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Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Paul Hawken, who at 79 years old, in my estimation, I would call him a force of nature. He’s a renowned environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and leading voice calling for the regeneration of nature and humanity. He’s written 10 books, including five New York Times bestsellers. You may have heard of these books—Blessed Unrest, Drawdown, and Regeneration—and now he’s written a new book. It is awe inspiring. Parts are jaw dropping. I’m so happy to have this chance to introduce you to the new book. It’s called Carbon: The Book of Life. Paul, welcome.
Paul Hawken: Thank you so much. It’s so good to be on a podcast that you listen to. I’ve been such a deep admirer. And I’ll be honest, much of the ideas and things that arose for this book came from listening to people. I read incessantly, no question about it, but the things where just like eureka moments come from oral presentations and many from your podcast. So thank you so much.
TS: I’m very touched. Thank you, Paul, and I’m really excited to get right to it. My experience of reading Carbon was that it was a love from your heart to life itself. Curiously, a love letter through the lens of carbon, an element that I think many of us think of as culprit in the current climate emergency. That’s how I previously thought of carbon. So tell me what inspired you to write what I’m calling a love letter through the lens of carbon.
PH: Precisely your point. I created Drawdown, created Regeneration, and certainly Drawdown was about solutionism, which is how do you stop putting carbon CO2 in the atmosphere and how do you bring it back home? I mean, pretty straightforward.
And I think what we’ve seen and still see is carbon being objectified. It’s a thing, it’s molecules, it’s an atom, and it’s gotten loose and it’s causing problems. It’s causing the climate crisis. And we have all these words about carbon neutral and decarbonization and all these phrases. And what they forsake is the fact that carbon’s actually a flow. It’s a flow. It’s a huge extraordinary complex flow, and it doesn’t exist by itself somewhere except as a molecular combo, of course in a gas, but it’s not like something that’s separate.
And the climate narrative, I feel, hasn’t worked. It doesn’t work, because we’re objectifying life. We think the climate is the crisis. We can’t have a crisis. We think the atmosphere is separate. The biosphere and atmosphere are inseparable. And so that objectification of the living world of nature is what got us into this problem in the first place. So that kind of thinking isn’t going to get us to a new place, and it’s actually not even true.
TS: OK, so hold on a moment. When you say calling the climate crisis “a crisis” is part of the problem and objectification, I’d like to understand that more. I certainly think we’re experiencing a climate crisis. I mean, that’s part of my narrative.
PH: Yeah, I know. It’s everybody’s, and the word just comes right out very easily, except the climate can’t have a crisis. It can’t. Climate’s just the climate. I mean, if you exhale, your exhalation is not having a crisis. I mean, the climate crisis simply is reflection of a human crisis in the biosphere, what we’re doing, what we have done, what we continue to do. And climate is simply a teacher, and it’s just reflecting back to us our activity down here. So the crisis is the interaction between human beings, and the interaction between human beings and all of the species on earth. That’s the crisis. There is a crisis. I don’t argue that one. Yeah.
TS: In Carbon, you’re proposing that we explore a new worldview and a new narrative. And I want to talk about both of these things. And honestly, Paul, the part that is the most challenging for me is the new narrative. I think when it comes to the worldview, I was able to follow you in various different ways and I want to share the love letter of this worldview. I mean, it’s been what my whole life’s about, and I want to share it through your eyes looking through different—
I mean, I’ll start with the worldview, but we’re going to get really into the narrative, which is at one point—and this was many years ago and it was not recorded. I had the opportunity—only because you said you were a fan of Sounds True on this podcast, am I bothering to tell you this, but I did think of it when I was reading Carbon—which is I had the chance to be alone in a room with Pema Chödrön, the beloved meditation teacher. And I said, “Pema, what I really want to understand”—this was about 20 years ago—“I want to understand enlightenment. That’s what I really—let me see it through your eyes.” We were alone in a room and I thought, I have to ask her. And she looked around, and she said, “Tami, you know that bug over there on the wall? How is that bug experiencing and perceiving right now? Tune in to that, pay attention to that, and that will give you a clue.” And that’s part of what I thought about in reading Carbon. So share with me this worldview that you’re presenting through so many different perspectives—plants, animals, mycelium.
PH: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s a new narrative. You may be right. What it is, is calling out the existing narrative because it is an objectifying, separating, disconnecting narrative based or informed by fear and threat and blame. And I’m not arguing against the concerns and the horrific things that companies are doing, the corporations are doing, the politicians are doing, et cetera. So I see that just, I think, very clearly. So I’m not denying that part.
But I think the narrative that is going on is that people see that as something distinct, that the global heating, what we’re talking about here, and the effects of that are something that is different from their everyday life and that hopefully somebody’s taking care of it, because they’re busy, they don’t have the money, they don’t have the knowledge. And so what I’m trying to do is that actually you do have the knowledge and you do have the money, because it doesn’t cost much to actually be on the land, be on earth, and be here with people and that little bug in the room, with parents, children, and then actually interact with the living world in such a way that we create more life instead of less, because that’s what we’re talking about.
