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A single cell of carbon contains trillions of molecules, and its role in connecting all life is immeasurable. American environmentalist Paul Hawken decided to study indigenous languages to further explore the beauty of the most versatile element on the planet that animates the entirety of the living world. Joining Corinna Bellizzi, he talks about his book “Carbon: The Book of Life” and how it opened his eyes to the fact that regeneration is the singular key to humanity’s survival. He stresses the importance of embracing regenerative agricultural practices, nature-based solutions, and indigenous knowledge to ensure the planet’s longevity and sustainability. Paul also explains why he considers “we” as the most dangerous pronoun and how to rethink our daily choices in a world addicted to overconsumption.

About Paul Hawken:

Paul Hawken starts ecological businesses, writes about nature and commerce, and consults with heads of state and CEOs on climatic, economic and ecological regeneration. He has written nine books published in 30 languages including six national and New York Times bestsellers: Growing a Business, The Next Economy, The Ecology of Commerce, Blessed Unrest, Drawdown and Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis In One Generation. He is the founder of Project Drawdown, Regeneration.org, and just completed his latest work, Carbon: The Book of Life which is published by Penguin Random House. It was released on March 18, 2025.

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-hawken-0792b/

Guest Website: https://paulhawken.com/

Guest Social: https://www.instagram.com/paulhawken/

Show Notes:

• 00:02:07 – Writing The Book ‘Carbon’
• 00:10:15 – The Growing Impact Of Regenerative Agriculture
• 00:21:57 – Regeneration: The Only Path Forward
• 00:34:46 – Living In A Consumerist And Capitalist Society
• 00:42:49 – Changing The Topography Of Living Spaces
• 00:52:24 – How Life Exists Within A Single Cell
• 00:59:40 – Some Regenerative Solutions From ‘Carbon’
• 01:07:05 – Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

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Paul Hawken On Why Carbon Is The Solution To Climate Crisis

I’m thrilled to once again welcome Paul Hawken, a bestselling author and leading voice calling for the regeneration of nature and humanity. He is authored 9 books published in 30 languages, including The Ecology of Commerce, Blessed Unrest and Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. He joins me to talk about his new book, Carbon: The Book of Life published by Penguin Random House. It’s now available wherever books are sold, at least here in the United States. With that, I hope you’ll join me in welcoming him to the show.

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Welcome back, Paul.

Thank you so much. It’s good to see you. I really appreciate it.

Writing The Book ‘Carbon’

It’s very good to see you again, too. I wanted to kick off this conversation having just re-shared some of my prior work on your former book, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, really with just what inspired you to write this book, Carbon, which I see as a love letter to life itself. I’d really just love for you to talk about that.

You’re not the first person who’s described it as a love letter. I didn’t think of it that way. The backstory is that I sold the book in 2014 to my publisher and then I said, “Before I get to that, let me do Drawdown. They said, “Okay.” I did that and sold really well. After I finished that, I said, “Actually, I need to do Regeneration.

They kept renewing the contract, my editor, so sweet. Finally, they said like, “We’re not going to renew it again.” I said, “Okay, wait, let me write it now.” The book I proposed then is not the book I wrote. I think during the years I watched the climate movement matriculate and grow, of course and develop. Pretty soon, everybody and their uncle was involved with it in one way or another, really legitimately and deeply and profoundly all the way to commercially and literally extractively, even though extraction is a cause of the loss of biodiversity.

The whole spectrum of human endeavor started to focus on climate. What I want to do is just pull back a little bit and was like, “Time out. Can we just clean up our language?” The language is so much about fighting, tackling, combating and othering, those words very othering type of language, which is of course relevant in our society. Everywhere, we just talk about everything is something else, instead of that inseparable connection we have to each other and to nature. I wanted to move the conversation over to something that actually was more reminiscent than of indigenous languages in that sense.

They don’t have that sense of separation built into the language and they’re educated with it. That’s why Chichen language doesn’t and others don’t have the word for nature. They didn’t intend not to have it. They never saw it as other. That’s really different than us with our extraordinary language, English, the way we see the world. It’s very much about nouns, Corinna. It’s very about naming. It’s very about science. It’s very about separation, which is good science by the way. Nothing wrong with that, but that actually doesn’t describe where we live and who we are and how our bodies work. Most importantly, it doesn’t describe carbon because carbon’s not a thing.

This is where I think I really took a lot from your book and a story that I didn’t expect to unravel. You cover this in the book. How many molecules of carbon exist in a single cell?

It’s 12% or 1.2 trillion. We have 10 trillion atoms per cell.

It’s a mind-blowing number and then we have 36 trillion or so of our own cells and then double that again, if you can consider all of the microbiota that are present in our bodies, without which we could not live. In a way, we’re a universe in ourselves and yet carbon connects us to everything.

Just in that it connects us to everything, carbon is connected to everything. Carbon is innate to us, too. It rather than it connects us because in a way we still are saying it’s out there and we’re connecting to it. I’m trying to erase that. We’ve all learned, by the way, and we’re good students and we’ve heard it and we’ve studied science, we went to school and all that stuff. It connects us. There is no separation between the flow of carbon in the world and us. Us is a useful pronoun, maybe, but it doesn’t actually describe our relationship to carbon.

