrub prairies and savannas rapidly became woodlands and sometimes forests.

Only in the late 20th century were these last two landscapes rediscovered as entities in and of themselves.

A former savanna can often be recognized by the presence of old bur oaks with the characteristically wide-spreading shape they develop when open-grown, surrounded by younger, straighter, narrower trees. In modern restoration, savannas have often been prioritized.

Conversely, shrub species such as gray dogwood, though native, have frequently been put on lists of less desirable plants in need of control. Only in this century have wild native shrubs’ value been reconsidered as necessary understory species and as major landscape components in and of themselves.

Wild native shrubs for carbon sequestration
In the Midwest (and possibly other regions in the world), reforestation and afforestation as a major carbon sequestering and ecological resilience strategy does not mean recreating the deep forests of the Eastern and Southeastern US.

What is required is figuring out how lessons from the old patchwork-mosaic, fire-dependent landscape can be relearned and applied in new ways.

Existing natural landscapes should be examined for their carbon-sequestering, water management and ecological resilience functions and the data used as inspiration for how best to conduct the necessary rewilding, recomplexifying efforts in the landscapes where humans live, work and farm.

We need to expand the army of ecologists, restorationists, landscape managers, farmers, and public and private landowners already at work and create new, potent alliances of land managers.

I believe it will be found that recreating a diversity of landscapes along the prairie to forest continuum, including shrub prairies and wetlands, in accordance with given soil types and water availability, will best make use of conditions here--even as the climate changes.

The possibilities are manifold.

• Where can gray dogwood and other spreading, suckering shrubs be encouraged in their proclivities?
  
• Where can huge wetland restorations be undertaken, where swamp roses and black chokeberries, buttonbush and swamp dogwood are allowed to run riot?
  
• Where will wild plums be allowed to form their dense, thorny thickets, or hazelnuts and bladdernuts be encouraged to grow among the oaks, their rightful companions?
  
• Who can persuade farmers that allowing these species back on their less productive land will improve the resilience of their farms—and the health of themselves and their children?
  
• How can park district and municipal officials and other urban/suburban land owners and managers learn to see native shrubs as worthwhile companions to trees?

And, though some of the needed work is ongoing even now, much more needs to be done, faster.

All of this should be possible and will be necessary as the indisputable benefits of nurturing species complexity in the service of biological diversity and soil carbon sequestration become more widely acknowledged during our climate emergency.

Shrubs grow much faster than trees and are powerful carbon sequestration engines in their own right.

They could play a huge part of the Midwest’s potential carbon sequestration and resilience strategy. It’s time for these middle children of the plant world to come into their own.

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A Climate Changing Proposal

SUBHEAD: We must devote ourselves to cooling the climate if we are to have any future at all.

By Peter Bane & Susan Butler on 15 June 2017 for Resilence -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-06-15/a-climate-cooling-proposal/)


Image above: An aerial view of agroforestry management practices in Niger in 2004. From (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/great-green-wall-stop-desertification-not-so-much-180960171/).

Climate cooling activities increase water storage to support green plant growth, and draw carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis to form deep, rich soils under forests, marshes, and grasslands.

The result is known as Drawdown, carbon banking, or when coupled with agriculture, carbon farming. While healthy biosystems worldwide do this already, human carbon emissions from fossil fuel, destructive agriculture, and deforestation combine to overwhelm the balancing effects of natural systems.

Beginning 7,000 years ago with early agriculture, quickening with the Industrial Revolution, and threatening to spin out of control in the 21st century, human activities past and present are heating the planet. We must now consciously enter the climate equation by assisting nature’s cooling processes through land repair.

For the first time in the UN process, Drawdown was recognized as a viable and necessary response to the climate crisis under the Paris agreement of 2015 (COP-21). Pushed aggressively by European and Commonwealth nations, “net zero emissions” became the goal.

This approach has gained political traction because, despite a quarter century of international agreements and efforts, emissions reductions through effiency, conservation, fuel shifting, technological innovation, and system redesign have proved exceedingly slow to move the global economy onto a lean carbon basis.

Optimists point to recent rapid growth in renewable energy, but time is not on our side. Beyond lowering the increment of industrial emissions, we must rapidly subtract CO2 and advance ecosystem cooling in order to mitigate the catastrophic and mounting effects of climate change.

The threat from climate disruption is more immediate and dire than is widely understood. Extreme weather events—fire, flood, drought, and storm—are proliferating and growing more intense with each year; this endangers life and property on a vast scale, triggering war, conflict, and migration.

Over the past 10,000 years, agriculture and human settlement have damaged and degraded two-thirds of Earth’s land cover, and devastated ocean life. Biosystems are under extreme pressure as humans consume 50% more than natural regeneration provides each year, further suppressing photosynthetic capacity.