The only way forward is regeneration. Now you can use any word you like—restoration, renewal—I mean, I’m not attached to that word at all. But all life regenerates. And we have set ourselves apart and think that we can take life in order to generate, not regenerate, but generate all our needs and wants and luxuries and goods and a lifestyle, and it won’t work. And so I just feel like if you look at the headlines, if you open up The Times or CNN or whatever you look at in terms of news, it’s shouting at us that the end of the road is here. We can’t go much further in the way we human beings interact with each other and with the living world. And so when I talk about carbon as a flow, there’s 1.2 trillion carbon atoms in every cell of your body and you have 30 to 34 trillion cells and you multiply those. And it’s a number that’s so big that it doesn’t mean anything, a jillion molecules.
But so that’s just a, whoa, wait a minute, wait a minute. I’m in a flow. Just think if you were a minnow and somebody said, “What’s water?” Well, you’re in it. Well, it’s the same thing. It’s like we’re in carbon, we’re carbon, it’s a flow. And we should see our landscapes and our interaction with the world as part of that flow, because we’re part of that flow. But we’re the only creature, we’re the only species that actually interrupts it, breaks it, and debases the planet and dysregulates atmosphere. We’re the only species that does that. And so is there a way we can actually be in alignment with the principles, and I would say the laws of life? Although you would call it one law. And the answer is absolutely yes, but not if we think of it as other. Because I mean, I can say this to a woman, show me a woman who doesn’t know what othering means. OK? So show me a civilization that is othering and I’ll show you this is our civilization, and we’re othering everything and thinking we can get ahead if we do so. And actually all we do is get behind.
TS: Part of what you do in this Book of Life is you take us into the experience of other species and plants and minerals that know flow. They know flow. That’s their experience. And I wonder if you can share some examples of that to give people a feeling of that.
PH: I’m not sure what part of the book you’re referring to, but I would say our cell is a good starting point really, because we have 1.2 trillion carbon atoms. But what’s going on in the cell? I mean, those things aren’t just sitting there. It’s a chemistry class. I mean, it’s extraordinary chemistry going on in every single cell with the total 10 trillion atoms in a cell you can’t even see. And that chemistry is actually technically not alive. It’s not alive. It’s chemistry, but it’s not life. The cell is life. OK. So I said, well, that’s the really good question. How can what is a chemical process be a life once it’s encapsulated in a living cell? That mystery, that miracle that has never really been explained. Not to say people haven’t tried to and have ideas about it, but they’re all different.
And so that threshold is sort of the key, I mean a gateway to understanding what we see outside and looking outside. And the forest here, looking at trees. This morning I looked at hummingbirds at the buddleja that I planted for the butterflies, not for the hummingbirds. And they’re all over it in the morning. It’s cold, it was raining, and the rain stopped and there they were again. But all those activities and our interaction with each other and with our landscapes is about the flow of carbon. We just have to realize that we haven’t been taught incorrectly, we just haven’t been taught correctly, if you know what I mean. And there’s a difference. I’m not blaming science. I’m not blaming even the narratives that surround us. I’m just saying there’s so much more there.
And the more is to, in a sense, see—whether it’s outwardly, say, at dragonflies or whatever, the living world that you appreciate, that you enjoy, that you like the hummingbirds at the buddleja this morning—but once you see the wonder, the complexity, the extraordinary qualities that actually create life, the language, the sounds, the communication with 3.4 trillion creatures on the land and in the ocean, and they’re communicating every single day, literally communicating. You say “talking” if you want. I mean, most people don’t like that because we talk, they don’t. Well, they are communicating and they can understand each other. Every cell has like a hundred sensors. Those sensors communicate with other sensors. Cells talk to each other, and this is where we live.
I give one more example, which is a rye seed. Most grass is rye, but it doesn’t matter. But just one has all these little blades of grass you see above the ground. Beneath one rye seed is 14 million roots, 14 million roots. It’s unimaginable. Each root is connected to the hyphae. Hyphae are connected to mycelium. The mycelium and the plant are having a transaction. The plant is metabolizing carbohydrates, glucose, sending it down, some of it to its roots. Those roots are interacting with mycelia. And the mycelia are asking the plant, What do you need? And the plant says, I need some nitrogen or phosphorus. And the mycelia say, OK, we’ll swap it for some sugar. I mean, this is a transaction. How are they communicating? We don’t know. How do they know? A plant could say, actually I need selenium, and the mycelia will figure out where to find it and bring it back.
