This is the most brilliant period in human history. So I’m not going around with a sackcloth going, oh man, we screwed up, and we’re, you know, that’s the end of this one. No, you know. Are there things ending that should Yes? Are there things ending that should not?

Yes. But the human beings right now on Earth are extraordinary. Let’s turn to that brilliance and imagination, creativity and care and compassion that is flourishing in the world, that it may be unseen and unknown and ignored by powers to be in corporations and doggos and all that sort of stuff. I don’t care about that. I care about when there’s arising, you know, and what’s arising is extraordinary.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host, I’ve got Paul Hawken on the show. Paul is a noted environmentalist. He has written eight books, five have hit the New York Times Best Seller list. His current book, carbon, the book of life, is coming out to very soon, and I think everybody should read it. Paul authored regeneration, ending the climate crisis in one generation.

That was published in 2021 became a best seller in one week. He’s been on The Today Show. Larry King NPR, Bill Maher, profiled in the Wall Street Journal Newsweek, WaPo and the Washington Post, has written for the Harvard Business Review, did a program with the King of Sweden. So you know, Paul, you’ve been everywhere. Thank you for being on the show.

You’re so welcome. You did mention Drawdown. I’m now Drawdown, and that is in, I think, 18 countries around the world, yeah.

Oh yeah. Project drawdown, yeah, yeah.

Project Drawdown. I have some criticisms of my own book, including that one, but, but nevertheless, I did offer it.

Yeah, I bought that one in the UN bookstore, one of the few climate books that is in the UN bookstore. So kudos to you for getting in the UN bookstore.

I didn’t do that. I didn’t do that. The thing I’m most proud of, that and regeneration, both were taught from fourth grade, hello to MIT graduate school. Wow. And I think it’s because I was raised a photographer. I was surrounded by artists, you know, when I grew up in Berkeley.

And I think it’s gonna be imagery, because the kids, you know, the fourth graders or higher, could immediately have response to an image, you know, and then that could invite them into text or, you know, understanding what they were seeing or what it meant, and something like that.

So I guess that’s why. But yeah, kids use it for plays and things like they used to act they become as refrigerator and a cardboard box can sign down say, talk about refrigerants.

Well, one of your books, ecology of commerce, was voted as the number one text for the business and the environment by it was like 67 schools. You know, that was written back in 1999 I was I wanted to comment on that and say, Hey, has that kind of promise come true?

Essentially, in that commerce has now driving the environmental revolution, in some respects, with electric cars, wind turbines, solar and the like. Have we seen what you were foreshadowing back in 1999 How far are we from kind of hitting that tipping point where, where business really takes up the the energy to take us to a cleaner world?

It’s an excellent question. You notice I titled it the ecology of commerce. I did not title it the ecology of corporations. The big, big difference. Commerce is ancient, sacred. I mean, it has brought people together for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and so far, it’s based on, you know, credit needs to believe, you know, it’s based on trust and based on exchange, based on connection corporations.

I would say the situation of business today is worse than it was my birthday called in the comments, much worse, because the tempo and rate and ubiquity corporate extraction of the living world is probably tripled since then, with no apologies at all to the living world, the children of the future, you know, current generation. So I would say it’s worse. Did the ecology conference have a big effect on students and things like that?

Yeah, I think it did, from what I can tell. But, but in terms of you just step back and look at the flow of capital, but we’ve seen since 1993 Is just a huge concentration of capital into fewer fewer hands and corporations and so forth. And that power is being exercised, certainly commercially, but politically, as we could see very well by now, in the top administration of billionaires.

And I just feel like that sort of infected the world, that there was sort of a thing, because people feel insecure, and their right to feel insecure, by the way, and so it almost like amplifies people’s sense of insecurity in the sense that they have to get things for them now, you don’t have to get more and safe and all that sort of stuff, because I think most people in the world do not feel safe. And so, you know, the ecology of commerce is really about understanding the connectedness between the living world, you know, in the commercial world, you know, and they’re inextricably connected.