That, in a way, sits with this same narrative that nature in itself is something that is not even considered separate from the people and some indigenous cultures.

When we talk about us, almost automatically, we circumscribe our identity as being different than nature. As you mentioned, the 40 trillion microbes that surround us and in and on our eyelashes and that we breathe in every second, without which we would die. Our life extends much further than our skin and our body and goes much further. There is much more complexity than we have any sense of.

In indigenous cultures, I think that understanding arose because they have nothing that we have in terms of technology and ways to actually manipulate the living world. They grew things, they harvested, they understand ecosystems in a way which is extraordinary. They did it because they wanted to continue to live and they didn’t have any import food. They couldn’t can it and all that stuff.

Those cultures developed with an extraordinary sense of place and understanding of place that really informed their existence and their language. I’ve only looked at a couple languages, that is to say the breadth of language that is defined or translated into English. What occurred to me, which I’ve never heard exactly because I’m not indigenous, but is that the language, like the Yamana language in Chile, actually teaches you where you live and how to live there. It’s innate in the language, in the verbs and the language is metaphors.

Aristotle said metaphor is genius and this language then is genius. There’s thousands and thousands and this language, Yamana is 30,000 words. This approaches Japanese in terms of the number of words. What a gap between people’s actual existence and their language and the way they saw the world and related to each other and the way we saw them and what we do. What the book is trying to do, it’s like, I can’t do it, but I can point to it, which is like, it’s entirely different than what I was told, what I believe, what I read as to who I am, what I am or what you are and what we are. The most important thing is the we. That never stops as a pronoun. It encompasses every single aspect of the living world.

“We” never stops as a pronoun. It encompasses every single aspect of the living world.

You talk often of language and the importance of things. Even when we first had a discussion about Regeneration, it was naming the problem of what we are facing with the climate crisis. It’s global warming. It’s human caused global warming that’s the problem. Reversing that is impossible if we don’t confront it as an issue head on in the beginning.

The Growing Impact Of Regenerative Agriculture

Over the past decade, we’ve made very little progress if we think about the whole, in so far as stopping pollution, slowing down the freight train that is progress for a capitalistic society. Ultimately, it seems like what is continually losing out is nature and nature-based solutions. The one area that I think is continuing to really see some strength is the growth of regenerative agriculture. I wonder what you are seeing from the perspective of gathering the data to write this book. Are there emerging trends that we can all really think about, support and feel good about to help us engage with this challenge in a positive and progressive way? It is just something I’ve been chewing on since reading your book.

I chew on it every day, my morning reading about what’s going wrong and how fast where and then also looking to extraordinary people in the world who are actively regenerating. Not just ag, but not to say ag is the most important in terms of we eat every day three times or whatever, but in all aspects of our existence. Not just with ecosystems or with trope and just with communication, but with really resuscitating language, which is really important.

Language is inherent to cultures and it contains so much wisdom and information if we parse it. I would say agriculture is an interesting area because much of what is being espoused or promoted with respect to trying to address climate and we’re not trying to address climate change because the climate is supposed to change.

We’re addressing our crisis. Us. That’s what we need to address. The climate will change accordingly. It’s not like we can address climate change and certainly, we can address ocean change. This is changing because of carbonic acid, overfishing and pollution. I think it’s an interesting thing because actually I’ve been involved with this for just pretty much all my life. What I see is people moving to regenerative agriculture because it works better.

We’re at the end of a long cycle, started in the ‘20s and ‘30s when artificial fertilizers were first produced and they came out of Germany. They came out of the desire to make bombs more cheaply and more quickly for World War I. Our pesticides came out of poison gases also embedded in Germany for World War I and subsequent wars.

What happened is that we could feed our plants with nitrogen and obviously phosphorus and potassium as well, but NPK, they did really well. They grew quickly. They’re green, they’re big, more food, more whatever. That was just game over, I think, for a lot of people in terms of where agriculture was going to go. This is progress. This is science at its best. It turns out that in fact, it had the opposite effect than what was intended, which is, yes, on the short-term, produce more food. If you snort cocaine, you’ll have more energy for a while.

There are things you can do to accelerate or expand. That doesn’t mean that it is actually creating more life. It actually can be consuming more life in order to get the payoff. The payoff is more corn and soy, more wheat, more this, more that. Not surprisingly, more people got born, more food, more people, more food, this cycle.

I think we’re right at the cusp of really seeing just how damaging and destructive it is. The runoff is 500 dead zones from agricultural runoff. In a dead zone in ocean, just so we are clear, means that there’s no fish because there’s no oxygen. Jellyfish do okay on the surface, sea anemones is okay on the bottom, but if you’re a skin diver, there’s nothing in between.

That’s one damage. Obviously, the damage is to the soil itself, because by top dressing it, how the plants basically be feeding the top feeders in a way. They didn’t really send their roots all the way down. That process of the roots going down with carbohydrates, with the sugars the plants metabolize from photosynthesis and CO2, those sugars fed the bacteria, mycelia and so forth. They enzymatically in the case of bacteria broke down minerals.