So the mycelium are talking to, it’s talking to itself. This is a thin thread, a fungi that’s like two cells or three cells thick. And this is one seed of grass. One seed. And so that’s why sometimes I would say we don’t know where we live, because most of life is actually under the ground. It’s not above the ground. We see what’s above the ground, but most of it’s beneath the ground and we have no idea, really, what’s going on there. But we have one idea, which is all 7,000 cultures in the world have called the earth “mother.” No one ever said “Father Earth,” because every culture knew that is where life comes from and came from and always will.
TS: I want to see if I can connect a couple of ideas here in our conversation, because this worldview of The Book of Life that I think people can start to feel into as you’re talking here about the type of receiving and giving of communication and flow. People can feel into that.
And then we have the narrative about what’s going on right now on planet Earth. And the core of my narrative, Paul, in really simple everyday language, is humans sure are screwing this up. And my question to you is what do you think of that? How could you help my narrative get better and more intelligent and more nuanced?
PH: It’s the question I ask myself every day. And I see the same narrative of the same things you do, I’m sure, and the viewers see. I don’t question that. I don’t have some special powers, some special abilities or capabilities. I do not. I have curiosity, and I wonder a lot about what’s going on with Homo sapiens and why they have become so self-destructive and taking other species with them.
But I do think that we tend to look, because we’ve been taught to, to authority, to people who are above us, maybe whether it’s our teachers when we go to school or the principal or the Dean of Men. You know, I saw the Dean of Men several times, not for good reasons, and in fact kicked out of school once. And that we look to the government, we look to the politicians, we look to corporations, we look to so-called leaders. And we also look to the Conference of the Parties. That is to say, the COP coming up is 30 in Brazil. COP 29 was in Baku, Azerbaijan. Conference of the Parties for Biodiversity was in Cali in Colombia. And we looked to these gatherings of really extraordinary people and scientists and politicians and businesspeople to get together and talk about it and figure out what we should be doing and so forth.
And the fact is that it will never work, because nature is not top down. And the idea that top-down solutions are going to restore, regenerate, the earth is ridiculous. Now, I love the fact that they’re getting together, because it creates understanding, communication, and linkage, and that’s good. But the idea—and I think most of us look to somebody, some agency, some government, some body that’s going to change how we’re acting. And I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Now, we are changing how we’re acting, but we’re changing it on such a small scale, tens of thousands of groups and organizations around the world. And I talked about that in Blessed Unrest, but it’s even more true now. And so we tend not to see that as effective because of the overwhelming inertia of the existing capitalist system, which is gathering wealth, gathering wealth by taking wealth away from the living world, from nature, from biodiversity, from people, from cultures, and aggregating it into Tesla, into SpaceX, into Amazon, into et cetera, et cetera. And I just feel that it’s kind of like what we’re missing is what we know. And we know that all change starts with one person. All change really starts with community. It’s only one person that can do that, become 2, 4, 8, 6, whether it’s on farming or forest or whether it’s with taking care of our children.
There’s so many different ways that regeneration occurs and is occurring, and we don’t see it because it doesn’t light up the amygdala, it doesn’t create click-throughs, it’s too small. The media ignores it. And that is accelerating right now, Tami, more than ever before because of the crazy things that are happening, both spoken and activity, but also in terms of the fact that the climate now seems to be moving out of its zone, a predictive zone, in terms of heating. Scientists cannot explain what happened in the last 16 months in terms of heating. They had right track and knew what was going on, the dynamics and so forth. They can’t explain the last 16 months. And so therefore it may be into a new, I don’t know what to call it, but I mean dynamic for sure. And we are on Spaceship Earth and we’re going, wow, who lit the fire inside the spaceship? No fires. We have no fire extinguishers except on earth, except how we act, how we grow our food, how we live together, how we build our homes, how we take care of really basic human needs. And if we do that in a way that actually increases the amount of life in the living world, then we benefit, we thrive. But we’re doing the opposite right now.
I wake up with despair because I subject myself to the data, the science, the news, every day, every day. And I also read and listen to extraordinary people, some people on your podcast, some people just because they’re amazing. Monica Gagliano. Karen Barker, when she was alive; she just died a couple years ago. Amazing woman. Robin Wall Kimmerer. I’m not trying to butter up one gender, but the fact is that most of the people I turn to—Melanie Challenger—I can name them—are people, women, who see the world in a way that it’s coherent, it’s kind, it’s brilliant, it’s connected. Instead of what I see again and again from science, which is new information, new facts. OK, fascinating. But it isn’t connected. It doesn’t see it like, it doesn’t see it as a mother, it sees it as something who is naming and studying and analyzing. And both are needed. I’m not criticizing one in favor of the other. I’m just saying I tend to go to that which is synthesizing and that has big arms, if you will. Yeah.
TS: You write in Carbon: The Book of Life that our grief is a measure of our love. And you could say our grief—and I would add our despair too. I would put that in with grief. What do you do, Paul? Because here you are, I mean, as I said, 79-year-old force of nature. You’re creating so much, networking with so many people, talking on so many different channels, writing here your 10th book. What do you do with your despair? How do you work with it, greet it?
