Carbon

‘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!...There’s information, and then there’s wisdom—and this book is a compendium of the latter.’ * Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature * ‘Paul Hawken writes beautifully about the situation we face here on our planet. Using carbon, life’s central elements, 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 * ‘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 * ‘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 * ‘Carbon has created what might be termed the first spiritual encyclopaedia of the earth highlighting and blue-printing the myriad umbilical connections between life and non-life, harmonising 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 intelligent rigour, read this book and try to prove me wrong.’ * Peter Coyote, author, actor and Zen priest * ‘I work on climate solutions, electrification, and the decarbonisation of our energy economy because I had the privilege of being raised on reefs and rivers, farms and fields, mangroves, and bird hides…Carbon endows the climate and environment movement with beauty, magic, majesty, and wonder, not just a carbon budget.’ * Saul Griffith, PhD and author of Electrify, An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future * ‘Carbon is mind bending—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 change makers and leaders.’ * John Elkington, author of Tickling Sharks: How We Sold Business on Sustainability *