They are really important minerals for the health of the plant and the health of us, or the animals we eat if, whatever animals we eat or we don’t, we go direct and we eat the plant. That was cut off. What happened then is the plants were not healthy. They may be big and green and grow faster, but that doesn’t mean they were healthy. They were subject to infestation insects and we said, “This is fantastic, 5,000 acres. Let’s go.”

Yeah, you get infestations, locusts, grasshoppers and things like that. They just eat everything.

What happened is that then the soils deteriorates and then you get weeds. One thing that isn’t talked about it and not understood, I think, and I learned this from Joseph Cocannouer, who wrote a book in 1930 for the University of Oklahoma called Weeds. What he was saying is that if you look at a weed, per se, if you look at Canadian thistle, it’s just like another type of infestation. There are weeds everywhere.

The soil deteriorates. Actually, plants want to heal the soil. The weeds indicate what’s happening below. Not to say we want to use weeds to restore our soil because we can’t eat those weeds, but that’s exactly why glyphosate came about in herbicides. That accelerated the loss of life in the soil. Now then the pesticides, when we started the coat the seeds with neonicotinoids, which last for five years, systemic, they go into the plant, they go into the leaves, butterflies and insects eat the leaves, they die, or the birds eat the insects, they eat the plant, the birds die. The bees definitely suffer. That’s our current agricultural system.

What we’re seeing, again, they won’t talk about it, but the Monsanto, Corteva, Syngenta, Bayer, etc., know that the future of ag is biology, not chemistry. Biology is chemistry too, of course, but I mean, it’s a system, not a chemical. You are seeing that. What I see in companies all over the world is just people moving through B-gen ag transitioning because it works better, it costs less, there’s more productivity, the food tastes better, etc.

It’s interesting of all the movements or practices that are addressed a warming planet, this one is the one that I think is now self-feeding. It doesn’t depend on subsidies, it doesn’t depend on mandate, it doesn’t depend on Donald Trump. It doesn’t depend on all that stuff. Renewables important too, but I’m just saying is that it is nature saying, “I know you gave up on me for a while, but this this works so much better.” I think farmers one by one, but well, more, I mean by the thousands, whether they’re small farmers or small holders, or whether they’re big farms in the Midwest and other places, are moving towards that.

Something I’ve reflected a lot on since really learning more from Robin Wall Kimerer and her work with Braiding Sweetgrass, which is a phenomenal collection of essays about really nature and nature-based solutions that come from indigenous knowledge. She wrote this one chapter, or this one essay called The Three Sisters.

It really helped for me to ingrain this knowledge that indigenous people who lived on this land long before us had these regenerative solutions at their fingertips embedded in their culture and as you have said, really in their language for even referring to these plants as the three sisters. That was corn and beans. The beans climb the corn and then squash, which they would grow in concert. Having these three plants together, you have a cover crop, which is a squash, that low lying, has great expanse that will cover, but it helps keep the moisture inside.

It doesn’t steal the light from the corn or the beans that are growing from it because it spreads out. You have something that is both fixing it. The beans fix nitrogen into the soil, which the corn loves. You have these diverse plants with roots that intertwine and connect and essentially enrich one another through just their individual properties.

Even as we see in the regenerative agriculture space, there are still farmers who are monocropping. There is more use of things like cover crops to ensure that they’re not having to use all these excess nitrogen fertilizers that do run off from the surface. Also, this movement to try and stop some of the heavy machinery on the soil, which really compresses everything down and makes at least sections of the soil more like compacted cement than a rich soil with that vibrant life living in it.

I see positive movement. I also loved connecting with Tim Crews, who he is leading the Lands Institute in a project related to testing kernza as a grain. Kernza has very deep roots and would grow taller than your are holding our arms up. Really getting moisture from the environment deep into the soil operates as channels so that your soil can retain more moisture. All of this makes sense, especially as we sit in this space where we have a warming world.

Regeneration: The Only Path Forward

This, in part, is what gives me hope. I sit here still working in the natural channel, trying to find solutions, studying regenerative agriculture, working to get my PhD at Prescott College in specifically sustainability education and then thinking about how these things connect. I want to talk about the social side of things.

All of these stories, if we look to the deep history that indigenous peoples have with the land, the things that we can capture and learn from them, from their language and from their customs and from the knowledge through stories that we’ve transmitted over time, there’s an element of social justice that just seems to sit at the center of all of this. I’d love to hear what your thoughts are about how we can generate more progress for the people at the same time that we are moving this whole idea forward, supporting the drawdown of carbon, of regenerating life, of creating more life.

I think one of the most dangerous pronouns in English language is we, because when we say it, who are we talking about? I just did it. Who am I talking about? That’s the proper pronoun because if I’m saying it, I don’t speak on behalf of anybody else. I was taught this by indigenous people.

It’s like in The Big Lebowski, the royal we.

Yeah. It’s a fair question. It wasn’t meant to be impertinent when they questioned that, but just the question was, “Who’s we?” I think, again, about language in the climate movement we’re always, we. We are not a we that’s one of the biggest problems. We’re the opposite of we. We are a splendid fraction. We’re atomized by our culture, by our language, by our activity, by what we’ve done to each other and so forth. The question is very valid. It’s not questioning, but it’s like, what can we do about the fact that we’re not we?