PH: I don’t think there’s any answer to that, because I think despair is there for a good reason. In other words, you want to welcome it as opposed to try to avoid it. Avoidance is what—everyone’s trying to avoid it in some way. Who feels it, feels it. And I would say Pema Chödrön would tell you to go with it, not avoid it, and so forth. Therein lies answers and lies in awareness. And where we’re going doesn’t mean it’s going to feel really good every day. What feels good is being in touch with people who work together, who understand, have that comprehensive respect and reverence for each other and for where they live and for the smallest thing.
And so when we are there, our despair can be held by a larger number of people. And we then can—you don’t surmount it, you welcome it, but you welcome it because it actually changes who you are in a way that… We’re only here. You say I’m 79. Look at it. I think about it every day. I’m one of those people that’s going to leave soon, probably. My wife doesn’t like that when I say that. But I mean the fact is we come and we go.
And I think at a certain point, whether it’s the youth right now who have arrived, the new arrivals, and who very plaintively and seriously say, “What were you thinking?” I mean, I remember looking at this mess and this disrespect and the conflict and weaponization and the war and killing children and bombing… What is going on? That’s a very, very good question. What is going on? And for us who are leaving soon, I think it’s incumbent upon us to embody the qualities that are timeless actually. And compassion, cooperation, respect, our timeless qualities is what has brought us together and allowed us to do amazing, wonderful things in this world.
And I would say we, because I don’t have the qualification to say “we,” the first person plural, but all the cultures, particularly what we call Indigenous cultures, the cultures that have been around for 10, 20, 40, 50… They now think Aboriginal culture in Australia is 20,000 years old. So whether it’s 50 or 60 or the point being is that people have learned how to live here in a way that is reciprocal, that has reciprocity, that gives and takes and gives and takes. And the very fact that the cultures in the 550 different Indigenous cultures that were here before the colonists and settlers arrived never sold food. You didn’t sell food. You created it, and you shared it. And we sell it. And what we sell is junk.
TS: Paul, there were several mind-expanding new perspectives, totally new perspectives, things I’d never thought about before in reading Carbon: The Book of Life. And one of them had to do with connecting the loss of Indigenous languages and species loss. Those are two things that I feel grief and despair about, but I never understood the connection until reading your work. And I wonder if you can share that with people.
PH: Sure. I mean, the languages that preexisted the Northern European languages, and English is a polyglot language. It’s got German, it’s got French, it has Scots, it’s got Swedish, it has, can’t forget, there’s all sorts of languages in our language such as a glotteral language.
The Indigenous languages arose in place, and we don’t know when and how far back and so forth. But if you look at the languages, the few that are translated into English, and there’s not that many, but they’re so brilliant. They do two things. One is they teach you where you’re living. So as you’re a child and you’re growing up, and they do it with metaphor as well, by the way, and Aristotle is the one who said, “Metaphor is genius,” but they use metaphor and analogs and they teach themselves how to live where they live, how to survive, but more than survive, how to thrive.
But the interesting about the languages, compared to, say, English, is that it’s dominated by verbs. And verbs are about relationships. And our language is dominated by noun. Noun, which is about naming. And you can’t name something unless you make a distinction, separate it. And so we have a million names for stuff. We have 350,000 chemical names, but most Indigenous languages are in the 10, 20, 30,000 range in terms of verbs—excuse me, in terms of words. So we need both.
Again, it’s not like one’s good and one’s bad. That’s not true. But when we start to combine the best of so-called scientific enlightenment, and it came out of Europe and the languages and the science that came out of that, with the science of place, the science of understanding that arose from people who lived upon the land. I can give an example. I mean, the sensitivity and intelligence they had. I mean, there was Navajo Diné people who—two men could recite the names and practices of 700 different insects, the scientists in 1947, and they can name them, exactly what they did and didn’t do, and all this other stuff. I mean, entomologists were gobsmacked. And they have no written text. It’s all memory. How could they do that? And so obviously people live in and with the land and so forth. I mean, the land is the teacher. And it’s not forgotten, because those are valuable lessons.
There’s a knickknack in southeastern Canada, a little better name. And in October, usually when the moon was out, they would listen to the mother trees, the large pine trees, and listen to the wind softening through the trees. But the trees had a specific sound. Not the softening—the tree itself. And they would name that sound. Now, we can’t do that in English. We can’t name those sounds. And they would remember. And then if they saw the tree 10 years later, visited the tree, came up and they would listen. And because it had a name, they could tell the tree had changed, become unhealthy or whatever from comparing the names.
Well, we can’t even understand what that understanding is. I mean, we don’t have the language for it, but the naming is what Indigenous people had to do. They had to understand where they lived and the interactions and so forth. And that knowledge was passed on and developed and refined for generations and thousands of years in many cases. I mean, Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about it much better than I am. But it didn’t externalize, which we do. We didn’t talk about—it didn’t talk about the living world as a thing, which is why famously cultures didn’t have the word for “nature.” They didn’t understand why we did, because they never saw nature, themselves, their children, trees, fish, whatever it was as a different world where you had to divide it and say, well, that’s nature, but we are… what? They were nature.