You don’t have to act that way. You can act as if the you know nature is, you know, something else you know, distinct and separate. But my question would be, when did the divorce occur? And what was the separation agreement? I wasn’t really there. It might happen, you know, it looks like there was no separation agreement. We are totally objectifying the living world. And that thinking math is what caused the caused, and is causing the problem. That sense of separation, you know, like objectifying. And we do it with climate. We do it with climate.

We’ve objectified climate. We’ve objectified carbon. And that’s why I wrote carbon The Book of Life, which is like, hold on, hold on. No, that is the cause, you know. And the idea that some of the market is going to save us is also sort of a fascinating belief, because basically, the last 500 years, you know, we’ve been selling off the living world to the highest bidder. So we think that somehow we can use that mechanism, you know, to restart the planet. I would say, No, we can’t.

You know, you don’t sell off the living world to the highest bidder, or you don’t, and that goes to carbon credits and biodiversity credits, which is just to me, well intended. I appreciate it. It’s kind. There should be no such thing as a market. We should have every corporation bending over backwards to create carbon credits, you know, to create situation forest land use practices.

You know, the sequester carbon, no question about that. But somehow should they be selling it so that they can then run something else over here with coal, gas or oil, and then they equilibrate it. They’re equal. No, it’s, it’s, to me, with all the respect, it’s bizarre.

So what do you think is a better tool? It would a carbon tax be a better tool than carbon credits?

Carbon tax would be great because you would start to get closer to appreciating what the real prices we don’t pay the real price of carbon fuels, you know, coal, gas and oil. I’m not suggesting that there. I’m not suggesting that there is some lever, some mechanism, we just pull it hard enough. You know. What I’m suggesting is we don’t see the world in a way that’s going to help.

So a carbon tax is like, so this, you’re taxing it, but you’re still trying to grow as fast as possible, using more resources, and you’re paying a tax. Okay? The tax goes to who you know right now we would go to the Trump administration, yeah.

And for example, you know so or Victor urban in Hungary, or Mila in Argentina, or, you know, Maduro. I mean, just, you know, where’s that money going? Is tax, you know. So it does definitely give people a price signal. No question that’s good. They might change their consumptive patterns, but it doesn’t change the underlying system at all.

So tell us. So what is your thought as far as how we could shift the way people see the world, the natural world is not separate from themselves, but that they’re a part of it, and that polluting any part of the world is polluting our own backyard and poisoning ourselves. And unfortunately, that isn’t maybe the way we’ve been taught to to look at it.

Well, first of all, I want to say categorically, I’m not here to solve things. You know, I every time I turn around, somebody’s got a solution. And do it this way. Do it this way. Listen to me or follow this it’s like, I’m just I read it, I look at it, I there’s some good stuff there. The more profound changes have come from people like Bill McKibben, who Madison out of the program.

But when he wrote end of nature, that book lives on to this day. And it’s really about a way to see the world. If you don’t see the world in a way that is proximate to you, actually how it functions or what it is, if you don’t see the world as being inseparable to you, then you’re just trying to fix it, which is a very male verb, and I admire that. I was a Greece monkey at race motorcycles. I love to fix things, so I think fix is a good verb, but it’s a beat. You don’t fix the living world.

You don’t fix climate, you know. And you know that. Mentality is still placing it as something else, separate and distinct and other from you, instead of actually realizing, you know, the extraordinary, intricate, beautiful complexity of the human being. Of human being just one of 3.4 trillion creatures on the planet, by the way, so and we sort of like, oh yeah, there’s, you know, biodiversity. We have a word. It’s again, like, Stop, hold on. Yes, diverse, but so are we.

I mean, we had 40 trillion microbes that actively, you know, run the ship, our ship, our life. Without them, we die. Okay, you have one cell that has 10 trillion atoms in it, and 1.2 trillion of them are carbon or carbon. And inside our head our cells is basically it’s a chemical factory. It’s chemistry. It is not alive inside it is alive on the outside. Now just stop right there. Wait a minute.