You’re speaking to lacking community.

Exactly, which is we starts with me. It starts with relationships and relationships that are actually helpful, meaningful, kind, compassionate and fair. That’s the only way people could live together on this planet for a long time. Not to say there wasn’t warlike tribes or but overall, there was not. The question always comes up to me is, what can “we” do about this and this and this? I think, actually, it’s the wrong question, because the answer is no idea.

First of all, nobody knows what to do. Let’s be honest. Nobody knows what to do. I certainly don’t, by the way, at least speaking for myself. I think we just have to accept that, that we’re in this extraordinary chronologically change of culture and of the entire planet, unlike anything that’s ever been seen that we know of, except when the meteorite hit 65 million years ago.

Since then, there’s never been anything this rapid in terms of change biologically on earth. We’re terra nova. This is not the terra we always knew. People always knew. The people who lived on. People who adapted to it changed, of course. Going back to the question is like again, what can we do? I say, “What can me do?” That is the most important thing, is to become what we want to see, what we favor, what we believe to be a way of living, being, seeing and relating that is kind to self and other and it connects and doesn’t separate and doesn’t disconnect. I think the thing is that when you read the headlines, you read what’s going on, you go, “We don’t have time.” There’s no time.

I understand that the momentum of what’s going wrong, of the damage, the extraction, the killing, the destroying of earth. Yet, I would say that what’s hidden is regeneration. I don’t mean that in terms of ag. I mean in terms of life wants to regenerate. That’s what life does. We are life. There are tens of thousands of communities and peoples around the earth doing things that are regenerating their land, their forest, their culture, the water, their source of sustenance.

They’re and struggling in many cases. They’re not funded necessarily, but they’re making the connections. That is the connections to this are causing that. Let’s stop that and let’s do something else. We don’t see those people. We don’t hear about them. We hear them once in a while. We can read about them, this tribe, this culture, this people in Bolivia, these people in Missouri. It’s happening, but they’re small by nature and so it makes one feel great, amazing people, thank you. However, there’s no collective growth or size to it.

In some ways, that’s true, but what we’re seeing is an emergence. We’re seeing human beings respond. Yet you don’t see a New York Times as opposed to the Guardian or this or that, or the TV or the whatever source of media you get, you may get it on Instagram, depending on whatever, on social media, but again, it gives a sense of minutia, of smallness, of minority, a tiny of this. That’s because we can’t step back and see it in its entirety. What I would say is that, yeah, the earth is on fire. We are burning. This is a fire and we don’t know when it will go out. We do know that it could just extinguish life on earth.

There’s a lot of small talk about this solution in this and if we only do that by 2100. I’m sorry, people don’t understand the momentum of change that’s occurring right now. Unlike a fire where after it’s burned the forest and then in the next spring, you start to see new growth, you’re seeing new growth in the fire at the same time.

Yes, there’s the Mitch Anderson and Amazon, these extraordinary stories of people pushing back against, in this case, oil companies and exploitation and extraction and the ruining of the waters and the tribal culture. They won. It’s an amazing thing. There are very few things like that where it’s 500,000 hectares, big. It’s a huge victory in Ecuador. Who knows how long that victory will last, by the way, because oil companies are on the march and they’ll corrupt government leaders just as quick as you can?

I would say, rather than thinking in terms of doom and hope, I’m not interested in either one of those, frankly. I’m interested in reality. I believe that we are seeing an extraordinary emergence of understanding in the world. That’s why I say in the largest greatest sense of the word, the only path forward for humanity is regeneration. There is no other path forward.

You may have a small constrained definition of regeneration, but I mean it in the way you ask that question, which is, that means absolutely every person, every human being, every species, every animal, every pollinator, every ecosystem, every river, every stream. I can go on naming. That’s the only way forward. We’re doing it. It’s beggared by the rate of damage and extraction but one thing we have to look at is like, people talk about renewable energy and it’s so great. It’s current solar income and wind turbines and so forth.

Yeah, 7% of electricity is from wind turbines, 3%, after 25 years, is from solar panels. That’s just electricity, that’s not oil. That’s not coal. That’s not gas. In as much as those things produce electricity, okay, but actually steel, concrete, roads, cars, aluminum, plastic, it can’t be made by electricity. You can have all the renewable energy you want, it can’t be made by electricity. It’s made by coal, gas and oil.

I see this. People assuming that if we get enough renewable energy, we’re good to go at 2050, like net zero. The answer of just a resounding no. That’s not true. Net zero what? Does net zero mean no fossil fuels by 2050? The world we live in cannot be run with electricity. We can’t do it. Try to run a freighter from Hong Kong to through the Panama Canal to New York on electricity. It’s not going to happen.

We have to really look, I think, to understand where we are with very realistic eyes, which is we cannot live the way we are. I say we in a global sense, the global economy. That’s tough news but I just want to be honest. There is no data to suggest that if we go 100% renewable that we will get to where we want to go.