And again, it sounds like a cliché to say that, for me to say that, but for them, in my understanding and speaking with and visiting and knowing Indigenous people—I have a great woman just down the street from me who always fact checks me, Melissa Nelson, Chippewa woman who was the head of The Cultural Conservancy. So what’s in the book, it was basically I had her be my reader, because I’m not qualified to talk about Indigenous people, Indigenous culture. I’m not, I know that.
But I still think that for us as colonists, settlers, Westerners have done so much to destroy the 550 cultures that were here in Turtle Island. It’s important to understand, what did we destroy? Now, we haven’t destroyed it completely. It’s coming back with extraordinary people inside and direction. It’s just a beautiful thing.
And I gave a talk once, and I was talking about this, and a man—a woman or a man—came up to me who settler foundation on the East Coast, and he said, “The seventh generation.” And he said, “Somebody used that for a toilet paper. It’s just so disrespectful—I can’t believe it. A cleansing product.” He said, “In the prophecies, the settlers were prophesied. We prophesied the destruction of our cultures. It was prophesied. We also prophesied that that would take seven generations, and in the seventh generation we would arise again.” And he said, “You think generations are 20 years. For us, they’re 70-plus years. That’s a generation.” So we’re at the cusp of the seventh-generation emergence.
So it goes back to the thing about despair. We have brothers and sisters who are—our teachers are here. It’s not like we have to go to school, go to ASU, go to Yale, to figure out what do and what’s going on. Our teachers are here, and so we just have to turn to them. And like you with Pema Chödrön, just ask. Just ask the questions, yeah.
TS: I’m glad you brought up this seven times, 70 years, seven generations, because I realized when you were talking, we don’t know where we live. As I was listening to you, I thought, I’m also very curious about when, when, in the when, in the cycle of time, how do we situate ourselves and what’s your narrative for that? For the when, not just the where.
PH: I would just add that’s a really great question. I’m not sure I fully understand it—the when being now?
TS: This time that we’re in. I think I’m really trying to—I notice I feel very disoriented right now. And when you talk about where do we live and how much of life happens below the surface of the earth, I can appreciate that and I get that and I’m like, I think I have a sense. And reading Carbon: The Book of Life also helped me know where we live in terms of how the plants are experiencing this. And you go through different plant species and how they’re receiving communication and giving.
When it comes to the when, I’m left with this big question mark inside me that I’d love to hear from you on.
PH: Well, I think many people would say that we live in apocalyptic times, that we are facing an apocalypse. And I would agree with that, by the way, but I would agree with it in the true meaning of the word, because it comes from the Greek. An apocalypse means the revealing of what is hidden. That’s where we we’re now, in terms of when. What’s been hidden, obscured, also killed off, et cetera, but what’s been hidden is now being revealed. And we’re seeing in news cycle is the end of a cycle, in leadership, in companies. We’re just seeing the end of something. And if we look at the science right now, it does tell us that we live in apocalyptic times. But apocalypse means something really quite wonderful, which is it’s the culmination, it’s the climax. And I do not say that without realizing there will be a great deal of suffering. There will be; it’s been prophesied as well.
Oren Lyons of the Onandaga Nation prophesied—I write about in the book—said that there was a prophecy of the end times, and the end times would be revealed by two things. One is the wind. The winds would howl and shred the sky, a sort of poetic thing. And the children. And the children would be abandoned, not cared for, exploited, and ignored, forgotten. And we’re there. That’s where we are right now in those prophecies. And that’s the apocalypse.
And I’m not trying to sugarcoat the world in any way. I see what’s coming, and I think about my children, I think about my friends, I think about my wife who’s younger than I and presumably will still be here when I pass. And I’m just like any other human being. I mean, that’s just natural.
But at the same time, I also think and believe and experience that this is the most brilliant time in human history. The most extraordinary, imaginative, creator time in human history. And I’m not talking about AI when I say that. I’m talking about what is emerging. And when you have an oppressive, dominating—really, how can you say it nicely—culture that is extricating people in the world for 500 years, it’s hard to see that actually there’s an immersion culture now and that you see—Tami, you see it, you know it, pivot on it, you bring it together, you put it back out into the world. And so it’s not shrinking; it’s growing. And the understanding and the knowledge and the science too is just exploding.
