29. Carbon and the Grammar of Life

“To me, it opened up whole worlds of exploration, of how life exists, how it expresses itself. And I would say: we are at ground zero in terms of understanding the flow of life.”

- Paul Hawken

SYNOPSIS:

In this episode we’re joined by the renowned environmentalist, activist and author Paul Hawken to explore the lifeworld of carbon and its role as a vital agent in the story of life.

Paul speaks about the dysfunctions in Western language on how we speak about climate and nature, and why metaphors of war, control, and fixing actually perpetuate the very mindset that created the crises in the first place. We explore common traps we fall into, how to strike a balance between the poetic and scientific, and how to recarbonize, to bring life back and restore relationality in how we think, feel, and act.

This is a wide-ranging and intimate conversation on language, grief, science, reverence, and what it means to come home to Earth and to the deeper meanings of life.

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Paul Hawken has written ten books published in 50 countries and 30 languages, including five New York Times bestsellers: Blessed Unrest, The Ecology of Commerce, Drawdown, and Regeneration. His writings have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Resurgence, New Statesman, Inc., Boston Globe, Atmos, Grist, Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones, Orion, and other publications. He founded several companies including Erewhon, the first natural food company in the U.S. that relied solely on sustainable agriculture. He served on the board of Point Foundation (publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog), Center for Plant Conservation, Trust for Public Land, Conservation International, and National Audubon Society. He lives in Mill Valley, California in the Cascade Creek watershed with his wife, coyotes, gray fox, bobcats, redtail hawks, and pileated woodpeckers.

QUOTES:

• All those words — “fixing,” “fighting,” and so on — they make climate, the atmosphere, the situation itself into an object. Something we have to act upon, do something to. That’s the grammatical construction. And of course that objectification — seeing it as separate, distinct, other, somewhere out there — is precisely the thinking that got us into this situation in the first place. We’ve been othering the living world: other people, other cultures, other species.

• How could something that augurs the end of civilization as we know it — a phenomenon like global heating — after 50 years, be largely ignored by over 99% of the people on Earth? That is a failure of communication on an epic scale.

• “Who’s ‘we’? You don’t speak for me.” We have to learn not to use “we” as a default pronoun when speaking about what besets us.

• I did a calculation and realized that the amount being combusted — just in one second, by all the cars going both directions on the 405 in Los Angeles — is equivalent to the carbon and energy in a blue whale. Every second: a blue whale, a blue whale, a blue whale.

• The fact is, we are intimately, intricately, complexly interconnected. And the fact that we don’t see that makes it difficult to speak in a truly relational language.

• I think the shift has to be about creating more life — because it’s the absence and destruction of life that will determine our future.

• To me, it opened up whole worlds of exploration, of how life exists, how it expresses itself. And I would say: we are at ground zero in terms of understanding the flow of life.

• Grief is your ally. Because you don’t grieve for something unless you’ve loved it.

• Love can only come from one place: the heart. And the heart is the organ that tells you the truth, always. From the day you’re born to the day you die, and even after.

• The seeds are here. What’s happening with humanity across the globe is extraordinary, and you don’t hear about it because it’s like a single wildflower.

• I think there is, or there’s arising, a deep longing: Can I come home? Because for many people now, this doesn’t feel like home. And people want to go home.

• What I’m trying to do is a prayer. A prayer to what we hold sacred, and what we know is sacred. And though it’s been glossed over, forgotten, buried, that doesn’t mean we don’t know. I believe we do. We really do.

• The greatest lack we face on Earth isn’t food, energy, or water. It’s purpose. It’s meaning.

• I, Carbon, recommend: be very, very still…. and dance.

• Change happens in such mysterious ways. We often look back and say, “Oh, that’s what caused it.” But in real time, we don’t understand change, or its dynamics.

• I know less than I thought I did. And that’s wondrous.

• We don’t understand change. But we know what’s sacred.

LINKS:

• Drawdown (Website & Paul’s book)

• Regeneration (website resources with projects)

• Regeneration (Paul’s book)

• Francis Weller Course on grief

• Closing Poem: Love in a Time of Climate Change By Craig Santos Perez

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