We have 1.2 trillion carbon molecules in every cell. We have around 30 trillion cells, and that’s us. So carbon is really a flow that animates everything we love, enjoy, eat, and all plant life, all sea life—everything that's alive on this planet—is animated by the flow of carbon. We want to see the situation we're in as that, as a flow. Where are the flows coming from, and why are we interfering with them? Why are we crushing them? Why are we killing them? For sure. But also, we need to see the wonder, the awe, the astonishment of life itself and to have that sensibility as the overriding narrative of how we act in the world, how we live, and how we talk to each other. Unless we change the conversation about climate into something that's a conversation about more life—better conditions for people in terms of social justice, restoring so much of what we've lost—then we won’t get anywhere.
Paul Hawken is a renowned environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist committed to sustainability and transforming the business-environment relationship. He starts ecological businesses, writes about nature and commerce, and consults with heads of state and CEOs on climactic economic and ecological regeneration. He has appeared on the Today Show, Talk of the Nation, Real Time with Bill Maher, CBS This Morning, and his work has been profiled or featured in hundreds of articles, including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, Forbes, and Businessweek. He has written nine books, including six national and New York Times bestsellers. He's published in 30 languages, and his books are available in over 90 countries. He is the founder of Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration, which is creating the world's largest, most complete listing and network of solutions to the climate crisis. His latest book is Carbon: The Book of Life.
PAUL HAWKEN
The book starts with the quote from Bayo Akomolafe, and it just says, “There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice.” To me, that is a very important quote to precede the whole book, to lead into the whole book.
The first paragraph says:
Carbon moves ceaselessly through the four realms–the biosphere, oceans, land, and atmosphere. It flows in rivers and veins, soil and skin, breath and wind. It is the narrator of lives born and lost, futures feared and imagined. It is the courier coursing through every particle of our existence, the interwoven lattice that permeates cultures, lagoons, minds, grasslands, organisms, and our temporal life. Carbon's dance of life does not take sides; it is never right or wrong. It is a timeless path that endlessly unwinds before us. Like Ariadne's thread, the flow of carbon is a story that may allow us to escape the labyrinth of anxiety, ignorance, and fear the world bequeaths. Carbon's increase in the atmosphere moves in tandem with the loss of the living world. The Book of Life encircles what has always regulated climate, the pulsing, living mantle we call Earth.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
That's beautifully read and beautifully written. I think that some people come to your book Carbon thinking, oh this is a book about Carbon, kind of like a sequel to Drawdown, but this is a very different book. I think of those words flow, the dance of life, and it's subtitle, the book of life. I think that that really conveys the message that I got from it. It's much more than managing solutions that you've covered in your other projects and books. It’s about appreciating this whole fabric and flow of carbon that runs through us and not thinking about it in a negative way, but in an appreciative way. This miracle of life, the miracle of this planet we live on, the carbon that runs through us and in the atmosphere, and through all of life on this planet. I believe the book is the fruit and wisdom of years and has been some 13 years in the making. What inspired you to focus specifically on carbon and its implications, but also this flow, this dance of life?
HAWKEN
I think like everybody, I read, and I listen, and I watch, particularly about the environment, about climate, about the narratives that are put out into the world about what is happening, what has happened, what will or might happen, or almost surely will happen. They’re primarily based around threat and fear. They're primarily based on suppositional facts, which I wouldn't argue against. By the way, I think they're good. The science is really good. It's a narrative that has infused our lives, who care about each other, about our place, about creatures, about living here, about our children. But that narrative is essentially about less reduction, about really blaming fossil fuel companies for sure, governments and politicians, and, obviously, large corporations. And there we are, that’s kind of the quote-unquote narrative, and then there are books. I think Drawdown was probably the first one to really accomplish a list of solutions.
Like this is what you can do. It was always meant to be followed by regeneration, and the difference between the two books is vast in a way because Drawdown was really about stopping emissions and sequestering carbon, so it was bringing it back home. Regeneration was about creating more life on Earth, and that's it.
Regeneration is fundamental and intrinsic to every living organism, including every cell in our body. I wanted to really introduce that as the pathway forward. The Book of Life really came out in response to the objectification of nature and of carbon. Like, there are carbon offsets, nature offsets, and now there are nature credits. There’s this idea that somehow if we can make the whole world of carbon a marketplace that entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley can utilize, we will somehow use the marketplace to solve or fix the climate problem. I put these in air quotes. What I wanted to do is pull back and say, first of all, carbon is not a thing we’re objectifying as if it were a thing. Now, of course, it is one of the elements, but it’s as if it were isolated, as if it were the bad boy, our problem child in our culture and civilization that we have to combat and tackle in all those ways pertaining to climate change.
We have 1.2 trillion carbon molecules in every cell. We have around 30 trillion cells, and that’s us. So carbon is really a flow that animates everything we love, enjoy, eat, and all plant life, all sea life—everything that's alive on this planet—is animated by the flow of carbon.
We get data that we've lost over 70 percent, 73 percent, I think the latest data indicates, of wildlife and mammals in the last 50 years. That’s just shocking when you get that data, but then you ask, what can I do? What can I do? I wanted to move away from any guilt or compulsion because it doesn't work to talk to people that way. After 50 years of climate being in the news, in science, and in our schools, less than a fraction of 1 percent of people in the world do anything about it on a daily basis. How could that be? This is a civilizational crisis. For less than 1 percent to be engaged and do something means that our communication is flawed. I’m not saying the people are wrong, or the science is wrong, or the facts are wrong, but the narrative as a whole is not one that truly entices people or draws them in with a shared understanding of what we face and what to do about it.