Zoe Schlanger, another woman, who wrote The Light Eaters—it’s a really wonderful book—spent eight years talking to botanists, and botany is an amazing thing. It’s about the plant world; most species in the world are plants. And at the end of the book, she talks about botanists who are really at the cutting edge, but they won’t really say completely what they believe, because they don’t want to perish. You have to publish to perish, get peer reviewed and so, by the old establishment botany. But when you see it differently, you have to be careful about what you publish and what you say. But what they said to her is that the only way we can explain a plant, whether it’s a tree or a vine or a vegetable, is the only way we can explain a plant given its capabilities in terms of communication, in terms of senses. There’s 20 senses. I’m looking at a tree. They have 20 different senses. It can see me when I walk by that tree. We know that, OK? It’s [INAUDIBLE]. It’s just the thing passing in front. It’s not in color. Doesn’t see the color of my shirt. But the only way we can explain a plant is a brain. That is, the entire plant is a brain. Of course, anybody who is a scientist says, “Well, that’s not possible. There’s no neurons, nervous system, blah, blah, blah. This is a brain?” Yep, that’s a brain for human beings.
But the only way we can explain plants and brains, that is, again, we don’t know where we live. I’m looking outside, and we live amongst extraordinary intelligence. And so what was hidden being revealed is that that’s our home. And we’re home. And not only are we home, but we’re home with extraordinary intelligent beings. And we haven’t understood that intelligence. We haven’t been able to listen to hear it. I would say that Indigenous cultures that I know of say, “No, you didn’t hear it, but we’ve been listening all along.” And they’re very frank about that. “And how did you know about this?” “The plant told me.” And we go oh, yeah, right. It did. And so there is this humility coming, I think, from our way of seeing the world and an immersion of a way of seeing and being in the world that is, actually, that keeps me going and keeps me appreciating the people who understand that better than I and keeps me wanting to write. If you think this is a love letter, this book, wait till you see the one that’s coming.
TS: Alright!
PH: This is a Valentine card.
TS: You give extraordinary examples in Carbon: The Book of Life. You talk about dragonflies—for whatever reason, this really got my attention—that have 24,000 corneas. It’s paper eyes, is what the chapter is called. And they can see 360 degrees with 24,000 corneas.
PH: Yep. Up and down and sideways and behind. I guess they developed that to survive over 350 million years. I was sitting by my pond. I have a small pond, too big, and these dragonflies would come out. And then they were just looking at me, and I was looking at them. And they were still, but the wings of course were going, and that’s what made me curious. And then I discovered that the larva actually comes from the pond that they’re there for three, four years and then they come out for 30, 40, 50 days to mate. And that’s where you see them coupling in the air. They’re mating, and then they go back into the water. But they’re extraordinary. We can’t imagine that many corneas seeing that much at the same time. And then processing that information as well, not just having those corneas. And we have two, and we do pretty well. But why did it develop those? Because dragonflies used to be 14, 15, 16 inches many, many, many, many millennia ago, and they got smaller and to where they are today.
But yeah, to me, it’s just, it’s out there for us. Wonder and awe. And for somebody who grew up in the Valley, Sacramento Valley, and my grandfather’s farm, and we would drive down 99—the highway. Then there was no freeway. And we’d have to stop and, heard about this, the windshield effect, but we’d have to stop with an ice scraper and scrape off the windshield so we could see, because there was so many bugs plastered against the car and the radiator, as well as the headlights. And you can drive down there now and go to LA and you don’t have to do that once, not even once. And even when you get there.
So it’s just a measure of who we are and what we’ve done. We didn’t do it on purpose, but we had done it nevertheless with agricultural chemicals. And we didn’t understand who we were killing and what they did or what we were killing and what their value was to our trees, to our crops, to frogs, which are also disappearing. Well, their food is disappearing. And I feel so blessed because when it rains like it did yesterday, we can hear frogs. And when we first got here—I’ve been here 15 years—there was no frogs. I don’t know where they came from. I don’t know where they go. I don’t know where they live, but they sure are loud.
TS: Here’s the question that comes up for me, Paul. In the beginning, you said humans we’re the only ones who are destructive when it comes to this flow of carbon throughout life. It’s humans that are the destroyers. And I think I’m trying to understand humans, if you will. Humans think we’re at the top of all the animals. I’ve heard even spiritual teachers talk about, well, humans have this unique capacity to do X, Y, Z. And I think to myself, yeah, unique capacity to screw things up. That’s what we humans have. So I’m curious what you see about, do we have some unique capacity that’s positive? We clearly have a unique capacity that’s creating harm.
PH: Well, yeah. I mean the theory is that we developed fire, and fire changed our food, it changed our metabolism, it changed our brain, and we went in a direction that no other species had gone. We were primates. We learned to walk on two feet when the fire arose. And this is a really good question. How do we discover how to make it—not just find it or see it—and then how to use it, utilize it.
And Patagonia, the people, they carry embers around with them everywhere. And when Darwin came around the Cape in the S.S. Beagle, and he saw these fires and Magellan did, who was the first person to come around the southern tip of South America, now called the Strait of Magellan. And he saw those fires, and that’s why it’s called Tierra del Fuego. It’s the land of fire. But there was actually the Yaghan people who used fire. Now, I mean, they were naked. They were covered with seal fat. And everyone—Darwin thought that they were proof of evolution, because they’re in between a human and a primate, which is simply not true.
