(A note on this transcript: Due to the audio quality, errors will be more prevalent throughout. The conversation is lightly edited. We recommend listening to the audio)

Paul Hawken: The meaning of crisis is. The original meaning of crisis is actually a turning point is actually in a disease, that’s what came from medicine, actually a crisis, but actually it’s indicating a point of decisions, so it says, this is time to make a decision, that’s what crisis means. And so, we are in a crisis and decisions have to be made, but decisions can’t be made in the pall of ignorance, and we, I, myself as well, by the way, so I’m not pointing fingers. Have been in our enthusiasm and our shock at what’s going on and the ignorance of, political leaders and in the, the selfishness and greed, the capitalist, corporate system, we have girded ourselves to come out as spokespeople for, other people, those who suffer, those who are going to suffer from migration, from migrants, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yet, I love that. I love the people who are doing that. Can we also think about a narrative? That’s the question. That’s what the book’s about, really. I don’t say it’s the narrative. It is not. But I’m just saying, can we enter a different narrative? For us, all of us, that actually allows us to listen, to connect as opposed to know.

Mike DiGirolamo (narration): Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your co-host, Mike Delamo. Bring you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today on the Newscast, we speak with Paul Hawken. Hawken is a globally recognized environmental advocate, author, activist, and entrepreneur. He is perhaps best known for his book Drawdown: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming, published in 2017, and for being the co-founder of the nonprofit organization, Project Drawdown. In this conversation with co-host Rachel Donald, Hawken discusses the issues related to his latest read Carbon: The Book of Life, which generally posits that the climate movement’s messaging is largely making the fourth most abundant element in the universe a misunderstood and undeserved villain. Hawken explains how unnecessarily using jargon and fear to motivate action is ultimately not a recipe for meaningful change and why humans respond best to and innately tend towards connection and community, and ultimately see ourselves not as distinct from nature, but an inextricable part of it.

Rachel Donald: Paul, welcome to Mongabay. It is such a pleasure to have you here with us on the show.

Paul: I’m delighted to be with you. Totally delighted.

Rachel: Now, I’ve had the sincere pleasure of getting to grips with the book that you sent over that is due to be published soon, Carbon. And before we get into the interview, I just want to say that this is such an astoundingly lyrical, empathetic considered analysis and not even analysis, but sort of unfurling of the great complexity of the crises that we’re in and also Indigenous wisdom and also science and also just the sort of vaguely untethered feeling of what it is to be a human today, experiencing the sand shifting under our feet. So well done. It was so lovely.

Paul: That’s music to my ears because, as I’m sure writing is hard. It’s not easy. Yet there’s something transcendent about it. I think if you’re writing in a receptive way as, opposed to reportage, you here’s the facts, no adjectives and because it’s about receiving and there’s two parts of that. One is that you scan you’re scanning to understand the zeitgeist of the world. What are people. Thinking, what’s happening? Why are they saying this? Why are they doing this? What are they, retreating from? What are they, why are they aggressive? what do they read themselves? And so forth. And so, you’re trying to write to the world as it is. At the same time. You’re writing because the world as it is really screwed up. So, there’s that thing where you are trying to bring in ways of seeing, because it’s all about seeing. It starts with how you see the world and see self. And so, there’s that integer process of, looking out, looking in, looking out, looking in and it’s a very enjoyable thing, actually, but because it’s a discovery, always, of the extraordinary people and science and discoveries and understandings and wisdom that’s in the world today. As well as the perfidy and the selfishness, the greed, the hate, the delusion, so forth. You’re looking at all scanning it all and trying to find a way through that. Another person, to say, hi, my name’s Paul. What’s your name? And when you meet somebody, you don’t know, and it’s cause when you write, you’re trying to meet someone you don’t know.

Rachel: That’s beautiful. When you write, you’re trying to meet somebody you don’t know. When I lived in France in my early-ish 20s, mid twenties, I suppose, would be more accurate. It was, I was learning a language, right, for the first time as an adult, and I was really astounded to discover, after some time that I could speak French pretty fluidly, definitely hold my own in a political discussion, but I couldn’t really read it. And I could kind of read it, but I couldn’t really read it. And so it kind of got me thinking about how language is different when it’s spoken and written. And then I started to think about English, and it really helped me engage with my native language in a different way. And I started to. not only think about but really feel how written English and spoken English is so, different. And everything that you’re saying there, this kind of like capacity for transcendence, discussion discovery, seeking, even though writing is such a solitary act in many ways, I do feel that we’re kind of living in a culture now. whereby it’s almost easier to meet in the written word than it is in the spoken word. Something has happened to the way in which we’re engaging with spoken language, or possibly even just as simply with each other. That, that, how do I put this? Of course, transcendence is still possible, but the miracle of written English is the ability to sort of say a thousand things at once in one sentence, or point over there while looking over here in the opposite direction, or imply in a way that suggests and invites the reader into joining that journey with you and kind of collaborating, almost. And that is a very tricky thing to do in the spoken word, whereby people are just Desperate for information, because as you say, the world is so screwed up and they want a sense of certainty. And it seems very well that actually the thing maybe we need to let go of is the idea that we can be certain about anything right now.

