Nonetheless this is a highly accessible book. When discussing the two dozen Arctic cultures impacted, he just can’t help listing – the Inuit, Yupik, Chukchi, Aleuts, Saami, Nenets, Athabaskan, Gwich’in, and Kalaalli…I was just grateful he resisted naming the other fifteen. “We take, we dam, we enslave, we exploit, we frack, we drill, we poison, we burn, we cut, we kill,” and “the proximate causes of the climate crisis are cars, buildings, wars, deforestation, poverty, oil, corruption, coal, industrial agriculture, overconsumption, and fracking”. Less attractive is the author’s fondness for lists. It is a human problem.” Or even pithier: “We are either stealing the future or healing the future.” “The climate crisis is not a science problem. There are plenty of well-turned phrases that border on political slogans. I would recommend the book for them alone. And the photographs are simply outstanding. It is no surprise that ‘Regeneration’ is a stylish treatise, somewhere between a press release and a political manifesto. He was a press advisor to Martin Luther King, at the tender age of 19, while holding down a job as a staff photographer for The Congress of Racial Equality on the side. His political credentials are equally impressive. He has founded several impact-oriented companies including Erewhon, using sustainable agricultural methods, and Energy Everywhere. Paul Hawken is one of the environmental movement’s leading voices and has dedicated his life to “changing the relationship between business and the environment”. The debate about climate change has moved on

But it is too misty-eyed and too politically-naïve.

There is a lot of interesting material on re-wilding, reforestation and biodiversity.We “live on a dying planet” and the only way to reverse this is a whole scale campaign of regeneration.A stylish and engaging book packed with outstanding photographs if perhaps a few too many lists.

Paul hawken regeneration book