Carbon

Advance Praise for Carbon

“Fascinating. . . . Illuminating. . . . Carbon ends with enchanting details about consciousness and ways forward as our climate changes.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“Paul Hawken invites us to see the connections that bind us to everything else on the planet. Carbon is an enormously hopeful book—hopeful about the creatures we live among and about our innate human capacities.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction

“Endlessly endlessly fascinating! Human beings, over the millennia, have come up with a thousand ways to carefully observe the world around us, and Paul Hawken has managed to collect and synthesize these observations–from the sweat lodge to the satellite—in a way that helps us see what now must be done. There’s information, and then there’s wisdom—and this book is a compendium of the latter.”
—Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature

“Paul Hawken reminds us that this problematic molecule is the basis of life itself. Carbon, his very readable synthesis of life on our heating-up, beaten-up planet, begins with the molecule. . . . Hawken’s book contains much excellent natural history, including the good news that when we treat Earth right, it regenerates itself, even rather quickly. . . . The road to restoration begins with a fairly accurate assessment of reality, no matter how complex. Carbon gives us that. It also gives us reasons to hope.”
—Priscilla Long, The American Scholar

“Recently I asked a number of people what they thought of when I mentioned the word carbon. Carbon credits said one, though he didn’t know what they were. Coal and charcoal said another. Diamonds? queried a third. Yes, and so much more. Paul Hawken, writing with his usual clear and often poetic style, explains that without carbon our planet would be a dead moonscape, devoid of life. Carbon: The Book of Life is absolutely fascinating, and I urge you to buy and read it.”
—Jane Goodall, author of The Book of Hope

“Paul Hawken’s Carbon is a profound exploration of the most essential element of life and its impact on the planet. This book is not just about the science of carbon; it’s a call to action and a vision for how we can shift our thinking to embrace a regenerative, life-affirming path. With a deep understanding of ecology, economics, and the interconnectedness of all living systems, Paul masterfully illustrates how carbon’s journey through our biosphere is both a warning and an opportunity. For anyone passionate about the health of our planet and our collective future, Carbon is an essential read that will inspire and empower you to become a steward of the earth and a champion for change.”
—Mark Hyman, MD, author of Food Fix and host of The Doctor’s Farmacy Podcast

“Carbon offers the heart and wisdom we need to live and love and repair our world in these wild times. Brilliant, scientific, poetic, warm and caring, visionary and tender, this is truly good medicine and nourishing food for our lives and the earth!”
—Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart

“Paul Hawken’s powerful new book mirrors the profound beauty that can save our world. Most books view carbon as a culprit. Hawken reminds us that carbon is the source of all planetary life. If you are looking for hope—for a way past climate denial and despair—Carbon is a must-read.”
—Van Jones, CNN Host and New York Times bestselling author of Beyond the Messy Truth

“Paul Hawken writes beautifully about the situation we face here on our planet. Using carbon, life’s central element, as a major theme, his eloquence and point of view are insightful, powerful, and important.”
—Jeff Bridges, Academy award-winning actor and co-author of The Dude and the Zen Master

“Deep into Carbon: The Book of Life, I felt that Paul Hawken has created a perfect balance between HUGE planetary blessings and HUGE planetary threats. I’ve loved all of his books, but this one is a bible for survival I’m finding so desperately needed that the writing strikes me as beyond belief, transcendent, and dazzlingly poetic because Mother Earth and her miracle element, carbon itself, are dazzlingly poetic. This work left me bursting with fresh hope.”
—David James Duncan, author of The River Why and The Brothers K

“Imagine putting on a pair of glasses that suddenly revealed the world as a fabric woven of miracles. Carbon reads like an extended love poem about life’s most basic chemical. Here, ‘Carbon’s dance of life does not take sides; it is never right or wrong.’ In Paul Hawken’s telling, carbon might just be the sexiest element, ‘available, loyal, and fickle in its versatility.’ In Hawken’s hands and in these pages, the chemistry is always right.”
—Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel and Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

