Earth's Hidden Wisdom: Paul Hawken On Reframing Carbon, Consciousness & Why Hope Lies Within Nature's Intelligence

Paul Hawken is one of the great elder statesmen of environmentalism, a bestselling author, and the mind behind Drawdown and Regeneration. This conversation explores the biosphere's intrinsic intelligence through the expansive lens of Paul's latest book, Carbon: The Book of Life. We discuss carbon's improbable origins, examine the mycelial networks that function as Earth's connective tissue, and challenge our extractive relationship with nature. He methodically deconstructs our reductive approaches to climate solutions, highlighting how humility and wonder might be our most powerful tools for planetary stewardship. Paul’s perspective represents not merely a shift in environmental thinking, but a fundamental reimagining of our relationship with the living world. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Eight Sleep: Get $350 off your Pod 5 Ultra w/ code RICHROLL👉eightsleep.com/richrollPique Tea: Get up to 20% OFF plus a FREE rechargeable frother and glass beaker with your first purchase 👉piquelife.com/richrollLMNT: Get a FREE LMNT sample pack for just $5 shipping 👉 drinkLMNT.com/RICHROLLMomentous: 35% OFF your first subscription👉livemomentous.com/richrollOn High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style 👉on.com/richrollGo Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF 👉gobrewing.comProlon/L-Nutra: Get 15% OFF plus a FREE bonus gift 👉 prolonlife.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:05Paul Hawken?

  The chances of carbon being created in the solar system, in the universe, is so incalculably small as it'd be impossible. Life is something that is far more extraordinary than even we could possibly know or possibly understand.

• 1:24Rich Roll?

  And so, what do you make of that?

• 1:27Paul Hawken?

  How?

• 1:30Rich Roll?

  Paul Hawken is a legend. He's one of the great elder statesmen of environmentalism, as well as an author, a lecturer, and entrepreneur who, for decades, has distinguished himself as one of the truest, leading voices calling for the regeneration of nature and humanity. But Paul isn't just an activist. When it comes to planetary stewardship, he is a precious resource for the many solutions to the existential threat of climate change we currently face. Paul's latest book, and the subject for today's conversation, is entitled "Carbon." It's been called a spiritual encyclopedia of the earth, and it's his most expansive, humble,

• 2:14Rich Roll?

  and hopeful text to date. One which posits that our greatest solutions for planetary healing reside in a deeper appreciation for the complexities of the natural world.

• 2:25Paul Hawken?

  I was a teenager and I lived in... Nevada City, and you dealt with fire where I lived up in the Sierras and where it burned. You look at this wasteland, it's all black, the trees, everything is just gone. But I do also remember in the spring, the grass is greener than you've ever seen, and you see wildflowers that you've never seen before. I use that today as an analogy. It's easier to see the fire, it's harder to see the birds.

• 3:00Rich Roll?

  You mentioned before we started the podcast, an interesting definition of the word apocalypse that I hadn't heard before. Can you share that?

• 3:10Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, it's a Greek word, and it's migrated into English, of course, and other languages. But the core root is still from the Greek, which is apocalypse. And it means revealing, a revealing of what is hidden. That's what an apocalypse is. We're in an apocalypse right now.

• 3:36Rich Roll?

  And a revealing of what is hidden is a necessary step on the path towards rebirth or rebuilding. So there's like a kernel of hopefulness in that definition. Like the idea apocalypse, it's a disaster, end of days, all of that. Like this is a reframe on that to say like, if you want to be reborn, first all must be revealed as a necessary step in that process.

• 4:07Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, you have to see it. What you do with it is different for every person. The one thing I try to emphasize to people is that you're most effective where you are. And that we look to top-down solutions, like the Conference of the Parties. On climate, there's the Conference of the Parties 16. On nature, there's a Conference of the Parties on land use. Okay, there's three of them every year. And they've been...

• 4:37Paul Hawken?

  ardently attended to by people, but you have to say the comments of the parties on climate has been a total failure. You know, it's actually getting worse, much worse. And the problem with those is that those are top-down solutions. And nature and life is not top-down. And I'm not saying it's bottom-up either, but it's certainly not top-down. And so you have these governments, institutions, you know, trying to solve something that can't be solved from the top. I'm not gainsaying what people are doing, or their sincerity, or their care, I certainly not. I'm just saying, yeah, but it doesn't work. And it's obvious that it doesn't work.

• 5:21Rich Roll?

  On some level, in order to solve this problem, we need regulatory shifts, we need our laws to change, we need our entire system of capitalism to be kind of reformed in order to, you know, find a more sustainable, regenerative way of living on this planet and, you know, sharing this one home that we have. But essentially, what you're saying is, that's also a recipe for us as individuals to kind of abdicate our own personal responsibility, because we're looking to the top to solve it for us, as opposed to shouldering, you know, maybe burden is the wrong word, but, you know, the responsibility of like, what can we all do now from a bottom-up perspective?

• 6:06Rich Roll?

