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?️ About This Episode:
In this episode of Care More, Be Better, Corinna Bellizzi dives deep into Carbon: The Book of Life, the latest work by renowned environmentalist Paul Hawken, a 6-time NYT bestselling author. As we prepare for Paul’s upcoming interview, Corinna explores the book’s key themes, including the role of carbon in sustaining life, the need for regenerative agriculture, and the intersection of commerce, cooperation, and climate solutions.

? Key Topics Covered:
✔️ The wisdom behind Paul Hawken’s Regeneration and how it led to Carbon
✔️ Why carbon is not the enemy—it’s the foundation of life
✔️ How industrial agriculture is harming our planet and what we can do about it
✔️ The revolutionary potential of bamboo-based building materials
✔️ The importance of fungi in soil health and carbon sequestration
✔️ Why collaboration and cooperation—not competition—are key to solving the climate crisis

? Get Your Copy of Carbon: The Book of Life
Pre-order now: https://amzn.to/4kQi9xL

? More Resources:
? Watch my previous interview with Paul Hawken: https://caremorebebetter.com/regeneration-ending-the-climate-crisis-in-one-generation-with-paul-hawken-5-time-best-selling-author-and-environmentalist
?️ Listen to my 11-episode deep dive into Regeneration: https://caremorebebetter.com/?s=regeneration+part

? Join the Conversation:
Have a question for Paul Hawken? Drop it in the comments or email me at hello@caremorebebetter.com—I might ask him in our upcoming interview!

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If you love what we do, please like, subscribe, and share this episode. Let’s spread the word about regeneration and sustainable solutions!

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? LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/caremorebebetter
https://linkedin.com/in/cbellizzi

Why Paul Hawken’s Carbon: The Book of Life is Essential Reading for Climate Advocates

This week I want to invite you on a journey to dive back into content that I created with Paul Hawken on regeneration, ending the climate crisis in one generation, as we prepare for the launch of his new book on Tuesday, March 18th.

And that book is carbon the book of life. Now I had the opportunity to reconnect with Paul today. We’re going to be recording on, I believe. March 24th, which means I’ve got some time to even further dog ear the copies of my copy of this book and really think about the conversation I want to lay before us.

But as we prepare for this interview, I want to encourage everyone to go out and pre order carbon and I’m going to lay the case for that for you today. First I want to dive into the last bit of regeneration and then I’m going to highlight a few things that really stood out to me in this new work.

Carbon, the book of life. I think, you know, I’m a fan. I consider Paul also to be a friend. I have felt transformed through his work. It is part of what led me to add the word regeneration to the byline for this show, care more, be better, social impact, sustainability, and regeneration. Now, um, that’s revealed in my interview with him from September 2021.

So first let’s dive into the last part of regeneration, which I have my copy here. Um, you can go and pick this up wherever you love to buy books. It’s also available as an audio book and the audio book version it’s read by many of the contributors to this book.

And, if you enjoy audio books, I encourage you to check it out that way. But during my interview with him, He said something that stood out to me first, he said that he had come to a realization that in each of the books that he writes, um, there’s a moment where he realized that the end of that book portended the arrival of the next book or that it kind of hinted at what that topic would be or what the continuing conversation would be.

So I wanted to read to you the last word. Um, he says one more thing at the very end of regeneration on page 234.

Now, there’s a reason that I went through over the course of the following 10 weeks of interviewing Paul Hawken and went section by section within the book and gave you my download.

Pulled out quotes from it. Each of those episodes ranged from basically 15 to 30 minutes. I usually took six or seven pages of notes before I recorded. So it really is a primer on everything regeneration. So I’ll link that with our show notes for this episode. I definitely want you to go and check those out.

And frankly, it will be the ultimate preparation for Carbon. The other thing that Paul said at the close of my last interview with him in September of 2021 is that there was something about falling in love. I don’t mean falling in love with a person, but falling in love with an idea or with life itself.

I connected the idea of the last paragraph that I just read you about carbon and how we should be looking at it and thought… I wonder if his next book is about falling in love with carbon. I finished Carbon, the Book of Life yesterday. And I have to say that I think that’s what it is, in a way.

It’s a love letter to carbon because carbon is this incredible molecule that is intensely versatile. They can be used in a number of ways. That seems to be one of the most unlikely. molecules in a way. And yet this element is the thing on which all life is centered. It is the thing on which life is built.

There are other elements that are far more abundant in our atmosphere. Um, but life isn’t based on them. We don’t have hydrogen based on them. beings. We have carbon-based beings, and there’s nowhere in the universe that we’ve yet found another form of life. It does appear that carbon is essential. And so, um, there are a few things throughout this book that got me thinking.