“Paul Hawken’s Carbon: The Book of Life has created what might be termed the first spiritual encyclopedia of the Earth highlighting and blue-printing the myriad umbilical connections between life and non-life, harmonizing to make life on this planet the mysterious wonder that it is. That he manages the tour de force — using extraordinary amounts of empirically verifiable data to reveal how nearly every current proposal of “Planet Salvage” is a masquerade shifting power to the extractive and profit-seeking practices that created these problems in the first place — is nothing less than stunning. He demonstrates again and again, with myriad examples, how the Earth, herself, is begging us to recreate the original balances we’ve destroyed. With that simple practice, the Planet will recover without vast corporate schemes to pump liquid carbon into underground caverns or a ‘new generation’ of nuclear power plants. If you don’t believe he’s pulled this off, poetically, balletically, and with intellectual rigor, read this book and try to prove me wrong.”
—Peter Coyote, author, actor, Zen priest

“Hawken takes his readers on an awe-inspiring adventure through forests, galaxies, and the soil microbiome, reminding us that balancing the carbon cycle is not an abstract question of atmospheric chemistry but the intimate everyday matter of healing relationships with our wondrous kin in this living world.”
—Liz Carlisle, author of Lentil Underground and Healing Grounds

“The life-giving element carbon moves ceaselessly between the biosphere and the atmosphere. It can either unravel civilization or renew it. If one form of carbon, fossil fuel emissions, are not rapidly curtailed, our way of life will collapse. The must-read Carbon: The Book of Life describes how the climate crisis invites us to change our behavior, reject business as usual, and restore the health of our astonishing planet.”
—Michael E. Mann, author of Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from the Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis

“Carbon is the invisible thread that binds all living things. With lyrical prose and deep insight, Hawken reframes our relationship to nature and charts a path toward planetary healing.”
—Christiana Figueres, author of The Future We Choose

“Carbon is mind bending. It is the book carbon deserves. In his paradigm-shifting Book of Life, Paul Hawken is a one-man ‘wisdom dome’—brimming over with insight, hope, and, perhaps surprisingly, joy. For this dome to replicate and scale worldwide, Carbon must become a keystone text for tomorrow’s changemakers and leaders.”
—John Elkington, author of The Power of Unreasonable People

“I work on climate solutions, electrification, and the decarbonization of our energy economy because I had the privilege of being raised on reefs and rivers, farms and fields, mangroves, and bird hides. Only saving ourselves sounds like a miserable future. Carbon: The Book of Life endows the climate and environment movement with beauty, magic, majesty, and wonder, not just a carbon budget.”
—Saul Griffith, author of Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future

“Why is Carbon: The Book of Life a 21st-century scientific holy book? Inspired by the ultimate mystery governing chemical bonds, Carbon provides a moral compass for re-entering the natural flow of carbon cycles. The chapters engage, with prophetic and metaphorical concision, a profound understanding of the universe and how humanity has veered off the course of our 300,000-year foundation of Indigenous knowledge. Like other holy texts that guide what we eat and how we treat the natural world while decrying the injustices that humans have wrought on each other, the book also describes the new paths we must take to restore our rightful place as gentle stewards and keen observers of nature. With detailed, awe-filled passages of descriptions of organisms (from nearly microscopic oceanic copepods to the massively networked fungal beings under the soil), Hawken delivers a highly literary, sacred landscape. Readers will come away from this ethical treatise inspired to pause in wonder and redirect our infinite creative flow toward a regenerative world.”
—Jessica Carew Craft, author of Why We Need to be Wild

“Sustainability needs to go beyond its stories of doom and apocalypse vs salvation and winning. Hawken eloquently gives a deep reframing of our current predicament: either modern humans start to understand the flows and stocks of carbon, or we don’t. Seen through the lens of carbon, humanity’s future pathways become obvious and less divisive.”
—Per Espen Stoknes, author of What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming

“An impassioned call for a return to traditional environmental stewardship. . . . Hawken sees reasons for hope that we will reverse our heedlessly destructive ways, even in the current political climate. . . . Profound cultural scope deepens Hawken’s exceptional science writing.”
—Kirkus Reviews