Paul: Yeah, no, I mean, it’s an extraordinary period in human history. In that sense, the English language, I thought it’s got, the most words of any language. It’s a polyglot language. It’s made of French. German and all sorts of different Irish, and Nordic languages and it’s all mixed together, and which is why it’s so difficult for a non-English speaking person to really learn it, I mean, and I’ve learned other languages as have you, and they actually have a sense of order to them, and the pronunciation rules are a…I, when I was young, very young, six months old, I had the youngest recorded case of asthma. And so, I had asthma all my life until I was 18. I mean, later I could take medication, and I could be an athlete and run and so forth, but I had to take medication. But when I was little, I didn’t have any medication, thank god. And so, my mother put me in bed, and I would be. There was no TV. And thank god there wasn’t. And I won the bookworm contest at the library. Paste a little thing in the bookworm for every book you’ve read and so forth. But to me, I was like, that was a new world. That was a world. And imagine, you just sit in bed, and you can see out the window, but you can’t go outside, you can’t do this, you’re not supposed to do that, and so forth, and so you open a page and whew, and so out of that, I think I grew a really great respect. And my mother tells me. I don’t remember. She said when I was six or seven, I said, I’m going to grow up and be a writer. I said that to her. I don’t remember that at all. and even when I was an adult, in my twenties I didn’t even think about being a writer. It didn’t even occur to me. And yet here I am with my 10th book. And every time I do it, I think I’m not a writer. I’m writing, I don’t think I’m a writer. I don’t think that way at all. But I’d love, right?

Mike (narration): Hey listeners, thank you as always for tuning in. I want to take a moment to say thank you to the people that have reached out to me, to voice their appreciation and their comments on the show, which is becoming more and more frequent. It truly does make me inspired to hear this from you. So if you’re looking for other ways to help out the podcast, I encourage you to donate to us at mongabay.com by clicking the button in the upper right hand corner of the screen. As a nonprofit, this is how we are able to bring you the interviews and the independent journalism that you’ve come to enjoy. If you can’t donate, leaving a review on the podcast platform you’re tuning in on really does make a difference, and it helps elevate the profile of our show. Thanks so much. And now back to the conversation with Paul Hawken.

Rachel: It sounds like you are kind of practicing what you preach, then, because in the chapter on language, one of the things you point to is that English is a very noun-based language, and that most Indigenous cultures around the world have a verb-based language. And to sort of identify as a writer would be sort of antithetical to cultures that are always in movement and always in a relationship, but to identify as writing would be correct.

Paul: Yeah. Well, I mean, the thing about verbs is verbs about relationships and nouns are about separation.

Rachel: Could you go into that a little bit more?

Paul: Sure. I mean, the language exploded out of the enlightenment and, the birth of Western science. And with a microscope and all sorts of other observed tools and observation methods and so forth, the Western settler colonist culture began to identify all the bits and pieces that make up the Earth. Whether minerals, whether animals, whether behavior even, and name it. Have a name. This is a name. This is a name. And you have to name it something if you’re going to be a good scientist because if it’s this, it’s not that. If it’s this, it’s not a that. And to make those distinctions and they become more fine and more finite even as science progresses and gets on. You had a cold. You have a virus. It’s not a virus anymore. It doesn’t exist. several million different viruses, and that’s science and it’s good science and it’s amazing science, but also it loses relationship completely. It doesn’t see the world as connected, it sees the world unintentionally as disconnected or separate, maybe is a better word. And so that sense of separation and disconnection from nature has caused us as species, Homo sapiens to see nature as different. As separate, as distinct, as other, and if you think about it, I mean, that was just sort of emerged into us, from our teaching, our classes, our books what we hear, what we see, and the fact is that sense of othering, seeing the world is this and that, and so forth, really informs us. What I call it the climate movement and has really, I think, derailed it in many ways because it is about othering the climate. I put that in hashtag, quote marks in my, with my fingers. I mean, and the atmosphere, as if the biosphere and the atmosphere are two different things. Right. And we talk about climate crisis, and I just want to assure everybody the climate cannot have a crisis. It’s impossible. there is a crisis, don’t get me wrong, but it’s right here on Mother Earth, and we did it. And so they, if you want to focus on a crisis, you know where to go, just look at yourself, look in the mirror, look outside, see what you do, and see how you communicate with the rest of the world, and the rest of the world being the living world, not just other people, both. And but, so the Indigenous languages are so interesting because, I mean, it’s been said many times that, Oshawa people don’t have a word for nature. Well, they can’t. It’s just, they don’t see it as nature. It’s their nature. And so is the leopard, and so is the beetle, and so are the fish, and so are the plants, and we mocked that, and we mocked also the idea that they had the capacity to listen, to hear plants. And what plants were saying and what other creatures are saying or say and speak and relate to and that was, as we came in colonists, and settlers, that was just dismissed as pure ignorance. And now, what I love about where we are right now is that we have Western science and a whole batch of new scientists, women and men, Who understand, Western empirical science, but actually are working with Indigenous people around the world and listening to them. And you’re seeing sort of an integration of a worldview that is very, different than the one we were taught when we were young. And what’s beautiful about what’s being discovered, this is my way of looking at it, what’s being discovered is what we don’t know, not what we do know. So that. Is about, oh, it’s about, oh my gosh, really is, and, so forth when you see like Zoe Sanders work from the light years is just a spectacular book. You spend 8 years talking to botanists all over the world, really good about this, but talking about plants, really, and describing is amazing plants and all that sort of stuff. And at the end of the book, she’s talking, she’s listening to some really. Great botanists who remain, want to remain anonymous in a way, because what they’re saying collectively is the only way we can understand a plant, the only way is to describe it as a brain. It’s the whole thing, the roots, the tip. And with its 20 senses, we have five, and its capacities and abilities and how it functions in the world. It’s sessile, it can’t move around, we’re mobile. Sessile beings have different ways of adapting and surviving. And it’s been here a lot longer. It plants have been here a lot longer than human beings and homo sapiens and primates. And it’s learned a whole lot. And that’s just so gobsmacking. what do you mean a brain? it doesn’t have neurons, it doesn’t have a central processing unit, in TED or something like that. And so what we’re seeing is this, really extraordinary expansion of where we live. Who we are, our relationship to it, and in that, if plants are talking, they are, all 3. 4 trillion creatures on earth are talking every day, they’re, voicing, they’re communicating, and so we are now entering an era where we can listen. To the voices all around us, and so that’s a huge shift, from say Western science and the arrogance, frankly, of seeing the human being as better, separate, and distinct from all those other things out there called, animals and nature and bugs and pollinators and snakes and reptiles and so forth. We’re better, we have the extraordinary language, we do, but it doesn’t mean the intelligence that of the living world isn’t commensurate with ours in completely different ways than somebody said, are we smart enough to understand how smart other creatures are? That’s a good question.