Overshoot has accelerated since 1987, bringing more and more living systems to the brink of collapse. Because of inertia in the climate system, the most dramatic changes from recent human carbon excesses have not yet manifested, but the trends are ominous.

Positive feedback loops from methane releases under permafrost, burning of tropical and temperate forests, ice-free Arctic seas, and deglaciation threaten to speed up warming exponentially well before mid-century. Scientists across the planet are afraid. Runaway heating presents a terrifying but ever closer prospect.

All life we know would die if Earth were to become another Venus. The build-out of renewable energy systems will take more than a generation and would not by itself be enough to reverse carbon loading of the atmosphere, while we may have no more than a decade before passing critical planetary thresholds.

More must be done. Geoengineering of the atmosphere and oceans is unproven and its undertaking would be reckless. But extending the longevity of green cover on land is within our grasp and will bring enormous benefits.

The evidence for effectiveness of photosynthesis is encoded in the data from Charles Keeling’s Mauna Loa laboratory.

Every May, as the two-thirds of Earth’s land mass in the Northern Hemisphere regreens, carbon levels in the atmosphere drop. Our job is to increase this drawdown. One method is proven across centuries: reforestation.

At times of plague and genocide during the past two millenia, the upward march of carbon in the atmosphere has stalled and reversed. Forests have done the work, as they supplanted farm fields abandoned by collapsing societies.

We do not wish for mass human death; fortunately recent innovations in agriculture point to the possibility of rebuilding our soils and forests while eating from them too.

A 2014 white paper by the Rodale Institute calculated that adopting best current organic farming practices worldwide, even without further reforestation, could sequester more carbon than the global economy and nature emit each year.

The required wholesale redesign of landscapes across the earth can provide healthy livelihoods for millions, redefine the meaning of work, and solve pressing social problems.


Image above: Before and after photos of ecological and agricultural restoration of the Loess Plateau in China begun in 2005. From (https://revitalizationnews.com/article/ecological-agricultural-restoration-of-chinas-loess-plateau/).

We must make building deep, rich soils and tending magnificent forests the over-arching purpose of human life, woven deeply into all cultures. Soils, forests, grasslands and silvocroplands can store 20 billion tons of carbon annually, enough to bring the atmospheric load down to climate-safe levels in the range of 280-310 ppm CO2 by the end of the century.

With demonstrated carbon capture rates between 4 and 300 tons per hectare per year, the planet’s 13 billion hectares of accessible land can support enough photosynthesis to reverse our current destructive course—but only if we make it our top priority now and for generations to come.

Building deep rich soils requires extensive land repair coupled with intelligent ecosystem management, especially slowing, spreading, and sinking runoff water, and covering land with green plants. For most immediate effect, surfaces must be kept cool to take heat load off the atmosphere.

Soils must remain vegetated or mulched at all times and pavements in urban areas should be shaded wherever possible. Forests too must be protected and expanded, especially connecting coastlines with continental interiors to enhance water cycles. With adequate water, crops and biomass can be grown, nurturing humans and other animals with nutrient-dense foods, while providing materials for the circular economy.

As agriculture is transformed away from tillage and chemicals and toward a perennial framework, the fungal associates of plants will orchestrate both health and carbon capture, regenerating soil organic matter levels to their prehistoric maxima and beyond.

In a virtuous spiral, organically growing soils, animals, and plants would support ample and healthy human populations as they do the work of tending highly productive landscapes. We see a fine-grained pattern of forests, fields, orchards, pastures, and wetlands across all the inhabited continents, dotted with villages and towns, connected by the World Wide Web.

Our cities too will regain their once green raiment, becoming mosaics of market gardens, greenhouses, edible parks, and offices, factories, shops, and warehouses under living roofs. There will be water everywhere: springs, streams, rivers, and lakes will reappear where no one expected to see them again.

Building up deep rich soils and healthy ecosystems begs a global effort in promotion and finance, but will be achieved by millions of small-scale projects carried out at neighborhood and watershed levels, where design standards can be determined democratically and best practices tested empirically.

This is work for hundreds of millions of people presently unemployed, underemployed, or pursuing dangerous and destructive jobs. Ongoing, globally coordinated research and development efforts should focus on documenting and sharing effective strategies arising from grassroots innovation.

Land repair leads directly to higher yields in agriculture and forestry, as well as cleaner water, reduced damage from flooding and drought, and so can become self-supporting in food, water, and economic yields.

Estimates from Slovakia suggest that savings from mitigation of flood damage alone provided a one-year payback on investments of 4 euros (USD$5) per cubic meter of water storage created. Most materials will be available locally (wood, stone, brush, plants, clay), and the energy, tools, and machinery required will be modest.

