Burning oil, gas, and coal — literal fossil fuels, made from the compressed remains of ancient plants and plankton — has released carbon into Earth’s atmosphere, where it traps heat and alters the climate. That process has caused massive destruction and loss of life, and it will continue to do so. As a result, carbon came to be seen as something to “fight,” “combat,” and “capture.”
Paul Hawken, the author of the new book Carbon: The Book of Life, argues that the climate movement is thinking about its work, and messaging, all wrong. “Those who call carbon a pollutant might want to lay down their word processor,” Hawken writes. Carbon, he notes, is after all the building block of life, the animating force behind trees, rhinos, eyelashes, hormones, bamboo, and so much more. Without it, Earth would just be a lonely, dead rock. So much for decarbonizing.
Hawken has come to believe that treating carbon as something to tackle, liquefy, and pump into geological formations not only reflects the same mindset that caused climate change in the first place, but also further alienates people from the living world. There is no “climate crisis,” he argues, but a crisis of human thinking and behavior that’s degrading the soil, wiping out entire species, and changing the weather faster than people can adapt. “From a planetary view,” he writes in Carbon, “the warming atmosphere is a response, an adjustment, a teaching.”
The book records a shift in his thinking. In 2017, Hawken published Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, a book that ranked 100 climate solutions by how much they could reduce carbon emissions, from refrigerant leaks to food waste. The nonprofit Project Drawdown, which he launched, continues to implement these kinds of fixes around the world. But now, Hawken is forgoing straightforward metrics to focus on what he sees as a deeper cultural problem. “The living world is a complex interactive system and doesn’t lend itself to simple solutions,” he said.
The new book frames carbon as a flow — a cycle that moves through the atmosphere, oceans, soil, with the element absorbed by growing plants and exhaled in every animal breath. Hawken’s book is a lesson in what’s sometimes called “unlearning,” or letting go of old assumptions, like the idea that nature is something to fix or control. The book explores ways to repair a broken relationship with the natural world, drawing inspiration from Indigenous cultures and new scientific discoveries. Hawken marvels at how much remains unknown about carbon, which he dubs “the most mysterious element of all.”
The book’s poetic language offers a stark contrast to the warlike terms climate advocates tend to use to describe carbon. Hawken argues that the typical metaphors are not only inaccurate — how exactly do you battle an element? — but also provide fuel for right-wing narratives that carbon has been unfairly demonized. Last week, E&E News reported that the Trump administration is planning a federal report making the case that a warming world would be a good thing, a pretext for weakening climate regulations.
“Carbon dioxide is not an evil gas,” David Legates, a former Trump official, said in a recent video put out by the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank. “Rather, it’s a gas beneficial to life on Earth. It’ll increase temperatures slightly, and warmer temperatures are certainly better than colder temperatures.”
Hawken wants a broad shift in how people talk about the natural world, though, not just a rethinking of the climate movement’s metaphors. He points to how financial institutions increasingly refer to nature as a commodity. In January, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, declared “natural capital” an investment priority. In February, Goldman Sachs launched a “biodiversity bond fund” turning ecosystems into investment products. The jargon used in scientific reports and global climate conferences also creates a sense of detachment that dulls the living things it refers to. Hawken describes the word “biodiversity” as “a bloodless term” and “carbon neutrality” as an absurd “biophysical impossibility.”
“We are numbed by the science, puzzled by jargon, paralyzed by predictions, confused about what actions to take, stressed as we scramble to care for our family, or simply impoverished, overworked, and tired,” Hawken writes. “Most of humanity doesn’t talk about climate change because we do not know what to say.”
Even plainspoken terms like “nature” are suspect, in Hawken’s view: The concept only seems to exist to mark a separation between humans and the rest of the world. He points out that the Chicham language of the Achuar people in the Amazon doesn’t have a word for nature, nor do other Indigenous languages. “Such words would only be needed if the Achuar experienced nature as distinct from the self,” he writes. English, by contrast, he describes as a “rootless” language, borrowing terms from so many places that it struggles to teach the kind of deep, reciprocal relationships that are born from living in one place and caring for it over many generations.
Hawken hopes to mend that separation by helping people discover the flow of carbon in their daily lives and kindle a sense of wonder about it. Carbon delves into mind-bending scientific discoveries about the kind of marvels that carbon makes possible. Bees, with their two-milligram brains, appear able to count, learn by observation, feel pain and pleasure, and even recognize their own knowledge. The rye plant senses the world around it with more than 14 million roots and root hairs, a network that one plant neurobiologist described as a type of brain. Hawken’s book is a reminder that carbon — despite all the problems caused by releasing too much of it into the atmosphere — is actually a gift.
The goal of Carbon isn’t to map out a plan for saving the Earth, but to rekindle a sense of relationship with it.
Where Hawken lives in California, his community recently restored a salmon stream, breaking down a concrete barrier under a bridge that had blocked the fish on their final journey up the stream to spawn. “The core of it is about care, and kindness, and connection, and compassion, and generosity,” Hawken said. “That’s where regeneration starts.”
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Kate Yoder grist.org