Rachel: I think you’ve just revealed the true depth and breadth of your book as well by covering so much. And I really would like to impress the listeners. It is, it’s quite astonishing the amount of information that you’ve managed to so exquisitely sort of unpack. So many books would be about just one of the topics that you tackle. And yet each chapter is a wealth of both scientific information, Indigenous knowledge, analysis and written really, beautifully. Testament to, how you’ve just spoken there. I kind of want to stay on the language a bit. Because you said that something that English has done or scientific English has made has othered the climate movement or the climate movement has engaged in a form of othering with regards to communicating what the problem is. And I was really I’m amazed to read about nounism in the chapter on language in you spoke in particular about carbon neutrality and said that essentially, there’s a nounism is revealing just sort of how disconnected we are to the reality of how things actually work. Could you explain what nounism is and why that is such a good example?

Paul: Yeah. Nounism is naming, of course, but also once you name it, then you can verb it. But there is no such thing as carbon neutrality, there’s no such thing as decarbonization, there’s no such thing, this is scientific, this is science I’m talking about, not my opinion, there’s no such thing as net zero, there’s no such thing as carbon negative, there’s no such thing as carbon mineral, and, Recently, and I saw your post on on the energy transition. There’s no, we’re not in an energy transition. So we’re using language in a way that actually alienates people because this is jargon and look at if I have a severe, illness or something and I have to be operated on and in the hospital and those 2 surgeons, they’re going to use jargon. very, useful when you’re doing something quickly and you understand that you’re cut right through you’re not speaking complete sentences. Very useful. It is absolutely harmful when we’re trying to engage people around the world and understanding global heating, the cause and what. It is having and will have going forward in terms of people, place, water, food, security, children. I mean, we are horrible at that because basically we’re using basically jargon and fear and threat as a way to engage people. And the human, like it or not, we move to possibility. We don’t move that that way to, well, some people do. We may have trumped a president who actually seems to have moved people towards. destruction and lying, but the human nature isn’t that. The Homo sapiens are here because we cooperated apparently as opposed to other periods of our species iterations of our species. And so that is who we are. And so we have to be able to develop language and about where we are and what’s happening and where we wish to go. Which is commensurate, with that innate desire for us to connect and be families and love our children and be in wonder and be in awe and be secure and we don’t have that in a climate movement. And again, it’s not like whistling past the graveyard and saying, okay, well, no, those are problems, but let’s talk about, what we can do. It encompasses that. It is aware of that. It is certainly hugely aware of that because people are being impacted by it every single day right now in front of us. But we have to create a climate movement that is actually the human movement. And the human movement Is humans that are not separate and distinct from nature. the verbs fight, tackle, combat, climate change, look at these are male war verbs, okay? This, I say, it comes from my gender, and I, that, and that comes from, thousands of years of war, and fighting, and combat, and so forth, like we’re going to combat that. Othering, again, you can’t fight, tackle, and combat. You’re Don Quixote if you’re doing that. you’re just, it’s fruitless, stupid ignorant, and also off putting because of that othering language. And the thing is, Rachel, I mean, othering the natural world, othering people, othering places, othering, is the cause of the problem. That’s why we’re in the situation we’re in, and we’ve been selling the living world off to the highest bidder for 500 years since colonists descended around the rest of the world in their oak ships.

Rachel: I completely agree with you. Equally disturbed by the, narratives, the language surrounding the movement. I’m very worried for the day when the public. is sort of told that actually the things that were promised cannot be achieved. And that sort of taking the pretty meager breeze that we have anyway, out of the sails of the entire movement. And I think that we have precedence precedent for that. I’m going to use an anecdote as evidence , which I know isn’t in evidence, but I think this will be a story that many people can recognize. But I had an encounter recently with a stranger that two strangers that became an eight hour long debate to Canadians. And they have sort of shifted from, being sort of Democrat leaning, if you will, to Trump leaning in the space of quite a short period of time. And one of the things that they referenced was COVID, in that we were told that X, Y, and Z was the case that we needed. to do X, Y, and Z and give up our freedoms and whatever. And then it turned out that the science was wrong. So if they told us this thing about the science, why should I believe anything about the climate movement? and I sort of, first of all, I mean, that was fascinating, but I worry about the future when people go, well, you, but you said that we could be carbon neutral. You said that we could just transition to renewable energy. Uou said. So now why am I going to listen to you about anything else when it comes to justice? Because of course the climate movement is, and we are talking heavily here, Western climate movement, but even the Western climate movement is trying to pull in strands of justice. But it always comes sort of secondary to. tackling or solving the problem. And so are people really gonna, are we creating the conditions for people to care more about the rights of the world that they see as separate or even other human beings when they are going to feel like their freedoms were even further impinged and they were lied to? It’s a recipe for disaster, I feel.