But so how long did people have it? When did they have it? I mean, way back. We think maybe 200,000 years now. But some say 300. But whatever. The fact is that it changed us because we can metabolize food better. We didn’t have to hunt as much. The senses that we had developed from being good hunters and hunter-gatherers, in fact, were then expanded into other areas of understanding and perception and intelligence and language and so forth. We really don’t know. But we’re pretty sure that it was the fire that changed our brain and changed our ability to—we have two lobes, left and right, of course, and they’re very different. And so do other animals, by the way. But the fact that we developed language—once there was language, then we differentiated ourselves. Now we have to be careful here, because it turns out that animals have language too and not just grunts and howls, which is—I mean, mother bats have a distinct lingo that’s different than the male bats. And the scientists who study them call it “mother-ese.” They don’t know what to call it. And they name their offspring and teach them to avoid certain bats in the cave, the male bats. That’s the language. So it’s not as though we were alone in that, but there was something about fire that accelerated the development of the human nervous system in ways that brought us today. And so our instincts to cooperate, our instincts to kill, are both there. They are. I mean, and if you look at civilization, it sort of alternates between both very cooperative societies and ones that are very warlike and destroy and take. Left brain, right brain.
TS: Well, this was helpful and interesting from an evolutionary perspective, but I’m still trying to understand how Paul Hawken sees the human and how you see us today. And I guess I’ll say our promise, if you will.
PH: Well, I think I’m just like everybody else that’s just trying to figure out what it means to be human every day, as opposed to having some conclusion or some definitive statement or understanding. I don’t. I really don’t. I don’t think any one person knows that, could answer that. And each one of us is different too. I mean, human comes from homo sapiens. We’re a species, arguably, although there’s some, maybe that’s not true, but we were the species—there’s many, many homo Neanderthals, homo this, homo that—homo sapiens cooperated, which is why it is believed that we became the dominant species. But within that cooperation, we also killed and went to war. Attacked.
And so, to me, it’s like what does it mean to be a human being at this time, as well, like at this time? And history we can only read about, we can hear about, but it’s history right now. And I would say right now is kind of the most confusing time, for me, because I’m sort of accustomed to being in a culture where truth was valued. And if you didn’t tell the truth, then you were called out and blamed or ostracized or—like Joseph McCarthy in the ’50s who lied and then was basically humiliated and ostracized. And now we’re in a world where it’s called the “power lie,” where the liar knows it’s a lie and says it anyway. And that is a way of exerting power. In other words, to demonstrate—we know who we’re talking about here, Trump—but then demonstrate his power. Why he has found and drawn so many people to him who are OK with that, and also do their own lies, is a recent phenomenon in my lifetime, which is hard for me to grok, hard for me to understand, hard for me to understand why people who know better follow, vote for, accept. Say, oh yeah, he’s a liar, but I think he’s doing some interesting things or whatever. This is a democratic process which is being destroyed by the lack of veracity, lack of truth. And that’s another sign of I call “end times,” which is if you don’t have the truth, you have nothing except power. Force.
So what does it mean to be human right now? It’s the question. But I think it’s the question everyone’s listening to this is asking themselves. And I don’t want to, in a sense, elude myself from your question.
TS: No, but I just appreciate, Paul, that I can ask you where are we, when, where are we in time, and who are we? And that I can bring all these questions forward and have an honest dialogue with you about it and learn from you. I’m so appreciative of that.
Now, I want to bring out here at the end of our conversation something that you share at the end of Carbon: The Book of Life. You tell a story about how you were near Cape Cod, you were walking on an unused dirt road, and you found a council of seven animals.
PH: Yeah.
TS: And I was a little bit, I mean, we’re talking about truth here, telling the truth. I don’t think you would’ve told the story unless it was a true story. And I don’t think—you weren’t on any kind of psychedelic drug or anything, were you, when this happened? No, I mean there’s a snake, a hognose snake, a box turtle, a possum, a rabbit. This is what you wrote, a white-footed mouse, a meadow vole—an animal I’d never heard of before—and two bobwhite quail, all of them were in some type of circle as if they were having some kind of council meeting. And I was like, did this really happen, Paul? Come on.
PH: Yeah, it did. I mean, the fact that I can remember it all these decades, really. Yeah, I used to be a runner and I used to run a lot. And so this was—I think it was a road. It was very dusty and I don’t think it was used much, but it was a track, that is to say there was no weeds or any rocks in it. It was a great place to run. And I was running, and I stopped because I was getting near to the house. And then I came around a corner, and I saw exactly what was described there. And it startled me, that’s for sure. And I startled them, of course. And the ones who were—like the quail could just disappear like that. And the turtle, the slowest one, sort of waddled away into the brush. And it took me a long time to assimilate what I had seen. It didn’t make sense. Why would these animals be together? Why would they be together in a circle facing each other? And I have no explanation for it.