I want to pull a few quotes and then, I’ll just share my thoughts. This is an invitation to pick up this book. The audiobook will be released on the 18th. It is now the 13th, so I haven’t had a chance to check that out yet. This is from page 4 of Carbon.

And frankly, I see no stronger representation of this than our present administration.

With the closing of national parks, with the agreements to, increase logging on what was national forest land, um, the loosening of environmental controls, all to extract value, all to be more insular, to be more nationalistic, to take less resources from other areas where they might be more sustainably sourced, and to just look to ourselves.

Now, logging, clear cutting. Is not the path to regeneration, is not the path to biodiversity, is not the path to creating more life on earth. And what we’ve learned through studying regeneration is that more life means bringing more carbon home. More bugs, more biodiversity, more birds. All of that, a thriving ecosystem, that brings more carbon home.

If we have more of it in the atmosphere, we dissolve more of it in our seas. Our seas become a sink for carbon. Roughly 50 percent of the carbon that is brought home to Earth is absorbed by the motion of our waves in our seas. And um, that increases the acidity of our oceans. And with that, what happens?

Well, mollusks in their larval state are less able to build shells. We’ve had massive species die off on land, namely in the insect animal kingdom, as well as in the sea. Um, estimates are that anywhere close to perhaps even 70 percent of all, all, uh, species of bugs that existed when I was growing up, maybe gone by now.

Um, Paul and I have talked about this. You’ll hear him speak about this or you’ll read it in his book that, you know, you used to drive through farmland and have to pull over at night to get the bugs off of your lights, your headlights, because you suddenly wouldn’t be able to see very far. Because guess what?

The bugs, they were just, their crushed bodies were all over your headlights, all over your windshields. I remember driving down the I 5 corridor and experiencing something of the same. When I would go down to Bakersfield from the Cupertino area, or from Oregon even, when I lived in Southern Oregon. From Southern Oregon all the way to Bakersfield.

And we would have to stop at gas stations, sometimes more frequently than to fuel up, just to get the bugs off the windscreen. They’re gone now. Most of them. In fact, it’s quite sad now on page seven. So again, early in the book. He introduces another idea and This is the idea of cooperation and collaboration and this is a theme that runs throughout the book So he specifically attributes this to the evolutionary biologist, Peter Kropotkin, who noted early in the last century, “cooperation and collaboration are far more effective than competition when the environment is changing and resources are scarce.” (Carbon: The Book of Life, p. 7)

Now, I think about this when resources are scarce, you could argue that we have abundance. We definitely have an abundance of food in America. Our waistlines are expanding much of the Western world. That’s the case. Metabolic syndrome is a massive issue. I myself am hypothyroid, so I have to really take care of the foods that I put into my body.

And, as I think about this particular quote, I am reminded of another fact. If all people on Earth lived like Americans do, we would need five or six Earths. This automatically means that we are living in a scarcity situation. We need to think about how we’re utilizing the resources around us, and we need to increase our collaboration and cooperation.

Some are arguing that we are living in a post capitalist world now, and I would agree with that. I think that we’ve stress tested capitalism and we’re seeing its weak edges. We’ve essentially proven that living in a capitalistic society, both keeps people in lower classes down and also puts forth ideas of white supremacy or supremacy culture in general, creates billionaire classes that don’t live by the rules that essentially take from all around them that are like cancer. We also should know by now that capitalism creates climate change, increases the rapidity of global warming. We are in a warming phase, but we are seeing unprecedented warming at an unprecedented pace, which means species don’t have time to adapt and they die off. The pollution that we introduce to the atmosphere, all of these things create more problems.

So this idea of collaboration and cooperation, it’s almost like a remaking of how we think about things. A reciprocal nature of life. It’s thinking about how life exists with symbiotic relationships between species like the mycelium or mushrooms that are living within the soil that help transport nutrients to the roots of plants, that help store water within the soil, that increase this living matrix that is the soil on earth.

It supports the drawdown of CO2 from the atmosphere into the soil so we can have that really rich abundant hummus of life in the soil. Life affirming that ultimately can create plants that are more nutritious that we can consume that creates a symbiotic relationship between the lifeforms living on it.

This is all collaboration. This is all cooperation. It’s not capitalism. There is commerce to it. There’s exchange of nutrients. There is a way of living together, a symbiotic way of living together. Anyway, it’s a beautiful idea, and I had not known about Peter Kropotkin before that moment. So I will be looking more into his work now.

So think back to when you were in school. Did we talk much about cooperation or collaboration? Probably not. So this is a quote from page 30 in Carbon, and I want you to think back to perhaps when you were in school as a school child.