Paul: Yeah, well, I go back to first cause or first element. I feel like there’s a famous parable. The river goes way back in different traditions. All we have to Bishop Desmond Tutu talks about it and which is you’re by the river and then you see these people being washed down the river, children or whatever, they’re drowning, they’re flailing around, they can’t swim, and you go in and you save them and then, oh, there’s another one. Then you go in and save that person, there’s a group of you, what’s going on and so forth. And finally, someone says, can we just go upstream and find out who’s throwing them in instead of rescuing them? And I feel like what we need to do is go upstream. we need to go where the causes are. Instead of focusing on just the cure, if you will, if that’s the right proper word, and by focusing on that, we actually threaten people. They feel threatened in their livelihood, or what their assumptions are, sometimes their religion who knows? But it’s a language that does not bring us together. Upstream can and does, because it’s causal. And that’s where we can say, yeah, that’s not working for us. Okay. And so what are we going to do? I mean, it’s not like I know you don’t listen up, which is kind of what, I mean, some of the best writers around the planet is still a little bit of that. I’ve spent. I know I’ve studied, I’ve listened to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, wonderful people I know, I’m very well, they’re friends, but I’m just saying, as literature, it doesn’t engage in the broader sense, and the thing, it is a crisis, so let’s be real about that, but the, meaning of crisis is. The original meaning of crisis is actually a turning point is actually in a disease, that’s what came from medicine, actually a crisis, but actually it’s indicating a point of decisions, so it says, This is time to make a decision, that’s what crisis means. And so, we are in a crisis and decisions have to be made, but decisions can’t be made in the pall of ignorance, And we, I, myself as well, by the way, so I’m not pointing fingers. Have been in our enthusiasm and our shock at what’s going on and the ignorance of, political leaders and in the, the selfishness and greed, the capitalist, corporate system, we have girded ourselves to come out as spokespeople for, other people, those who suffer, those who are going to suffer from migration, from migrants, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yet, I love that. I love the people who are doing that. Can we also think about a narrative? That’s the question. That’s what the book’s about, really. I don’t say it’s the narrative. It is not. But I’m just saying, can we enter a different narrative? For us, all of us, that actually allows us to listen, to connect as opposed to know, and, and not that we don’t know a lot, we do, we’ve studied, we’ve thought, I mean, I listen to you religiously to learn. Okay. That’s a compliment. You can take it any way you want. that’s who we are. We’re human, but can we have a narrative, that is absolutely enthralling? This really? I live here. That’s what’s happening. Is this possible? And we can’t do that in the world of the modern media because it’s an amygdala media. It’s about lighting up the amygdala. It’s about click throughs. It’s about scaring the shit out of us. It’s about, and glamour too, which also is enthralling to us. It’s looking at something bright and shiny and what is it? That’s glamour. And you mix glamour, and fear and, threat together and stir well, and you have all the major media. And that’s what people are feeding us, eating that. And so, what carbon, the book of life, the subtitle is more important than the title in some ways, but the book of life is saying, guess what? There is an extraordinary world around you. It’s talking to you and you can engage with it, and what it’s saying is fascinating. And I remember once meeting Ben Zander, who’s the conductor of Boston Symphony, and he, he’s conducting, and I was like, what? Ben Zander, a group of executives is conducting. Singing happy birthday. it was actually, that story is funny because he’s, he said, is anybody here have a birthday today? One person raised their hands. come on up, sit here. And he said, okay, let’s sing happy birthday to Ralph, and everybody had a birthday too. I see some Americans singing, happy birthday to You and it’s and, then they finished the song and he said, you think Ralph is going to remember that? And he said, everybody stand up, let’s do this again. And he picked up his invisible batons and he said, I hit middle ear, whatever it was, and then he conducted it and the whole same room, same people put beautiful singing. They broke into harmony and it was like glorious. Same people, same song, right? So I asked him, Ben Zander once, what he did. he said, not conduct, that’s obvious. And he said, you know what I do is I listen to all the voices. And he said, leadership is listening to all the voices. And I never have forgotten that. And so I feel like we are in that situation. Can we listen to all the voices instead of being the voice?

Rachel: Oh god.

Paul: But listen, and that includes, the 8.4 million species and 3.4 trillion creatures that we live here with, our Earthmates.