And the reason I told the story wasn’t because it was a mystical experience. I told the story because I can tell other stories. And I think many other people can spend a lot of time outside in nature, whether it’s in the mountains or wherever it is, that you’ll have experiences that you can’t explain. That’s what I’m saying. And you won’t get them in suburbs, you won’t get them inside, you won’t get them watching TV. You get them when you’re in the wilderness in places that are relatively untouched or unruined by human beings and where animals feel safe, basically. And they’re going to be different. And I know many, many other stories others have told me, but they’re not bragging. Never, never. I mean, when you’re out, and I’ve had this, when the grizzly comes right at you, but actually it isn’t. It’s coming past you. It’s like, I’m not interested, and your heart is in your ankle. What was she thinking? I have no idea.
I remember once when I was in Vallecitos and there is a river there, and it was the springtime and I was a caretaker at this refuge, Buddhist refuge. Nobody was there. And there’s a river that goes through it. And I was walking along the river, and all of a sudden there was a bear coming at me, cinnamon. And it was as surprised as I was. We both realized the other was coming at the other at the same time. Now that bear had been in hibernation, and it had termite wings on its snout. It must have been going into rotten logs and looking for insects to feed on. Hungry bear. Wasn’t that? We both got embarrassed. I can’t say for sure the bear was embarrassed, but I—and you don’t look at a bear. You do not look at the bears. So you look this way, but you can see, I can see you right now looking this way. So I could tell that it was embarrassed. I was embarrassed. I was also frightened. And then we decided to keep going, and we made a wide circle. And it was going towards me, and I was going towards it. And so we both kept going. And those kind experiences, what I’m saying is if you don’t put yourself out there, you probably won’t have them. But those who do have so many. Some of the authors and people I know who really are outdoors people and really spend a lot of time in the wilderness, just it’s an amazing world out there. And we wouldn’t know it watching David Attenborough on TV.
TS: You share the story and the spirit of “If you turn to the living world, it will turn to you.” That’s a quote from the book. Now to end, I’d love to know, you said the new book you’re working on now, the next book, is even more of a love letter. I’m like, what could that be? What could be even more of a love letter? Just give us a couple little breadcrumbs if you will.
PH: Well, I won’t give the title.
TS: Fair enough. Don’t.
PH: I don’t, because the people I tell it to love the title. They just, oh my God.
TS: You’re very good at titles. You have a special good instinct for that, Paul.
PH: Thank you. This one actually came from a woman, a scientist who passed, and then I asked her family if I could use the title. She never used it as a title. It was just a phrase in the book. So I’m not saying, and it was just a phrase that caught my eye. And I said, “Can I use this phrase?” I didn’t have to ask. Titles aren’t copyrighted, but I had to, otherwise I wouldn’t feel comfortable using it.
But I’d say, I’ll tell you a story about a conductor. His name is Ben Zander. Boston Symphony. Did a great TED Talk many years ago. And I was watching him, and he was conducting. And I asked him later what he was doing up there. Now of course, conducting, right? I said, “What are you really doing up there?” He said, “I’m listening to all the voices.” He used the word “voices.” He didn’t use the word “instruments.” Voices, as if each violin, oboe, et cetera, was a voice. And he paused and he said, “Leadership is listening to all the voices.”
And I thought, that’s such a beautiful, beautiful phrase. Because I lived in Japan and I remember seeing the kimono of the emperor. And it’s a black kimono, very beautiful. And it’s got this 16-petal chrysanthemum called the kiku on white. It’s quite striking, and it looks like a design. You wouldn’t know it was a chrysanthemum. And in Japanese “kiku” means to listen, and it means chrysanthemum. So that’s the symbol of the emperor on this kimono. And I talked to Shinto priests and others there about that. They said, “Yeah, the first thing the emperor must do is to listen to all the people.”
So when Ben told me that, I thought, who aren’t we listening to? Who aren’t we listening to? And I would say, we’re not listening to the 3.4 trillion creatures. And they’re talking and they’re communicating, and even fish are talking. They make sound. Each one. Even the soil is talking. And so I want to do a book about all the voices, yeah.
TS: That’s beautiful. And one of the most beautiful sections of Carbon: The Book of Life is when you talk about nature’s acoustics and talk about what it’s like when they’re putting microphone sensors down into the soil and what we hear. I love that. I love that part. And the fact that you’re going to expand on that moving forward, or at least that’s the breadcrumb you’re giving us here.
Paul, I’ve so enjoyed talking with you, author of the new book Carbon: The Book of Life, a book that filled me as a reader and I think will fill readers with a tremendous sense of awe, reverence, wonder, the deepest type of flowing appreciation of where we are. Paul, thank you.
PH: Thank you, Tami. Thank you so much, really, for what you do.
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