When we say something as simple as we need more life on earth, we need more regeneration, then you can’t just keep paving over everything because the moment you pave over everything, you create hardscapes and you kill life. That’s essentially what you do. More thoroughfares and highways, more paved jungles, that’s not going to do it.

For example, EVs. Put aside Musk, EVs, okay, great. Maybe. We have 1.5 billion cars in the world now. By 2050, IEA says we’ll have almost 3 billion. What? Okay, let’s say they’re all EV. So what? They’re driving on roads. How do you make a road? Concrete.

More concrete. That’s right. Parking lots.

How do you make asphalt? You can’t make it with electricity. Somebody somewhere is using coal, gas and oil to make these things that are EVs can drive on. I’m not trying to gain other people’s initiatives. I’m just saying, “Can we step back and look at the whole?” That’s what the climate movement is not doing, in my opinion. It assumes that if we get the net zero and so forth, does that mean we can live the way we’re living right now? Are we just feeding a consumptive society in a different way? It’s, for sure, if we get to net zero that we won’t stop using coal, gas and oil. We won’t.

It’s so astute. We are in a consumerist society. If we’re in a society that is essentially funded by consumption, like that’s how capitalism is built, then if we stop consuming, then suddenly, a lot of things start coming to a screeching halt. We haven’t built an economy that can be more circular. It is a remaking, a re-imagining of how we do things and a commitment on the part of people like myself and anybody reading the show right now to try and reduce everything they can in that way.

Not to say to live without everything. My kid is in baseball now and he tells me, “I want to play catcher, Mom.” We’re looking at this stuff. He’s like, “Okay.” I’m like, “For one, I’m not going to spend $250 because you tell me today that you want to be a catcher and next week you’re going to tell me you want to play a different position. I’m not going to buy all the new gear for you. We’ll go to play it against sports down the road and we’ll find some used gear for you to try out.”

It’s improving the life of something. It’s also acknowledging that I can’t follow every whim and give my child this culture in my home of immediate satisfaction every time he has some desire. There has to be a little bit of a weight. There has to be a reason behind things. We have to think about it. He’s actually at a point now, because I’ve followed this through for the ten years of his life where he prefers used.

He’s actually like, “Mom, that would be great. Can we go check this out and see what they have?” Okay, guess what? They don’t have the chest plate for him in his size, but we’re going to go ahead and do these other parts. If he’s still excited about it, we’ll keep looking or we’ll get on their list and they’ll let us know when they have something in his size.

It’s a different way of thinking about how we consume. It’s thinking about what you actually need versus what you’re told you need. Do you need a new car every five years? Is that going to make your life better? These sorts of questions are the things I ask myself as now I have a Jeep and an electric car. My husband has a big truck that I try to encourage him to almost never drive, but he also needs it if his motorcycle breaks down and he wants to pick up the motorcycle.

It’s not to say we have to stop everything and be like, peel the Band-Aid off and that’s it, you’re done with everything that you want. You’re like, “Maybe it means you don’t have the F-250 anymore.” You think about paring down your possessions in a way that’s mindful of resources and that can save you money with time too. These are all things I think about. I think we need to all be thinking in this way. How do we get as much as we can out of living while also supporting a reduction and over consumption? What we have is over consumption.

Yeah. I used the word we a lot, too. You just used it. It’s not we. It’s actually the privilege, 10% of the world you’re talking about.

It’s me.

Yeah. Me, too. By the way, I haven’t bought an EV yet. I’ve got a fifteen-year-old hybrid that actually Ford gave to me and we drive 4,000 miles a year. The most ecological thing I can do is just keep it going by far, but that doesn’t make me a saint in any way. I just don’t think we understand the impact that we’re having overall and certainly the privileged people. Much of the climate tech, much of the conversation about what needs to be done and know the IEAs and all these different agencies, the World Bank, the Davos, the cops, conferences and the parties. It’s the privilege talking to the privilege. They’ll invite people other cultures to talk just like they did Greta Thunberg for a while.

A young person telling the truth, how novel. Let’s listen. It doesn’t take because the momentum of the privileged society is overwhelming. It’s making the decisions. It’s money, it’s acting out of fear now, trying to get more money in case. It’s the proper community. It’s got the guns, it’s got the food for six months. It goes on and on. It’s going the opposite direction of where we want to go, which is, “My name is this and we haven’t met each other yet.” It’s to be a neighbor, to be somebody who cares about others? It’s also to reduce radically our impact.

Also, to understand that unless we have a climate movement that is really addressing the current existential threat, that’s future because the privilege is always worried about the future existential threat. This could happen. It’s getting warmer, this water, storm, tornadoes, drought, floods. For sure. If we’re not addressing current existential threat for the 6 billion people on this planet who wake up every morning with current existential threat, we’re not serious.

It could be their children, it could be safety, it could be food, it could be education, it could be healthcare, it could be their home. It just goes on and on. It’s quite a list. That is the world we live and occupy. If we’re focused on about, “I got a Tesla and I’m really a good person,” it doesn’t matter if it’s Tesla, whatever, electric care.