He’s not wrong. We live in the sterile environment that we have created, and we live in the natural world. And the fact that we live less in the natural world is part of what has created challenges for humanity. Disconnection between people, disconnection with our environment. We don’t really know the land we live on. We don’t feel a connection to place the same way that we used to. It’s a beautiful thought, a beautiful idea.

And it just exemplifies this whole concept that we are part of a living system. We are part of this together.

As we further the journey through this book, you go through different kind of chapters. Um, there are ways of, of thinking about carbon. The first chapter, is specifically on carbon and talking about what makes it a unique element. Then how elements come together. Firmament, cellmates, I just read you a piece from cellmates.

Next is chapter five, eating starlight, sugar salad, bucky and bing, green beans. There’s a lot of prose and poetry in this. At any rate, so in eating starlight, this is on page 52. “Food and taste are no longer about the flow of carbon. They are about the flow of money.” Think about that just for a moment. “Food and taste are no longer about the flow of carbon. They are about the flow of money.”

So, I work in the natural channel. I create products that are in the supplement space, products to be sold to consumers. And, I have long felt that there are many products on the market today that are frankly useless.

You don’t need to build a better mousetrap to absorb nutrients from food. You need to eat better food. But guess what? Eating better food is hard for people because our lifestyles are consistently on the go. So what do we do? We create supplements. the pill that’s supposed to mimic the things that you get from the natural food that you would eat, but everything we put in those pills is not going to change the, the negative, um, the negatives that you get from eating things that are, you know, ultra-processed foods, things that are made into delectable treats, but that don’t contain any of the raw nutrients that were in that food in nature. Essentially, we’ve denatured nutrition. We’ve created food-like products. And sure, they’re edible, but they don’t necessarily sustain you the same way. You’re more likely to overeat. And they might be high in salt and other things that stimulate the appetite and are flavor pleasers.

Mouthfeel is something that scientists work to perfect and all of these things, um, come with a price tag and you can charge more for them or you can create things that are shelf stable and can sit on a shelf in a warehouse for a year or more. What food can you do that with that’s fully natural? Oh, grains and seeds that you could plant in a subsequent year, but really, you know, a piece of fruit, a vegetable, absolutely not.

So we need to think about that. If we go to whole real foods, we can really improve our access to health and our connection to the natural world.

There’s, Some solutions that are posed throughout this book that I didn’t see in regeneration. Novel technologies that are coming about that can help solve some of the problems we face today. Like for example, building, building materials are increasingly expensive. You know, we’re having a trade war now over steel.

So what happens with steel prices? What happens with construction costs? All of these things are going to impact, rebuilding things like the, all the buildings lost to wildfire in Southern California. Or anytime you want to build a new space for people to live, create zero waste cities. Yeah. You know, it would be nice to be able to do this with natural materials, but so often.

They’re out of reach and too expensive. Wood is very expensive right now. So, there’s this novel technology called Inventwood, which was created by this gentleman, Bing. And this is from a chapter called Bucky and Bing. Bing is what this gentleman goes by. He is of Chinese ancestry. And he was a young genius.

He is an incredible individual who looked at life differently and could see that nanotechnology might be applied to the cellulose and fiber world. And so he created Inventwood. His given name is Liang Bing Hu. He is from the Hubei province in China.

And he was identified to be gifted young and placed in university at 15. By the time he was 20, he had his PhD goes to show at any rate, he created this really great technology that would enable you to use cellulose fibers in such a way. That they would be much like the nanotubes of nanotechnology and could, basically capitalize on the properties of, the cellulose, the strength of cellulose to create something that was lighter, more durable, fire resistant, and bug resistant, and could be used as building material to replace steel and even be used in the way that wood is.

So, Really incredible. It can be made from bamboo, which is a grass, which grows just like any, perennial grass and can be continually harvested. So the point in the book that comes up that I think is really amazing is, and this is a quote, I’m going to start the sentence, um, from page 83.

And not only that, but the reliance on steel on steel trade. So that’s a really incredible technology that is solvable coming from the material science space.

But what’s more is that Bing is actually working to improve upon this even further. He’s investigating. Whether this nanofiber material from cellulose could be used to create batteries that are rechargeable. So this is something that looks to be on the horizon. And this I’m going to just quote, quote directly.

So, the need to mine for things that go into your lithium ion batteries and your rechargeable cars and cell phones and more could come from an entirely different source.

One that doesn’t require rare earth minerals, cobalt. getting rid of permafrost and just to get at rare earth minerals. Let’s see, let’s, let’s warm the planet further. That sounds like a really good idea. The book goes on to talk about things like fungi and the interconnected nature of our natural world from the soil perspective.