You mean inside the cell is not technically alive? No, it’s chemistry, good chemistry, amazing chemistry. The cell itself is alive with sensors. So right there is kind of like a miracle that goes back, you know, obviously, a couple billion years. But the point being is that that’s the beginning of life, and all life exists in community, without exception.

There is no exception. It doesn’t exist some other place or how means and so to me, we’re just inundated with very sincere in many cases, but you know, ideas and memos and solutions, you know, out there that really still separate us appreciating who we are as an organism and how interdependent we are to all other forms of life. And as I said in the book cowboys, I mean individuals all exist in Cowboy Western, you know, I mean, we don’t exist.

Yeah, right, right. We’ve kind of been sold this bill of goods that we’re separate and that and that that keeps us kind of the divide and conquer is, if we’re all separate and individual entities, we kind of are easy to manipulate, then maybe we would be as a group, or seeing ourselves as part of a group or dependent upon all of the other members of our community.

I like to say a lot of times, hey, the chemistry set that we each have in our body is far more sophisticated than any pharma pharmaceutical company has, and so that we are able to change our own body chemistry through whether it’s working out, meditation, eating good food, much more, you know, effectively, than the pharmaceutical companies can do. And yet we haven’t focused our attention on that, because the more we could do it ourselves, you know, we don’t need the pharmaceutical industry as much.

Yeah, I mean pharma, Big Pharma, is really emblematic of an entire system that profits from pathology. It’s not just our bodies that are pathological, that need, you know, $4.5 trillion worth of health care and medicines every year in in the United States. I mean, we spend more money on health care and pharmaceuticals in the developed world, much more with much with the worst results. So what does that tell you? And I think that when we think about, you know, what do we do?

First of all, when you mention community, it’s the community of life, all of life, not just our community, not just the human community. And I think that is what’s missing in the conversation. And again, we have the biodiversity crisis. We have the climate crisis. Well, first of all, there is no such thing as a climate crisis. It can’t the climate doesn’t pay attention to what weakling can do. Okay? It’s the climate. The atmosphere can’t have our crisis.

And so when we have people saying, and say, on, we’re fighting, we’re combating, we’re going to tackle, you know, the climate crisis, I’m going really, I mean, it’s like, Don Quixote, come on. It’s like he might be on his horse with his thing going after the windmill, you know, because, again, it’s just emblematic of how we, you know, objectify the living world and so forth.

And now, once you’ve objectified, we can manipulate it, change it, or try to. And, you know, instead of saying, gosh, wow, we are a miracle, our bodies are miracles, and we live in a miracle. And I mean that in a religious way, or not in a religious way, any way that makes sense to you, it’s a miracle. And so appreciating that, gratitude for that, you know, respect for that, is the beginning of how we change where we are today. It and get back to a path, a pathway that is regenerative.

And that’s why we’re regeneration, that what we have to do on this planet is create more life, and that which does not really has to be addressed and stop and now, how do we do that and provide with, you know, the goods and services that people need? Well, let’s talk about 6 billion people don’t, do not get the goods and services they need. So that’s a good starting point, and a good, I don’t know how many, you know, millions and millions get way, way, way, way too much, you know, and taking so much for themselves.

And so that’s a good conversation to have, which is, do we want to be a we or not? If we don’t, well, it shows, I mean, because we’re not, but if we’re going to survive, if we’re going to thrive, if we’re going to stay here, if we’re going to be the civilization we keep praising ourselves to be, then we have to become a we with respect, dignity, purpose and meaning. I think the climate narrative, the climate movement, has failed miserably in its communication.

And I’ll throw myself in there with it, really. So I’m not pointing fingers, but, you know, it just, it just doesn’t pencil out, and it doesn’t engage. And so after 50 years of sort of broad understanding that is in science, in the media and so forth, you know a warming atmosphere, which is really what we’re talking about here. Lesson, we don’t know less than, way less than 1% of people in the world do anything at all every day. They do nothing younger 99 plus percent.