Rachel: I completely agree with you. I have been feeling, since January in particular, since January in particular, and we all know what happened in January a sense of overwhelm would perhaps be the wrong word. I think I was in the camp that was pretty prepared for what was coming, and I’d read up about it. Not so overwhelmed of what the administration is doing, but a little bit overwhelmed of how the community is responding. Everybody’s got an answer. Everybody’s got an analysis. Everybody is desperate to throw their two cents in. And it’s making it very difficult to navigate a sort of cohesive collective response or analysis or understanding or whatever. And the effect is that we’re, I mean, we’re drowning each other out and there’s sort of no sense of, yeah, collectivism, which is really important. It is the absolute thing that we need. And then I sort of see that as well on exactly as you were saying, not just this desperate desire to kind of throw one’s voice in the human world, but also with regards to the more than human world. There is almost no listening happening with regards to what do the other species, and I do use that word, but what do our brothers and sisters who take their many forms want as well? What would be good for them? You talk about the principle, the Indigenous principle of thinking in seven generations of the past and seven generations in the future, and would this action be harmful or beneficial to that, that, that stretch of, time and the people who inhabit it? And we also need to be thinking about that for, everything that we share this planet with and for whom now we share a responsibility towards because of the immense power at our disposal. And when I say power, I really do mean sort of energy supplies and the capacity to transform raw materials. And I have noticed in the research that I’ve been doing on the ground with communities who are responding to the crisis in some way in organizing, the communities that are the most effective are the communities that listen, that have a really clear, conception of the web of life and themselves within it and not being at the center of it. But in just in the way a kind of sphere is made, there being no center, no middle point, everything being at the center together all the time, essentially all the points being center and they are happier. They have more longevity. They are managing to withstand multinational pressures better. And also, their analysis of sort of the global picture, what’s going wrong, how we got here, is acute and decentered. it’s colonialism, it’s capitalism, it’s human supremacy it’s, throw in some racism and sexism and all the different forms that these things take, violence, and then there you have it. And it’s not even about the white man. Or the oppressor. It is about these systems that have sort of colluded in and of themselves to facilitate the dominance of one group over another, which of course has then spawned all these ideologies. And what we need to get back to is a sense of kind of dismantling that hierarchy in every which way. And they make better activists. Having a real sense of feeling. for the big picture, provides the intellectual acuity to figure out the strategies that will last the generations. And I think that is so important to realize when you listen, you’re not taking time away from your own cause. You are adding to it.

Paul: Gosh, I, it makes, I’m in meeting, dispatches and I’m going, when I’m meeting, I’m going right on, sister, and what I mean by that is, is like people, I get, what can I do? Questions. I gave a talk last night, and what can I do? And people care and they want to do something. And I said, all change starts with, if you’re a human being as a single person, not as a group and when becomes two becomes four becomes so forth, I think. It comes from listening and so forth, but it comes from community. Community is the source of change, and what we have is, obviously systems that are destroying community everywhere and so forth, and the community starts with a single cell, a cell in our body is a community. It’s got 10 trillion atoms in one single human cell. And it’s a chemical thing going on in there and it’s pretty complex. And no one really understands no matter what they say. I don’t care because inside the cell ourselves is chemistry. It’s big chemistry. Get together have 10 trillion atoms, and carbon is the leader. It’s the flow of life inside the cell, but the cell is not alive inside. It’s alive outside. Okay, we’ll, stop. Say that again. It’s just chemistry inside. But in, in the whole cell is a living entity. It has sensors and is communicating to other cells and likes to hang out with other cells and make things like us. And plants, beings, and, but that’s what all life starts as community, and that’s community. And so, when we, I said, don’t go upstream, can we go upstream? How does change originate? And your description of what’s going on in the capacity and the ability of the, I don’t want to, groups, tribes, cultures, villages, et cetera, et cetera, the different nouns, it’s just exquisite because that is exactly what is happening. And that’s the only way, because we are seduced by the idea that there’s a top-down solution if people get together, all these leaders of all these environmentalists, all these scientists, get together in Azerbaijan or Brazil and the conference of the parties and they hang out and then they get together and work all night long before the last day to hammer out an agreement that is never going to be actually acted on that somehow this is the way forward. And the thing is nature is not top down. No top-down solution works for nature. And so we’re pursuing this illusion, of control of vectors of change. And you, when you’re chronicling in right now, and again, we’ve never met, but I can tell you, I have met you. In that sense, because I read it and going Yep, yes, this do, that’s right. And, but you’re just giving it the dimension. But that’s for, the whole world. People think nothing’s happening, restore without the eeco, which is atric and the Crower lab, has 250,000 examples of people restoring life on earth. What? It’ll never make the New York Times. It’ll never make, Financial Times. It’ll never be in the Guardian. It’ll never be. Because it’s, each one of those small things is not a story. For a year. But it is the story. And that is that humanity is actually emerging to restore life on earth, and to heal those distinctions and separations and dichotomies that have made our life miserable.

Rachel: This is just so lovely. I was expecting a lovely conversation based on reading the book, but this is really, I think, exquisite. Is the right word. And I think we’re sort of gliding from lily pad to lily pad, if you will, and sort of feeling the roots of it through the soil, deep into the earth beneath. And

Paul: I’d be happy to be a frog, by the way, if I was going to lily pad.

Rachel: Yeah. Right. And I think we should, Move round to, and maybe this would be a really fine, lovely final point to kind of wrap up everything that you’ve been saying, but the title of your book is Carbon. Carbon is the element of life and it is being utterly demonized as the villain of a story in which human activity has destroyed. much of life’s carrying capacity and ability to renew itself on earth. But instead of, point our fingers to ourselves or, get to grips even with a lot of what you’ve been saying, such as the problems of our language and the fear that hounds and snaps at our feet living in this culture of competition, said an element is the problem and we will do mad things like remove it from the air, although that’s a linguistic fallacy, let alone a physical fallacy. What happened? What happened? What’s, why have they done this to carbon?