I’ve done a lot of work on this podcast about regenerative agriculture, so I’m not going to go deeply into this, but I do want for people to understand Fungi are different. I mean, they’re a part of the animal kingdom. Um, they’re not a plant. They can live in anaerobic conditions. They don’t need oxygen.

They just need sugar. So they get that sugar from the plants that are decomposing. They support the build of really healthy soil. They support the decomposition of the decaying matter. And they’re really incredible. And I love the way that Paul put this. This is on page 104 in the chapter called KINDOM.

So let’s keep the fungi world happy. Yeah. This intricate web of life that is supported by fungi, just understanding that there is commerce. Between the fungus and the plant the fungus that live in our soils enable the soil to retain moisture and able the soil to, support a true living matrix of bugs and everything else so that we can transmit nutrients from one area of the soil to another.

I mean, the fungus actually acts as almost like a highway for these nutrients. From, from one area to another and, without that fungus, that interconnected matrix in the soil nothing’s as healthy and certainly not the plants that we’re growing. So something to consider as we look at this whole picture.

It’s a comment on if we do continue to support. our traditional conventional agriculture where we, you know, till all the soil and have heavy machinery on that soil and compact all of it down and essentially like almost creates a really thick, hard, compacted area that’s hard for the roots to go through unless you till.

So you have to keep tilling. It’s like this self perpetuating prophecy. You then have to also, you know, Cover it in all sorts of NPK fertilizers so that the plants can grow because guess what their roots can’t go deep and find other nutrients because you’ve compacted the soil so much below that first few inches and you’ve killed the living matrix of the soil.

There aren’t a bunch of. Healthy bugs that are there to create that environment for all of the nutrients that’s needed. The matrix of the mycelium aren’t there to bring nutrients from one area of the soil to another or one plant to another. The moisture that is present in a really rich soil is devoid.

Water runs off the surface as opposed to soaks in. The roots don’t go as deep and the roots act like channels for water to go deeper. So all of those challenges will exist if we continue conventional agriculture the way we have. So here’s a quote from page 111.

That’s the direction we’re heading if we don’t move towards purely regenerative methods of farming. So this is why we need to care. Obviously could go on and on about this book, but I think the core message as it comes to soil is we need to reduce our, reliance on inputs like pesticides and fertilizers because We are going to damage and further recede life on Earth if we continue down that road, you know The fact that I used to drive down to Southern California and have to pull into a gas station before it was time to fill up To clean my windshield that was because there was so much life present on earth And now a lot of that land is just silent quiet It’s dead.

The soil has become dust that blows away in the wind and what can live on dust? Not much and nothing without inputs like fertilizers. There’s one comment on page 138 about the most damaging insecticide and I want to talk about it because it’s what’s killing off our pollinators and particular bees.

“The most damaging insecticide used on farms today are neonicotinoids, a class of pesticide invented to replace the morbid toxicity of other pesticides. It binds to insects nerve cells causing paralysis and death.” (Carbon: The Book of Life, p. 138)

These types of pesticides were purported to be safer for humans, right? Because they They cause insects to die, but they don’t seem to harm our health, at least not in a way that we can obviously measure.

Um, now it does harm our health if we no longer have food pollinated by something like bees and access to honey plummets, among other things. Um, you know, we’re, I’m remembering a day when, um, This is probably summers around 2008 or nine, possibly even into 11 or 12, because I think I was living in my house in Scotts Valley when we were getting some of these warnings, but we had brown apple moth infestations.

And so. These brown apple moths would, uh, live in our oak forest, and there’s a lot of oak forests here, but they’re considered a pest, and so we got warnings in the mail that low flying aircraft was going to be dispersing these, insecticides to take care of this brown apple moth infestation.

And I kept thinking, this is like the worst idea ever, but having no ability to change it. Right. Um, and I stand by that sense. You know, I would remember going, on trail rides with my horse and through the oak leaves, seeing the flutter of wings from these brown apple moths and not understanding why we would need to purely eliminate them.

I’m guessing it had something to do with the fact that Martinelli’s is close here on the central coast of California and brown apple moths would create a problem for their crops. But my thinking is that we’ve got to find better ways. I’m sure there would be a better way. Page 166. The conventional food industry.

This is 166 to 167. It’s a longer quote, but it’s really related to everything that we do in the food space. And, I think encapsulates a lot of why I care about this book so much.