So if you were in a corporation, in a company, and you had an advertising program, you see, kind of after 50 years, we’ve only our market share has gone up that much. You see, let’s talk about how we’re communicating through our customers, you know. And so it’s the same thing. I mean, if the climate movement is gonna be effective, it’s gotta get out of its jargon shoes, you know, and like net zero. That. What is net zero? What does carbon neutrality mean?

These impossible things in the living world, you can’t have carbon neutrality. There is no net zero. And it’s like abundance is possible, but not net zero. So, I mean, things are possible that are extraordinary and wonderful, and we want to move towards but you do that by seeking cause and not a cure. You know, you don’t go in.

We have an allopathic climate movement, just like the pharmaceutical business. We’re going to change symptoms down, you know, down river, down we’re in stream. Instead of going upstream and say, well, what’s the cause?

You know, but are we going to make direct air capture machines, 20 million of them all over the world, to suck the air, you know, out and then absorb the carbon, liquefy the carbon, and then pump it in pipelines down to geological formations.

Do people actually think that’s a solution? And again, I’m not appealing to emotion here. I’m appealing to physics, you know, which is that we all know what entropy is. You know, you burn wood, you get ash. I mean, that’s entropy. Energy only goes in one direction. It doesn’t go backwards. And so everything we have in the atmosphere that has increased over the last 200 years from the combustion of coal, gas and oil, is entropy. It’s like the ash carbon dioxide is like the ash of combustion.

You know, the carbon in the wood or the oil is combined with oxygen, and may see, oh, two, okay, it’s up there. Fine. So you know the idea that we can fix, and I put that in quote marks, the entropy of the past by having entropy on the surface of the earth to suck in the air and liquefy on and ship it and so forth, is bizarre. It’s not like unquestionable, no, it’s not correct. It is bizarre, because you’re saying entropy doesn’t fix entropy.

You can’t make a cow out of a cow patty. Okay? It doesn’t work that way. And life works the other way, you know. So billions are pouring into this idea. Well, where does the energy come from? For DAC, it comes from, they say, Oh, well, use renewable energy. Renewable energy is not renewable, with all due respect, sunlight is current, yes, current solar income, okay, that keeps coming. It’s not even renewable. It just keeps coming. Great. Solar panels. Give me 25 years.

You got to throw them away. You know, a recycle. We don’t even recycle solar panels yet, you know, and same with wind turbines. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it. By the way, I’ve sold my house, you know, have no natural gas. I mean, I’m a good, good boy, you know, everything I do. My car is a hybrid, but it’s almost 15 years old. So the best thing I can. Do actually, is keep my car running and drive it very, very little.

So right now not to buy a Tesla, you know, which is huge imprint, a huge footprint, you know. So again, like, how do we get down this path where we thought that engineers and frankly, greedy entrepreneurs, you know, could figure out ways to fix, you know, global warming with technologies that actually don’t fix it as well.

Well, it’s, you know, it’s fascinating the way you’re talking about it, and that the climate movement is allopathic and kind of trying to treat the symptoms. And the net zero is not, you know, it’s, it could never happen, essentially, because we’re going to be creating some emissions.

No one talks about cars. There’s a wonderful thing about besmir Desmond Tutu, which talks about being on the river and seeing these bodies, kind of live humans, sort of being rushed down the river, and they can’t swim, and they’re, you know. And you go in and you save them, you know. And you know. Then you look, oh, god, there’s another one.

You keep going and saving people who are sucked and drawn down the river. And then finally, somebody says, Why don’t we go upstream and see who’s throwing them in?

Yeah, if we don’t go upstream, then we’ll never get to where we want to go if we don’t get the cause, there absolutely is no cure.

Well, tell us about your new book, carbon, the book of life. What encouraged you to write it, and what do you think the impact or what’s your hoped impact for it?

Well, hope is hopian is now when I much in my blood is training. Hope is the pretty face of fear. You can’t have hope unless you have a fear.

So what are you hoping? I’ve read that in your your friend Stephen Mitchell’s book, you know the Tao Te Ching, you know hope is as empty as you know fear, because then I mean you’re hoping. Well, okay, then what?