Paul: Well, I mean carbon is the only element that can, in chains, store energy and have memory. Oh, it’s called DNA. It’s called, metabolism and no other element can do that. And so what. We have done by isolating it and really look at a carbon atom from the physics point of view is basically, electron neutrons and protons, revolving around basically nothing, but huge magnetic force, which little subatomic particles come in for a million to the second dash in and out, I mean, honestly, there’s nothing there, but there is, and it’s hard to wrap. Your mind around that for, from a physics point of view, they can describe it, but the force that is involved with a single element, of is extraordinary, which is why you have atom bombs and hydrogen bombs and so forth, because you release that energy, which the sun does, when it fuses, hydrogen into helium, reduces these produces neutrons that, Are actually energy and light up this beautiful, star that we depend upon but by isolating it, by demonizing it, by in a sense, pointing to it as a problem, it does reveals the mindset that caused it, and also reveals the fact. A complete and utter dissociation with where you live, because you think if you can get carbon right, so you have things where billions of dollars are going to direct air capture, which is to suck the air back, not there already, but back into these complex machines. That basically separate four parts per 10, 000 of CO2, then split the C off from the O2, because we don’t want the O2, we want the C, which is carbon, and then to liquefy it, and then put it in pipes and pump it, sometimes many, miles away into geological formations, and okay, now, and even the IPCC, Rachel, says this is an important point. Part of solving, the climate crisis and quote marks and that’s okay. Got it. Now, what is CO2 in the atmosphere? It’s the product of combustion of coal, gas, oil, wood. You burn it. the C in the wood combines right with, oh, and becomes C O two. That’s great. And it’s lighter than, it goes up and it goes around in the air. Cool. And so the idea that. We can take that CO2, which is the product of entropy. It is entropy. When you burn something in this ash, that’s entropy. That’s the second law of thermodynamics. energy goes in one direction, doesn’t go back and forth. and so what we’re saying is that we’re going to set up these machines, the idea, the proposal is 20 million machines in the world. Run 24 7 to, to the year 2100 that are taking this air and transforming it into liquid carbon and pumping it away and, or maybe making something out of some of it. Okay. carbon fibers for 7 47 Dreamliners, whatever. But it takes a lot of energy to do that. And that energy, whether it’s renewable or, it, I mean wind turbines or, solar panels or this or that also produces entropy, of course, it’s the law. So we’re saying we’re going to use entropy to fix entropy. And if you’re a physicist, you’re laughing your head off because that’s like saying we’re going to take, I’m at your farm. I’m seeing cow patties everywhere from your cows. Let’s take these cow patties and make a cow. that is what director capture is saying to the world. And getting millions of dollars.

Rachel: Such a good analogy.

Paul: That’s what happens when you think of carbon as a thing. Instead of a flow. Because carbon is really a flow of life itself. And But that could only happen, that’s kind of the madness of science. science can be really crazy stupid, excuse me, with all due respect. And it can be brilliant. And that’s the madness of it. We’re seeing it in BECCS, bioenergy carbon capture systems to plant an area on Earth, that’s as big as India with, you can switch grass, it can be trees, it can be brush, anyway, basically cellulosic plants and then cut them down, burn them, For energy, for renewable energy, , and then capture the carbon that’s coming out of, the power plants that are burning and then replant again and replant again, and so forth. This is called max bioenergy carbon capture systems. And again, it’s like we’re saying we have to burn the size of India, in sequence every year for the next a hundred years in order to save the planet.

Rachel: It’s crazy.

Paul: This is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Scientists from around the world. This is consensus view, and what I would say to that is that there’s no such thing as consensus in science. It is not consensual. That’s not science.

Rachel: I mean, those poor scientists have huge forces pressing down upon them and penetrating their research and shuffling around the conclusions so that the, governments themselves can then come to consensus. So that is a profoundly analogy that science is non consensual. Paul, I could talk all day, I think, and I hope one day we will have the chance, but I think we should leave it there for now. Can you tell everyone when your book will be out and when they can buy it?

Paul: Yeah, you can buy it now. It got, it came out two days ago,

Rachel: Of course. Hey, congratulations. That’s amazing.

Paul: Yeah, it came out, and I mean, it officially comes out in ANZAC here in Australia, New Zealand in a couple months, and then in the UK in August I mean, it’s being sold all around the world already, people buying it from different countries, but that’s when it comes out, and then it’s followed by two more books. We can talk about that offline. It’s, actually it’s meant to spur, I mean, it’s meant to create kind of a trilogy is some people say, well, draw down and then regeneration. This is a trilogy. And I think that’s true in a way. But actually this is the beginning of a trilogy and, at my age, that’s probably the best I can do before I go. And yeah, anyway, I just say thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I really mean that. I’m not just because I’m appearing. I’m saying thank you. Thank you all the time. And I never thought I’d get to appear with you at all. So it wasn’t like that and to be with you to see you to meet you and listen to you. It’s just really such a treat and such a treasure. Thank you.

Rachel: Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure speaking with you. You’ve got my brain going off on all sorts of things and I’m pinching things to reference in my own work. So expect to see your name in ink. This is really astonishing. And as I said, your book is really astonishing and I thank you for, what you’ve done. It’s a tremendous feat and I think it is the words that the world needs to read right now. So thank you for your work.

Paul: Thank you, Rachel.

Mike: I had to listen to this conversation multiple times. I have actually lost count how many times I’ve stopped and started and re-listened to it. but I had to listen to it a lot. for you listeners that are listening to us talk right now, I encourage you to do the same thing. Go back and re-listen to this, because it’s just a lot of information to take in and the things that Paul says, I think you should turn it around in your head and look at it and examine it. I certainly had to, and, yeah, I didn’t make one note on this audio. I’ll say that much. I didn’t insert one note. and that was because I was going back and checking and everything that was said, but yeah, I’m not sure what more I can add to this conversation that, you two already didn’t say. I kind of feel like it speaks for itself, this thing about a noun was something I thought was interesting and we have to call things, names because it’s useful in like a scientific sense, but it can also alienate people, and I thought that was a pretty good point. There is this video campaign that was, of comedians explaining, scientific stuff to people in in pretty straightforward, no-nonsense type terms. and. I don’t know how big of a difference it made, but watching it, you’re like, this is digestible, easily understood information. And they were explaining like climate change and the climate crisis. and it kind of reminds me of other comedians that do that. like people at the Daily Show, Ronnie Chang, when he talks about climate change, it’s. Really funny, but it’s also really, it’s also accurate and it’s easily digestible because you’re laughing at the situation. And for some reason that is disarming, that it disarms you, it allows you to absorb the information a little bit easier. so, I think that’s really relevant and good point.

