When we face this week’s UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s urgent report on the state of global warming, it’s easy to lose hope. Even at the Drawdown kick-off to Climate Week NYC just a couple of weeks ago, veteran activist Bill McKibben called on Lynne Twist to “provide the necessary antidote to my mild gloom.”

In this brand new video, we see segments of this live event including McKibben’s introduction and Lynne’s inspirational keynote. We invite you to watch, get motivated, and then explore the many promising resources that Drawdown offers.

Edited Video Transcript

Bill McKibben: Before we learn more about Drawdown, we need someone to come up and provide the necessary antidote to my mild gloom. It is really true that my job for 30 years has been basically to bum people out and I’ve gotten good at it. I apologize, but I feel all right about it tonight because, among other things, we have Lynne Twist to take us in the next direction.

Lynne Twist: …What I want to say is that we are having people be able to see that they can make a difference. (We are speaking to people) who have lost hope, who feel that “there is nowhere to go” and they can’t face this giant thing called global warming or climate change. They think, “It’s just too big for me. I can’t figure out what to do about it. It’s overwhelming, it’s hopeless, it’s inevitable. What are we going to do?” And they just do the best they can to ignore it.

Our job is to wake people up, particularly people who are apathetic, particularly people who’ve lost their hope, particularly people who can’t see their way to take action. I must say that global warming is so gigantic, so upsetting, the news keeps getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. Things are going faster than anyone predicted, so it’s easy to want to go numb to it. It’s easy to kind of go back into the trance…

So, (I was excited) when I got a call from Paul Hawken saying that this book was getting released called Drawdown, and he started to tell me about what Drawdown was and what had come out of the research that had been done for years by over 200 experts and scholars and scientists..

Then, he said, “You know what? We can reverse global warming. Not just mitigate it, not just try to slow it down, not just avoid it, being totally at the effect of this thing that’s much bigger than us. We think we can actually reverse it. We created it as a human species and we can turn it around completely. Now, it’s not going to be easy, but we can do it.” That’s the kind of the revelation that’s in the Drawdown research.

I started to cry because I needed that. I needed that tonic. I needed to be able to see the way through. I was beginning to get discouraged myself, even though I’m in charge of the possibility of life. <grin>

People need to see that this is not something happening to us; but perhaps, as Paul has said, it’s happening for us. Global warming is actually perfect feedback for a species that has lost its way.

In other words, the natural system is working perfectly. It’s giving us real serious, real urgent, real comprehensive feedback as a species to have us course correct in a very deep and profound way. And so this is Drawdown’s extraordinary message.

Drawdown is a book, yes, but it’s way more than a book. We consider it a revelation, a gift, a blessing, a kind of a miracle coming just at the right time. When you engage with the Drawdown material, open your soul, not just your brain, to being one of the people who gets this message implanted, not only in who you are, but in every living human being you can get this message to. Because ultimately, what this message says is that it’s not ‘game over.’ It’s ‘game on.’

So, I ask you once again to be open, to be a carrier, an ambassador, a spokesperson for this message and everything that comes with it. Yes, there are huge hurdles in front of us. Yes, it’ll take everything to turn the situation around. But knowing that we can, knowing that it’s possible, knowing that there’s light at the end of the tunnel … I have a friend who says “the light at the end of the tunnel is actually a mirror.” We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for. We can do it. It’s not ‘game over.’ It’s ‘game on.’