So I don’t hope anything for the book. I love the book, and I love writing it, and I love sharing it, and I’m already getting a lot of responses to it, but it comes out marching March 18, but a lot of people got it before I had fun to publish it. And I think Bill mckibbens comment, it’s endlessly, endlessly fascinating. That was his part of his comment a blur for the book.

That is what I wanted. That was to again, to move away from the objectification of carbon, of global warming, of climate change, you know, all these things, and introduce the reader to the miracle of life and with your feet on the ground. I mean, this is good science. I’m not you know, this is not very terrible stuff, and but create a sense of awe and wonder about who we are and where we live, and who we live with, and what is our true community, our planet.

But do so in such a way that fascinates the reader. He sort of asking, what makes a good book, I said there’s only one thing, what you turn the page you want to change, otherwise it’s not a good book, you know. And then tell, you know, somebody else can say, Oh, if nobody reads it, it’s not really great.

So for me, it’s always about writing in such a way, you know, that people watch on the page, and it comes from just the same things I’ve shared with you, just observations of the climate movement, of the idea that we can decarbonize.

That’s another cute phrase, the language, the lingo, the parlance, the IPCC, the idea that BECs is going to work, which is bioenergy, carbon capture systems, which we plant forests around the world the size of India, and then we cut them down, and we burn them, and that’s our energy, clean energy.

And then we have carbon capture systems on the smoke stacks, or those to capture the carbon that’s back and IPCC, the governmental Panel on Climate Change is saying we can’t get there without backs. Well, what’s there? You know what I mean? I’m questioning when there is, you know, and really saying, Do we have any idea where it here is where we are right now?

And Queen, look at that with a new lens, a new way of being human, and which is a great thing, by the way, of course, but being human in a way that lights us up, that gives us a sense of, like, I say, meaning dignity, purpose, you know. And so sure, absolutely, to your question about cutting back. I mean, yeah, being aware of one’s impact of consumption, of what’s what’s buying, taking and waste streams that occur if you do that are really, really good to know, but it’s really much more about designing a life that is better for you and your neighbor and your children and your children’s children. That’s what we’re talking about.

And those are conversations and questions and and that we should be having, and we are. I mean, there’s gosh, I mean, generative communities all over the world right now, just growing up, just small, you know, I live in California, lived here in my life, and seen lots of fires. And the one thing about fires is that, you know, when it’s over, you go, Oh my God, it’s like, it’s just charcoal.

You know, everything’s gone, right? And then the rain comes. In the spring, you start to see grass green, super green, all the food from the ash trees. You see wild flowers that actually haven’t blown for 50 or 100 years because they needed heat in order to crack open the carpets. I mean, you see, it’s so beautiful. And I feel like, you know, we’re burning down. I mean, I think the earth in a I don’t mean with fire. I’m doing that too.

But culturally and and our children, how we educate, how we live. You know, we’re burning this place down. That is depressing, and that makes us feel bad, you know, and and guilty and all that sort of stuff. Okay? But I feel at the same time, you know, it’s understandable that actually, we’re seeing that the grasses and the forbs and the wildflowers and the animals that come to it just coming back to Earth right now, in 10 1000s of little groups or organizations you never hear about.

They’re not charismatic. They don’t make the headlines. People don’t write about them. You get on down underneath, and you’ll see a regeneration movement doesn’t use the word necessarily, doesn’t have to, but it’s about creating more life on Earth. It’s like looking at themselves, at their group, at their community, and their farm, and whatever it is that they’re involved with and so forth, and saying, How can we do this in such a way that the end of the day, there’s more life instead of less?

And that’s the question, and that’s the conversation, and that is the only direction that was going to make any sense, because it encompasses everything. And say only direction and whatever. There’s lots of directions. No, it encompasses everything, creating more life. Is what we’re here, and that’s what all everything you see I’m looking at the window, at the forest. That’s what the living world does.