Okay, but how much are you driving? Do you share? Do you walk? Do you live in such a way that actually is a light footprint upon the earth or have you just changed the devices? Have you just changed this and changed that? Yeah, I’ve sold my roof. I’ve had it for almost twenty years. I don’t think they’re very efficient compared to what they have now. I have a heat pump, I don’t have any natural gas. I don’t need it all. I cut it off from PG&E. I said, “Take it away, the meter, and everything. I don’t want it.” I’m trying to be self-sufficient where I am, but on a larger scale I live with, in a consumer society in a town that is just infiltrated with privilege, with privileged people.

I think my question to you is how do we get this conversation out of its privileged surroundings and beliefs that dominated so people feel like, “If they’ve done this and this, they’ve done enough. I did something. This is what everybody has to do.” It’s just not true. That’s why I say two things. We really don’t understand how bad things are fucked up. We really don’t. We do not know where we live. We have no idea where we live. I’m talking about where we live, this place, this house, this land, this forest, this whatever, grassland. We have no idea, no understanding of where we live. Those are bad places from once to be the architect architected change.

Changing The Topography Of Living Spaces

Most people have no idea what their land looked like before there was four square walls built onto it. We’ve changed the topography of the spaces that we live in so dramatically from before, there’s really almost no concept of what existed before. My home, an open space preserve. Before it was an open space preserve, it was dairy land. You better believe that they did some clear cutting to make grazable land. The forests that were here dominantly before there was grazable land were mostly redwoods. Now it’s oak and chaparral. We changed it before and we changed it again and again. We paved over paved spots of it and everything else. It does mean that the entire life that exists here has changed too.

More ground squirrels, less other life, maybe more coyote than cougar, but nature will find a balance, too. If we can support the ecology and pave less and try to tread more lightly and steward the land you’re on, as opposed to just replace it all with hardscaping, then we can do things like even create a little bit of a butterfly corridor on our own land and support the natural ecosystem that could exist there. Those things, maybe it’s me-focused and making small changes and not as grand and large as we might hope, but we can make a difference in that way, too.

No question in, in doing that. I plant for pollinators and food and butterflies because I love looking at them. I have a pond and the dragonflies come up pretty soon, about a month or so and I love them around and they’re so beautiful and I can’t believe that they actually have a lifecycle on my little plot of land. However, I do think that these things, the value to them is also to start to teach us about where we live again. When I say we don’t know where we live, I don’t mean to say you’re ignorant and a scientist knows where you live. I don’t mean it that way. It in a very profoundly wondrous way. I don’t want to sound like a doomsayer here because I’m not.

At the same time, I do want to speak truth to power and so forth and call it out and say, “That just won’t work. That’s not working. That is delusional.” You’re just feeding your sense of guilt or, or you’re in denial. That I will do, but I just also want to say that when we start to understand where we live and how ecosystems work, it’s extraordinary. The thing about nature, we say nature-based solutions. I love that one. It means I don’t like it at all.

Anyway, the point being is that for 200,000 years, homo-sapiens and then neanderthals, the homo species has been radically changing the earth radically. There’s 40 different mammals that came across the bridge from Russia, and people extirpated all of them. We can dig them up the bones and stuff forth like that. Obviously, the woolly mammoth is the most famed one, but there’s so many others.

When those animals were extricated, then the whole landscape changed because they were changing the landscape. We know that ruminants that is grazing animals, grazers and so forth are regenerative. We also know that when the wolves are reintroduced to Yellowstone, because they have been extricated, every wolf in the United States had been killed. Every single one. We had to get them from Canada to repopulate Yellowstone.

The whole ecosystem changed because once the rules are there, well that changed the whole relationship between elk and wolves because the elk could just sit around and stay there and eat whatever they wanted. They had to move and get out of there and be much more alert and not breed as much and so forth. The rivers came back and the beavers came back because the riversides weren’t overgrazed. All sorts of things.

This has been going on for 200,000 years is what I’m trying to say. Animals have changed nature. Nature changed people. The idea that somehow we can restore nature, yes, we can, but the idea that we and nature somehow evolves separately, no. The whole world, every single parcel and acre of land, except maybe glaciers, Greenland, were modified by us and their change, modified who we were, where we ate, how we lived, our cultures. Could we actually be in equatorial regions, could we not be based on hunting, but on the three sisters which came out of Incas.

That sense of difference is really a false narrative. When we’re restoring our ecosystems, whether it be just around our yard or just around the open space, it’s next adjoining to us and so forth to be part of restoration, we are also part of an evolutionary process going on for 200,000 years since we walked the earth. It’s a wonderful thing, but nature is absolutely created by us and we are created by nature. Of course, we have different fingernails and stuff. I’m not saying we’re distinct, I’m just saying the word inseparable. That inseparability is something to wake up to.

What I’m trying to do in the book Carbon: The Book of Life is to start to reintroduce or introduce people to, I guess, their family. Maybe I don’t use that word in the book, but your family of living creatures, including plants. There’s this beautiful new coming together of Western science and indigenous ways of ecological knowledge and their combining respectfully of each other as opposed to being downplayed. Science was so arrogant about what other people knew and did in practice. That is being washed away. Out of that is emerging a new understanding. That understanding is, we don’t know. It’s not the empiricism, finality and arrogance of Western science. It’s a mystery.