The first thing we must do is to care and to feel that care. I wanted Carbon to be the subtitle of the Book of Life because it truly is the book of life, without which there is no life. It was 10 years in the making, and witnessing the success of Drawdown and Regeneration only amplified my feeling of needing a different narrative out there that didn’t exclude those narratives but included a larger sense of self and the idea that our life, our soul, our bodies, our cells are inseparable from the living world. It’s not that there’s a climate crisis; we are climate. It’s not that there’s a biodiversity crisis; we are those creatures. We are those cells. That inextricability of human beings and life on this planet is something indigenous people understood and continue to understand, having practiced it forever.
This is something we colonists, those of us who have been educated in Western science, have to step back and look at: how did we create this world of duality, where we separate ourselves and think of ourselves as better, thinking we can take and extract from the world? It’s not meant to be a critique; it’s meant to be an opening to the fact that we may not actually know where we live. I don't think we were taught about this planet as children. I went to school; I read the books. I don’t think we actually know where we live.
Carbon is like lifting a leaf up from the ground and seeing all these creatures underneath. Carbon represents that for the whole Earth. When you open it up, you see, oh my goodness, that’s where we live. It is just a miracle. It’s extraordinary.
That’s what we want to enhance and save. When people talk about saving the Earth, the Earth doesn’t need saving; we need to save our awareness. We need to reimagine who we are to each other and to all other living beings.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
I think that that's so true. Earth, if we actually look after it, it can save us. It can look after us, as it has, when we don't interfere. And I have to say, it's an inspiring book. And I didn't mean to, but in preparation for this interview, I was rereading different passages, and then I went out into a cafe. I was just reading, and it actually inspired me to write a story. I’ve never written a science fiction story before. In the story, at first, we think the characters are Earth beings, astronauts, who've been away from this Earth and are coming back, but then we understand that they are actually aliens coming to the planet, discovering the wonders of Earth. And they think it's amazing, but then they start talking about humans and they say, “Oh, well, don't mind them. Just don't try to get in their way, but there are others, octopuses and leopards and butterflies and bees… they know how to navigate, and they can see all these things humans can’t see and live in harmony with Earth.”
So I want to thank you for the inspiration. And I think if I'm any measure that other people, they'll learn a lot, but it will also inspire their imagination and their emotions and create that emotional connection to take care. If we think less of ourselves, we could begin to understand more. And I think that this book is a great gateway to that.
HAWKEN
If we look at ourselves as visitors, even for a minute, we might think differently. If we visited a favela where people are suffering and deprived, we would have a completely different sense of the planet. In between all that, there are 3.4 trillion creatures—that’s just creatures that walk and fly and buzz—that are in constant communication. Our education from Western Europe often leads us to believe that we have the brain and can talk; no one else can. Slowly, though, there's grudging acceptance that other animals and creatures have consciousness, they can communicate, and they can remember.
What we're seeing right now is an explosion of extraordinary scientists—both women and men—who are going into the natural world, observing the animal kingdom and the insects, and coming back with astonishing reports and science. They’ve discovered that snakes can identify different snakes. They have personalities, and mother bats speak in a certain dialect, which they call “motherese” for lack of a better description. They name their children and warn them about predatory males.
Every creature on Earth is in communication with at least themselves and others, and we live on a sensate, conscious planet. It’s much more interesting to think about us wanting to listen and appreciate all the voices instead of thinking we are the only voice, which is very lonely if you consider it. We’re not in charge. We are in charge of one thing: destroying life on Earth. That’s what we're doing. Nothing else is doing that. There is no creature doing what we're doing. We are one of 8.4 billion species, and we’re the only ones who decided to double-glaze the planet and ruin life on Earth with our mining, pollution, and plastics.
This book is about stopping, taking a look. This is not fiction; I’m not telling you a story. I’m saying this is where you live. This is who we are. This is our brothers and sisters, and our life depends entirely on the whole of life, not on technology, not on Silicon Valley, not on Elon Musk, and not on lies and cheats who accumulate capital and money.
It’s actually so much different, so exquisite, than the world we confront when we open up the New York Times or The Guardian and go online every day and think, “Oh my God, that’s happening.” What is also happening is that people like you and others around the world—who are unheralded, who don’t make the news or headlines—are restoring life on Earth at every single level out of respect and love and out of grief for what has been lost. As a Californian, I used to be a firefighter in the Sierras when I was younger.
The one thing about fires in California, because we're so prone to them, is that after the fire is over, it leaves a black carbon landscape. But in the spring, you see grasses and wildflowers and a peculiar green color because it's nourished by all the ashes of the grasses. Some wildflower seeds can only break their carapace and grow after being subjected to extreme heat. After these fires, you see plants that haven’t bloomed for 50 to 100 years. This is what’s happening now. The Earth is burning, and civilization is engaged in a form of self-immolation; it’s killing itself. But underneath that is extraordinary understanding and human beings wanting to regenerate and restore life on Earth. The action itself is how you restore yourself, you know?
It’s not just about others; it’s all connected. Whether you’re a farmer, a forester, or whatever, you are part of the flow of life. It’s the flow of carbon, and that’s the Book of Life. We’ve just lost our way. For the last 500 years, as Homo sapiens, we have lost our way completely. We’re not going to solve it with some new technology; that’s not going to do it. Technology is not leading us to where we want to go.