Well, it’s a beautiful, you know, view to say, hey, we’re creating more life than we’re killing off. And I it’s certainly a question to live into, I guess, to kind of bring it around full circle. What are the things that you think that are valuable for listeners to be thinking about, reading, being active about whether politically or individually, what are the levers that we can be focused on?

Archimedes is dead, so let’s stop talking about levers. Okay? Please, like that. Thinking is so mechanistic, so male, with all due respect to our gender, now that somehow, if you get the lever right, we can pull on it and we’re going to change the world.

You know, that has just, that’s just crappy thinking, okay, with all due respect, I really appreciate the question. I know where you’re going with it, though, and I’d be happy to send you a list of people in books and sub stack authors and so forth.

You know that? I think you can immerse yourself in that are mind bending, that are life changing, that are illuminating, that are just make you feel alive again, and so forth. From, you know, I don’t want camera service Barry to, you know, Ernest and Peabody Argentina, sub stack, I too. I mean, I can just give you a whole list say, you know, it’s there’s no lever there at all. It’s your mind and your consciousness you know, and your awareness you know.

And I think people want to feel that they’re enlarging, that they see things in a way that is inspiring, that doesn’t walk away from the problems we face. No not at all. But once you get it, once you understand that we’re in a tight situation, we’re not in a great, great state. Yeah, you know, in terms of civilization, you got it, then let’s talk about what we can do.

These are books about what we can do, what we are doing, what we can be and what is possible. And think that’s really what people need, you know, not like, I can’t really respect again. I get the lever. Like, there is no lever.

Yeah, I appreciate that. And kind of the pressuring and making it happen again, going back to kind of Daoist training, you know, it’s, it’s kind of like forcing, and that is this masculine, you know, kind of mindset that got us into this problem to begin with, that, you know, we’re going to make something happen, we’re going to pound this out, so on and so forth has kind of been the the whole system that created the pollution engines that we have and undo.

That thinking to a kind of more creative perspective, which is the, you know, kind of divine feminine energy, which, you know, probably makes a lot of insecure men get more insecure, but it’s something that we can shift our consciousness towards.

You can there’s no we, we, we have to stop using the word we. Who do we speak for when we say we need read this we this very male pronoun, that first person plural?

No, it’s just stop that pronoun. You know? It’s because when it’s used, there’s this implication that somehow a person is speaking on behalf of many others or or on behalf or to benefit of many others, and that that person knows, and that kind of language is, is inappropriate play, you know?

And that was I saw, I think it was a reliance on undock chief, and there was a panel, and somebody kept saying, we, we, we. And these aren’t only comment was, who’s we? Interesting?

Yeah, it’s, it’s a mindset, mindset shift that is, is pretty profound, and is so embedded in culture and language that for most of the time it’s, completely invisible to me. That’s the first time I’ve had anybody say that about the word we. And I’m getting it, I’m hearing it, and I think there’s a lot to it, and expanding that to being in my own consciousness is the first step towards.

Well, Paul, thank you so much for joining us on the program, I greatly appreciate the work that you’ve done for all of us and for the community. So keep on doing it, and everybody go out and buy carbon, the book of life. Sounds like it’s yet another best seller in the making.

Matt, thank you so much for what you’re doing, and thanks for putting up with me and listening to all my counter criticism of the climate movement and all that sort of stuff.

Well, appreciate that, and I think that it’s so noteworthy to listen to somebody who’s been involved in this for decades. This is the most brilliant period in human history. So I’m not going around with a sackcloth going, oh man, we screwed up, and we’re, you know, that’s the end of this one. No. Are there things ending that should Yes? Are there things ending that should not? Yes?

But the human the human beings right now on Earth, are extraordinary. Let’s turn to that brilliance and imagination, creativity and care and compassion that is flourishing in the world, that it may be unseen and unknown and ignored by powers that be in corporations and dogs and all that sort of stuff.

I don’t care about that. I care about when there’s arising, you know, and what’s arising is extraordinary. It truly is and thank you again.

Thanks so much, Matt.

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