“The conventional food industry presumes that industrial agriculture is here to stay, soon to be joined by vertical farms, lab grown chicken, and vat cultured meat. Artificial initiatives will move the food system further away from the living system of the soil toward an ever greater concentration of production. Corporate food production envisions farms without farmers overriding life giving agricultural techniques because regenerative land based methods do not lend themselves to corporate scale profits.” (Carbon: The Book of Life, pp. 166 – 167)

Are you an anti capitalist yet? I mean, it really gets you thinking, right? Like what are. The tenets we want to uphold for our society. How do we build a healthier society? And if you’re one of those individuals who bought into this whole concept of make America healthy again, this is the stuff you should care about.

Regenerative agriculture. Real, whole foods. Building systems that support farmers, not take away their funding so that they can explore these avenues. And that is frankly what we’ve done. The Trump administration has taken away funding from a lot of these farms that are working to employ new methods of regenerative agriculture.

He goes on, this is again on page 167.

“Restorative farming techniques and practices have numerous designations. Agroecology, ecological, organic, biodynamic, and regenerative encompass most methods. These farming technologies employ the breadth of plant, soil, entomological, fungal relationships, and specific landscapes. These techniques are more science based than industrial methods. Sophisticated, biological, non toxic ingredients are employed that break down without harm. There are farming techniques that culture the soil’s innate microbial population and small vats, liquid ferments that might be called soil kefir, which are then returned to the soil. The land tells the farmer what it wants.” (Carbon: The Book of Life, p. 167)

And when the land tells the farmer what it wants, guess what? The farmer can give it to them. So with that, I want to encourage everyone here to pick up a copy of Carbon. It is 194 pages before the acknowledgements. And what I’ll tell you is that while it is nonfiction, because of Paul’s prose and the stories he tells throughout, it is Really readable.

And, um, you know, I got through it as a working mom in a week with, you know, 15 20 minutes here and there to read it. I read the bulk of it actually last night. So I got from about page 90 to 194 in just a few hours. And I’m a slow reader. I like to read slow because I like to digest what I’m reading and think about it as I go.

And this book was no exception to that rule. Um, it’s really great. So I want to close with Paul’s last paragraph from the last chapter. And this chapter he closes with is called Conscious.

“Where you are is where you are most effective. The power to act does not lie elsewhere. Fundamental human rights and needs must be met. Everyone on earth comes first. There is no second. Revive, honor, and nourish the wild and bountiful lives that forever astonish us with their splendor and grace. The movement to restore life on earth is not a repair job. It is transformative, an entirely new experience of self, the visceral awareness that our life is coincident with every being on the planet. Our intention and reward are the same to experience and express the irrevocable connection to all beings. It is our only way forward.”

In short, regeneration. It’s our only way forward. We need to maximize life. So carbon, the book of life out March 18th, wherever books are sold. You can pick up your copy and pre order it on, uh, paulhawken.com. I will include links with show notes as well as to my past interviews with Paul Hawken and also, the 10 episode series that I did on regeneration. Now, I also encourage you, if you have a specific question that you’d like me to ask, Paul, send it on to me, send me an email note or make a comment wherever you’re picking up this podcast. You can make a comment on Spotify. You can make a comment on YouTube and you can send me an email directly to hello at care more, be better. com. With that, I want to thank you for your time today and really encourage you to get out there and do what you can to support. more life on earth. Thank you.

RESOURCES:

• Carbon: The Book of Life by Paul Hawken
• Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis In One Generation by Paul Hawken
• INTERVIEW WITH PAUL HAWKEN – Sept. 2021: Regeneration: Ending The Climate Crisis In One Generation with Paul Hawken, 5 Time Best-selling Author and Environmentalist

11 Part Series on Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis In One Generation

• Regeneration Part 1: Podcast Updates And Regenerating Our Oceans
• Regeneration Part 2: Forests And Their Role In Climate Change
• Regeneration Part 3: Wild Things and Wilding, A Review of Paul Hawken’s Book on Ending The Climate Crisis in One Generation
• Regeneration Part 4: A Review of The Climate Activist Portal – Nexus – on Regeneration.org with Anca Novacovici, Tia Walden, Julie Lokun and Nicole Davis
• Regeneration Part 5: Land, Regenerative Agriculture and Soil Restoration To Reverse Global Warming
• Regeneration Part 6: People, Indigeneity and Our Role In Reversing Global Warming
• Regeneration Part 7: Cities, Green Architecture, The Living Building Challenge and Getting To Net Positive
• Regeneration Part 8: Food, The Need for Localization and Decommodification To End The Climate Crisis
• Regeneration Part 9: Energy Use, Renewal and Storage As We Transition Away from Fossil Fuels and Electrify Everything
• Regeneration Part 10: Solving The Climate Crisis By Regenerating Industries
• Regeneration Part 11: The Role of Action + Connection In Reversing Global Warming