Rachel: You’ve just triggered a thought, Mike. I think that there are lots of campaigns that are effectively normalizing the conversation around climate, which is really important. it should not just be, sequestered in the realm of science or politicians, especially not politicians ’cause they don’t know what they’re talking about. And it needs to be depoliticized. And that’s what these campaigns do really, well. I’ve just wondered, right. If we have a language that is based on nouns, is that why it’s really difficult to assess what to do with information once you get it? Because normalizing a conversation around the climate crisis, the planetary crisis, that doesn’t tell people in and of itself what action that they can then take to do something about it.

Mike: I mean, that’s a great point, Rachel. I totally agree with you. I mean it, but I think the. I think it’s wonderful to try and do things, to try to tell people, like things they can do or actions they could do. but at the same time, it’s important to acknowledge that, your action alone isn’t gonna claw back the climate crisis, the environmental crisis. And that’s where I feel like personally, I have difficulty communicating this to people without depressing the heck out of them because it’s well. We’re sort of at the mercy of what our world leaders are doing with, our, systems and our resources and, how we commune and collaborate with each other. We’re sort of at the mercy of that. And when people hear that, I feel like the response, understandably, is like depression and despair. and. Kind of striking that balance. yes, but you can also make your voice heard and communicate yourself to your representatives and tell them you want x, y, z reforms. That’s a lot to say in one breath. It’s a lot to communicate in a soundbite that’s the difficulty there.

Rachel: I’ve been thinking about how different places are, at different points of the timeline recently. and that for listeners, those of us who sort of come from hail from the global north or live in the global north, that sense of like enclosure is really quite profound and it’s incredibly difficult to extricate ourselves. From systems. And as I’ve been traveling through, Latin America recently, kind of working with communities who are doing things about the system, and it’s really interesting to see how, because they’re not further down. The track of TechNation, digitization, w wage slavery, even. They still have this room to maneuver. So, it is actually possible for people to get together and actively resist or even develop alternatives that have a huge impact locally where they are. And I do think that’s connected to the fact that the, where they are is like healthy ecosystems. I think that’s really important. Whereas for the majority of us who kind of exist in either urban areas or not even urban areas, but you know, rural areas that have been absolutely sort of, dominated by and extracted from by these systems of extractivism and capitalism exploitation. How like with the disappearing of the territory comes, the disappearing of the language for, alternatives and like the disappearing of action that one can take to, to do something. and I, don’t really have an afterthought of that, but just that’s something I’ve been considering recently sort of comparing the. Different communities capacity for action, and it might be really surprising for people to learn that, folks with much less resources than them are actually achieving amazing things. They’re still kind of only dreamt about in parts of the world where we might be incredibly like financially wealthy, but pretty short on ideas.

Mike: I mean, this is an excellent observation, Rachel, and I think. It just goes to show that for those of us who live in wealthy industrialized nations, it’s really important to decenter ourselves from the conversation and look broadly at the world in the different stages that different nations and peoples are in and ask ourselves these questions for example. I did an entire podcast series on the island of New Guinea, new Guinea is, in a spot where it is 70% roughly forested. It’s mostly forested and the people that live on the island, do need critical life infrastructure that us in wealthy, industrialized parts of the world enjoy how they go about building that infrastructure, though is, a bit of a fork in the road and can be done in ways that don’t become a net negative on the environment. They can, they’re in, the spot where they can choose to do it differently than say we did in the United States. And so how those kinds of conversations are the ones that I, I’m really interested in, having and looking at and seeing how other nations are looking at the mistakes made in other countries and deciding to do things differently.

Rachel: Yeah, totally agree with you. And also how, there’s that sort of, Intuitive awareness and also, self-educated kind of knowledge of what’s gone wrong and the most, quote unquote, developed parts in the world and how we can do it differently. And then also how the forces of capital and imperialism are moving in to try and, dismantle those conversations as they’re happening and ensure that things go a certain way. I mean, I think we can all remember. the, was it the most recent cop or the cop before? How there were those documents leaked about how the, the state oil company was essentially strategizing about how to get the continent of Africa hooked on fossil fuels because they recognized that likely a lot of their Western consumers were going to disappear over the, coming decade as they move more to electric vehicles.

Mike: Yeah.

Rachel: There’s a lot of forces at play in the world, aren’t there?

Mike: Indeed. I don’t know if I have much more to say than you, than has already been said. I was gonna mention something about the English language and noun, and it presents like this inherent sort of like barrier challenge to science communication. I just think that is like a feature of it. and it makes for what should be a nuanced conversation harder to have in some regards.

Rachel: Yeah, I completely agree with you.