These scientists are entering in with that understanding, awareness and respect. I mentioned in about where we live, that a scientist studied the roots of a single grain of rye and counted them an electron microscope. There are 14 million roots, 4 million root hairs. Put those aside, 10 million roots on single kernel of rye. Those roots are connected to mycelia. The roots of talking to the mycelia, the mycelia talk to them, they’re transacting, “Here, I got some sugar. What do you need? Nitrogen,” whatever. That’s like a kernel of rye.

I’m looking outside my window. There are redwood trees here. How many are there? Who knows? It is communication. We know mycelia communicate to each other and to plants. Plants are communicating that way. This isn’t a mechanistic process. It’s not chemistry. It is chemistry involved. This isn’t what we think of something that’s inert. This is something that’s alive.

We know mycelia have clicking sounds that is and the packets of them and they arrange them and they’re transferring nutrients in two different directions at the same time. In these tiny little 4 or 5 Celtic vesicles and that there’s more life underneath the soil than there’s above. All of earth, there’s more below. We talk about the earth, we actually don’t know what we’re talking about.

How Life Exists Within A Single Cell

Paul, I think this brings us to the last phase of the conversation I was really hopeful of having, which really is about how life exists within a single cell. I’ve heard you describe this, but if we think about all life and really engaging with it in a new way, not separating ourselves from nature, of being part and parcel of the same thing, this interconnected web of life. The cell itself, in a way, is a microcosm of all life on earth. If you take a single cell and all of its parts on their own, they’re not really alive. I’ve heard you talk about this. I would love for you to connect that thought to this real magic that is life and that is carbon.

It goes down to what is life, really and the estimated 10 trillion atoms. It’s chemistry because they’re not all there by themselves combining. It’s just a big chemical lab. It’s like that many molecules that a cell are busy. They have the mitochondria, which are like almost a second cell within the cell.

They look like bacteria, for all intents and purposes. They look like they’re their own thing.

They got into cell that became eukaryotic cells, as they’re called. The technically inside the cell is chemistry. The cell as a whole is alive. Science cannot explain how that’s true. You can say, “The whole cell is alive.” That’s fine. Without the sensors, without being held in a sense by that barrier of the cell, if we are just analyzing what’s inside the cell, it’s not a lot. In that sense, we have profound respect.

We don’t know where our life comes from. We see it a lot, don’t get me wrong. Cells love to talk and they have sensors. When I say love to talk I’m anthropomorphizing it, but I mean, they do communicate. That communication actually shows like to be together too. They grow things and make things all of which is life on earth.

Some scientists will push back against me to say that and some don’t, but I don’t really care one way or the other whether they do. That’s the miracle. We breathe it. We look how it works. We’re talking. It’s extraordinary but it’s true for every single thing that’s out there. Everything that’s underneath, above, around, beyond and so forth. The understanding that we have had up to now, particularly in Western cultures of the living world, to me, has been very truncated, very mechanistic, very Adamistic, very reductionist. Even though there’s 1 million names for all different things, it doesn’t matter. Naming isn’t the same.

I think we’re at that threshold. Obviously the world can’t go on the way it’s going to go. That’s obvious. The question is, what is life going to do? We are life, what are we going to do? I don’t have the answers. I don’t have like, “You can do this and this.” I think most people who are reading this are literate. They know what to do.

Don’t try to do everything at once. You can’t do it. Just take one step at a time, and then connect. Connect the family, neighbor friends, connect the place, connect the pollinators. I was up early this morning and it was before dawn. I was looking at the plant I planted years ago for butterflies. There were all these hummingbirds. They got out early. They only live for two years. They’re just so beautiful

Understand, just to see that just beautiful interconnection, again, a word I’m overusing, really. The inseparability of life and its interdependence. There’s a difference between complicated and complexity. Complexity is living systems, complex adaptive systems. Complicated means you can separate and fix things. Very complicated. A car is very complicated. This computer is very complicated. We’ve been thinking about the world like we’re going to fix it. It’s complicated where we are, but we can fix it. We can do this and this instead of actually using our right brain and going, “Oh my gosh.” It’s like one thing and we are part of that one thing or one stream of life.

Carbon is a flow. It’s not a thing. That’s just like, the cell 1.2 a trillion carbon molecules, what are they doing in there? They’re part of other and they’re functioning, they’re doing things. They retain energy and memory carbon chains. Not no other element does that. Our Carbon: The Book of Life is saying, “Take a look. Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know. Here’s what’s possible.”

To take that with you, because it changes you, and then when you read the morning news and go, “Who said that? Are they dumber than stick and mud? They are. Are they selfish? Are they greedy? Are they deluded? Are they heartless?” Not at core, but are they acting that way?” That’s our family. It’s always about who we are going to be and who we can be is just taught to us every millisecond by what we call life.

Resounding themes through this book that I find were really inspiring, also, even though I don’t know that you would call yourself hopeful because the word hope, it’s like, no, you want to know what you can do, like get to work on it. I think a call to stop thinking in a really reductionist way. A call to think in a collaborative framework, to consider your spot among the people in your community, how you fit with nature and ultimately, to get you thinking differently.