As hundreds of millions devote their lives to this cause, the resulting rich landscapes, clean waters, healthy populations, and stable climate will be deeply respected as a global commons, deserving of permanent protection.

Climate change is an emergency demanding that we reorganize our societies on a wartime footing to fight for our lives. By terra-forming the planet, by pulling carbon gas out of the air and storing it safely and securely as humus in soil and wood in trees, we can rebalance the earth’s carbon chemistry.

While this calls for lifetimes of labor and virtual mountains of treasure, we have hundreds of millions needing employment while trillions of dollars slosh around the global economy hiding from taxation, feeding speculative bubbles, extracting wealth from the natural world, and creating pernicious social and political problems.

Migrant problem? Not anymore; rather, an opportunity. Instead of vast refugee camps spreading across deserts in Africa and the Middle East, let us create networks of villages for a new Civilian Conservation Corps, housing millions of well-paid and well-trained workers building infrastructures designed to catch water and repair landscapes.

Starting where investments in natural capital can bring the most immediate return of employment and agricultural productivity, this urgent, moon-shot-scale effort must be kickstarted now because time is of the essence. It can evolve into self-organized human cultures across the planet.

We know how to do this. President Franklin Roosevelt put millions to work through the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) across the US during the New Deal era of the 1930s.

Many of the earthen structures: swales, terraces, infiltration pits and ponds, as well as the bridges, culverts, forest trails, and more that these agencies built are still in place, working quietly to regulate stream flow and improve ecosystems.

More recently, the Slovak Republic undertook a pilot program of waterworks with EU support to similar purposes in 2010-11. The result was a dizzying array of creative, low-cost solutions to flooding and erosion in agricultural, forested, and urban landscapes. These are national-scale examples from recent history to the present.

Smaller efforts are ongoing in a multitude of regions, unremarked but no less effective. Bill Mollison and others have described many of the same techniques and methods used in these programs, and have gone beyond the Euro-American context to address dryland and tropical regions.

Permaculture designers have gathered traditional knowledge and combined it with the scientific method to demonstrate what works to repair damaged lands, restore water supplies, improve agriculture, and sequester carbon.

The demonstrated systems are effective, cheap, can be made in large measure with local materials, and do not require machinery—although it can be helpful on larger projects.

Wood, stone, and bamboo structures, gabions and check dams, earthen dams, dikes, polders, balks, terraces, and contour ditches can be created quickly and without specialized tools or materials. They can endure for generations and so represent excellent investments.

Water slows down and infiltrates into soils, making more groundwater available to sustain more plant growth for a longer time each season promoting better transpiration, cooling, cloud formation, and rainfall. This supports healthy springs, streams, lakes and estuaries.

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Microengineering works are not the only approach, though they restore damaged lands directly, and once installed can work passively for decades, supporting food systems where no agriculture is presently sustainable.

Where farming is active, cover crops, zerotillage implements, elimination of fallow, intensive rotational grazing, polycultures, and a suite of agroforestry techniques are available to improve yields, eliminate erosion, support ecosystem services such as pollination and microclimate, and build soil carbon.

Through the international Permaculture movement and its proven curriculum, extensive grassroots networks are now familiar with land repair tools and could rapidly extend these practices by training teams of local workers.

The urgent need for a massive effort to ensure human survival means it’s now time to take back finance. Faced with a falling house of cards, global elites have been innovating like mad, using quantitative easing and negative interest rates to prop up failing industrial growth economies, perhaps to no avail.

But now we know more about using finance as a tool. We know money is not scarce. It’s not a commodity, but a social construct.

Whatever we can do, we can finance. Whatever is truly productive magnetizes and proliferates money. It would be an epic understatement to say that Drawdown activities are truly productive.

We must use Keynesian public financing to put the global underemployed and the badly employed—which is most people—to meaningful and collaborative work at sufficient wages making their immediate vicinities ecologically productive, building rich soils, sequestering carbon, and cooling the climate. Finance for this purpose, issued debt-free by national central banks, can be administered by local governments.

Much as the 1911 Weeks Act in the US acquired failed farms for the public trust, and planted forests on them, derelict and degraded lands can be purchased from private ownership through public finance to create new common pool resources, vested in local land trusts, community councils, or state stewardship, as appropriate.

Conservation agreements with private landowners accompanied by 4C land repair can upgrade private property while pulling it out of the polluting industrial economy and into organic production.

Good design of our watersheds, forests, rangelands, and estuaries holds the promise of a regenerative economy for the future. These will be the long-term rewards of seizing the moment of our destiny:

We must devote ourselves to cooling the climate if we are to have any future at all. On our way there we can solve a plethora of persistent problems that have plagued the growth economy from its inception, ushering in a new era of human prosperity and planetary health.
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