Mike: Again, like you said this well. There’s not much more I can add to it. Oh! I did wanna say this. I might cut this out of the audio, but I wanted to get your opinion on it, There was like a study done, it was published, by a researcher in psychology at Leeds Beckett University. Humans are not inherently selfish. we’re, we are hardwired to work together. and the evidence for this is spread out over many, years. it’s only like in recent human history where you sort of have this competition for resources come into play. And that’s not how we are inherently. And I thought that was like a really interesting thing because Paul was talking about how we’re, hardwired for community and connection. and I think he’s right and I think that the research bears that out. And we often hear in popular media like concepts of an alpha person or an alpha male or what have you, which is also not a scientifically accurate term. since the term alpha comes from a now debunked term of the alpha wolf, which the researcher on that. Even said, Hey, I was wrong about that. Don’t use it. we’re not inherently competitive. We’re, inherently, communal. I find that really interesting. I always knew that myself. but it was really validating to see that as the years passed, the research showed it.

Rachel: I have some thoughts on that. I think that there have been other studies as well that have interviewed people from all over the world and shown that generally speaking, human beings tear to share the, same core values no matter their culture, those being like altruism and community and quality time, et cetera, however, I’m wary of saying that anything is inherent because. The dynamic of being a sort of living organism is that of, being impacted by and impacting one’s environment. And I do think that it is really important to acknowledge that we now live in a population that has, Gone from like 2 billion a hundred years ago to 8 billion today and 1 billion prior to that. So we are living through an age of, it’s not yet resource scarcity. And, de growth has shown that there are enough resources to go around, but, we are gonna have to kind of actively manage our resource consumption for the very first time in human history. Right.

Mike: Yeah.

Rachel: And so what happens to human beings when confronted with a sense of resource scarcity, there’s sort of cultural stories from tribes around the world, that when resource scarcity would set in, they, would go somewhere else. there’s a myth in Pap New Guinea that, only the violent cultures remain essentially because it was, tribes that hailed from other lands that ran out of resources and then arrived on the shores of this incredibly resource rich, Papua New Guinea and then soldered all the natives who had so much, they were just incredibly generous and had never known violence. it was my source in Papua New Guinea, an MP that, that told me that myth. so I think it’s one of those things that like when looking at the data, yes, wonderful. That’s a story that we need. We are empathetic. We are generous, we’re we are altruistic, but also the conditions of our environment impact our behavior because we’re living and so how to then take those lessons and think about, the coming decades.

Mike: Yeah, no, excellent point. Rachel. the researcher that wrote about this, which I read in the conversation, actually pointed out that there was a, I believe it was, a situation where a group of apes were like, sort of given these harsh conditions, not given, but they encountered harsh conditions where their resources were, scarce and they were competing with another neighboring group of apes, and they all fought with each other..

Rachel: Yeah.

Mike: So it was the imposition of these harsh conditions created the conflict but yeah. Excellent point.

Rachel: Sorry, but hang on, that’s, sorry. But that’s just an excellent point as well. Thinking about how we could literally create a nonviolent world by being very mindful and deliberate of the conditions that we create for society. I. if you give people enough to support themselves and support their families and have what they deem to be a high quality of life, then you could minimize violence all over the world, not only against the natural world, but between human beings. And if that’s not just a very self-evident goal to strive for, I, just dunno what is,

Mike: Well, I think it’s self-evident. I mean, this is the whole, this is the whole concept of like monopolies, right? When a, when like a company takes over a market, right? And they can just jack up the price and do whatever they want because they’re the only ones controlling it. that’s what causes like this whole, like the strife and the struggle that people are ex, it’s engineered, the scarcity is literally engineered. And they like it that way because then it means they make more

Rachel: Yeah.

Mike: It, takes something like a government to step in and break it up and be like, nah, you can’t do that.

Rachel: Hmm.

Mike: But yeah.

Rachel: Yeah, I’m totally with you. The flywheel I think it’s called, which is Amazon’s business model, have very low prices, attract people in, squeeze out your competitors by pulling in all of your consumers. Once you have them and all of the competitors are gone, then jam up your prices because nobody has anywhere else to go.

Mike: I didn’t know it was called the flywheel.

Rachel: Yep. We are all  flies to Amazon

Mike: God, I hope not. Well, Rachel, I mean, I don’t have anything else to add. I again, the conversation I feel speaks for itself. Important book.

Rachel: Really important book.

Mike: Important topic to talk about.

Rachel: Yeah, I, just wanted to sort of shout out again to the book. It was a phenomenal read. It’s so beautifully written. It sort of weaves together so many different parts of this crisis and does so expertly and with such a sort of gentle touch that I think it’s just a, an, important read for everyone to be honest. So go and get a copy

Mike: All right, well, I look forward to the next conversation, Rachel.

Rachel: See you on the next one.

Mike (narration): If you want to check out Carbon by Paul Hawken, you can find a link in the show notes. As always, if you’re enjoying the Mongabay Newscast or any of our podcast content and you want to help us out, we encourage you to spread the word about the work we’re doing here by telling a friend and leaving a review. Word of mouth is one of the best ways to help expand our reach. But you can also support us by becoming a monthly sponsor via our patreonPage@patreon.com slash Mongabay. Mongabay is a nonprofit news outlet, so even pledging a dollar per month makes a big difference, and it helps us offset production costs. So if you’re a fan of our audio reports from Nature’s Frontline, go to patreon.com/Mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast. You can also read our news and inspiration from Nature’s frontline@mongabay.com, or you can follow us on social media, find Mongabay on LinkedIn at Mongabay News, and on Instagram Threads, blue Sky Mastodon, Facebook, and TikTok, where our handle is at Mongabay or on YouTube at Mongabay tv. Thanks as always for listening.