Some Regenerative Solutions From ‘Carbon’

I also will point to a few of the solutions that you talk about in the book, like in invent wood, which I was thrilled to learn about the fact that we’re creating some technologies to build new buildings to replace things like steel, which could ultimately mean that we have more regenerative materials that are grasped.

We’re working with nature, like in the case of bamboo, which can be then repurposed to create tools like invent wood that can replace steel and that are far less costly and so far as energy and fossil fuels and all these other things to build so that we can create solutions that make sense and support populations as opposed to destroy our ability to continue living on this beautiful planet.

I’m not a big fan of climate tech. I’m a big fan though of inventors and geniuses who create technologies that actually create more life. That’s really what it’s all about. The generation is like, “Do we want to destroy more life, inadvertently, unintentionally, but actually, or do we want to engage in activities and technologies that create more life on earth?” To me, the answer is obvious. There is no other way forward than to do that. Yes, there are technologies, so I’m not anti-tech at all, but they have to be brilliant, ingenious technologies like invent wood. They can replace steel and aluminum completely.

They’re truly inspiring.

There are these geniuses out there that are really doing some wonderful things. I’ll talk about that more in the next book, too. I want to say humanity is incredible and it’s brilliant. It’s covered over by the wave of weed hate and delusion from a capitalist society. The fear it creates then makes people want more and more money to be safe and secure.

It causes us to separate and then to want to hoard, essentially. They hoard money, they hoard resources, they hoard homes and places. Suddenly, you have companies buying up all the apartments in an area driving up prices.

I know. It’s greed.

How do we get there? I don’t know. I don’t use the word hope. That’s true. I feel like I don’t want to be hopeful. I want to be proactive. I want to be courageous if I can. Where I sit and the books about that and also what I read and do in the forthcoming books is about the extraordinary quality of human beings.

I love where research is headed too, going away from these, “I have the only answer.” There’s one truth to listening to different perspectives and ultimately gaining knowledge from a variety of angles, acknowledging that there is no singular truth and that what we’ve learned tomorrow changes what was true yesterday.

I don’t know if we talked about this before, but Zoe Schlanger is a writer who wrote a book called The Light Eaters, which is about plants. That’s what they eat. She said that after spending eight years researching this book and talking to the top botanists who didn’t want to go on the record as saying this, but they certainly spoke to her about it and saying the only way we can understand a plant is that the total plant is a brain.

When you look at all the things every plant can do, we have no other word for it, for its functionality. The idea of the brain has to have two lobes and neurons and all that stuff is true for a human being. In terms of what the plants can do in terms of their 20 senses, we have 5, they have 15 more than we don’t they learn to adapt. They can’t move around. That botanist thing, that’s the only thing that comes close to describing the functionality, capability, intelligence and the communicative abilities of plants is inside of its brain. That’s where we live, too, with all those beautiful plants.

We barely understand insects.

I say to people, “If you want to have a good time at night, get an ultraviolet flashlight and go outside and then look for the moss and look at it all lit up brightly. It’s like there’s a light show.

It’s amazing what you’ll see. I loved your book, not surprisingly, and I will just say this is recommended reading for anybody that wants to consider a closer connection to nature. I think it’s also a spiritual journey because when you really start to dive into this topic of life, it’s like you can’t approach it with the same childlike wonder without wondering how did this come to be in the first place? How did carbon become the root of life? How can there exist trillions of these molecules within a single cell?

How is it possible that we are organized to be the beings that we are and the plant that’s in the soil that can’t move somehow knows how to extricate the nutrients it needs to thrive from that environment, from rainy season to drought, to expel seeds that might not germinate for a generation. It’s incredible wisdom that we are yet to even come close to understanding.

It’s a beautiful privilege to be alive.

It is a beautiful privilege to be alive.

Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

Thank you so much for joining me. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I will read your book again, continue dog-earing it. For those that have read this interview and also followed the earlier journey, I went ahead and did about a 30-minute book review of Carbon and offered some quotes and some perspectives from that. I’ll encourage people to go and take a sneak peek at that and pick up a copy so that they can follow along. I can’t wait for our paths to cross again and I hope I get to shake your hand in the near future.

Thank you so much. Yeah, I really appreciate that. Tell your son I was a shortstop.

He is wanting to play catcher now, so we’ll see how that goes.

That’s difficult. That’s so hard. The two positions have the most pressure is pitchers and catcher. If you’re shortstop, you just even make it or miss.

Thank you so much, Paul. I’ll be sure to share that with him.

Thank you so much.

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Important Links

• Paul Hawken
• The Ecology of Commerce, Blessed Unrest
• Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation
• Carbon: The Book of Life
• Drawdown
• Weeds
• Braiding Sweetgrass
• The Light Eaters
• Why Paul Hawken’s Carbon: The Book of Life Is Essential Reading for Climate Advocates
• First Interview with Paul Hawken – Sept. 2021: Regeneration: Ending The Climate Crisis In One Generation  
• Agroecology: From Annual to Perennial Crop Farming | Tim Crews, PhD | The Lands Institute