  And when I look at your work, kind of the arc of the last couple of books, Drawdown, Regeneration, Drawdown's like, okay, how are we gonna, you know, like, get into the nuts and bolts of like, you know, drawing down carbon? Regeneration, more of a rebirth, how can we, you know, restore this planet? And this latest work, Carbon, is your most expansive perspective. It's almost like, it's a more enlightened call to action to say, in a very kind of poetic and encouraging and hopeful tone, to say, like, the solutions...

• 6:45Rich Roll?

  Cannot all be extracted from new technology or from these processes about like how to, you know, kind of sequester carbon. The real answer lies in reframing our relationship to all living things such that it can be symbiotic. And you approach this from a perspective that feels somewhat analogous or familiar to the way you've all know Harari looks at culture or societies or civilization or history. But you're just doing it with respect to like all life, all life forms. Going all the way back to like, what is carbon and where does it come from? And how does it, you know, how did it originally arrive on planet Earth? And what does it mean?

• 7:30Rich Roll?

  Like it's this, you know, to say it's, it's a, it's a 10,000 foot view is, is to understate. Like you're, you're, you know, you're outside the solar system, looking in on, you know, this shiny blue dot and trying to make sense of it all together. Is that accurate?

• 7:46Paul Hawken?

  It's very accurate and it arose from two different directions or sources. The first one really is the climate movement narrative. There was, there's a narrative, it's been around for decades. And it's based on fear, threat, reduction, less blaming. You know, and, and when it hasn't worked, then it's just been amped up, you know, you know, extinction rebellion, you know, for example, as a name of an NGO that's gone to schools in the UK and told children it's game over. I mean, that's some narrative.

• 8:31Paul Hawken?

  And I would say that narrative has completely failed. If we hired an ad agency, you know, decades ago and said, you know, we need everybody in the world to understand this is a threat to civilization and to our future and to your children's, children's future. And we need to get together and come together and figure out what to do about it because we know the cause. Well, they said, got it. And what we're going to do is scare the shit out of people.

• 9:00Paul Hawken?

  And you'd fire that agency. So that's not selling the product. That is not bringing people in. Now, I'm not, again, saying like, people have become involved. They are involved, they're doing great work. But less than 1% of the world's population, a fraction of 1%, does anything every day about climate. So how could that be? And so, so that's one source about, we're using carbon as an object, you know, as a thing, like a bad boy, a culprit, you know? We've got to do this, sequester it, stop emitting it, carbon neutrality, you know, those kind of terms.

• 9:44Paul Hawken?

  Net zero, and net zero what? And, well, the implication is net zero carbon emissions, right? And so by doing that, we've objectified it. There's a thing over there, it's a very male, you know, left brain oriented. We're going to solve this problem, we're going to fix it. Here's the problem, you know? This is what we're going to do, which can be done. But that thinking of objectification of any aspect of the world, whether it's people, or plants, or creatures, or places, is the mentality that has caused the problem. We've objectified the living world. And we've been selling off the living world

• 10:28Paul Hawken?

  to the highest bidder for 500 years. And we wonder why biodiversity is plummeting? That's why. So to me, what is the narrative that makes sense? The narrative that makes sense to me isn't one where everybody gets it in the same way. Oh, I got this story, you got this story? Yeah, I got this. No, it's not a single story. But it arises from human need, from human delight, from human wonder, from human curiosity. And what I'm trying to suggest in the book and so forth is ways to look At plants, at creatures, at butterflies, you know, at mycelia, at other people,

• 11:09Paul Hawken?

  other cultures, in a way that promotes a sense of wonder, a sense of awe, a sense of respect, a sense of, oh, my gosh, who knew?

• 11:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the more you know, the less you know, though, right? Like, that's sort of what the book's theme is.

• 11:26Paul Hawken?

  But I think that when you have that experience, it changes you. When you see the world differently, you are a different person. There's no, there's no separation from that awareness and that consciousness and then what you become aware of in a way you never did, you never understood. And so I do give a few anecdotes in the book about that happened for me, but, but it's available to everyone, regardless of age, or tenure, or job, or culture, or nothing. And that is the source of regeneration on Earth. Not from people meeting in Paris or Washington DC or Nairobi and having these big meetings

• 12:09Paul Hawken?

  and go on for days and days and coming out with something that is a new declaration. It won't work.

• 12:15Rich Roll?

  So rather than, you know, lambasting people for making bad decisions and, you know, conferences congregated to, you know, create policy, the solution is inspiring awe and wonder in the average, everyday person by demonstrating just how magnificent and complex and just astronomically mind-blowing this biosphere actually is, right? It's sort of like a David Attenborough kind of like way in to make us feel like we're not this thing that is existing on the outside of this place that we live, but actually we

• 12:57Rich Roll?

  are integral to it and can be part of the solution by reframing our relationship with it.

• 13:06Paul Hawken?

  Yes, I would say, but let's not do it like David Attenborough. Because when you see, and he's a beautiful human being, and his films, the BBC stuff is crazy good, except it's a nature you will never see.

• 13:24Paul Hawken?

  Never, in your life, no matter what you do. You don't have enough drones and cameras and, you know. And so that actually separates us from the natural world. We can appreciate it, I do, I love to watch it, love to listen to him. But it doesn't, I don't feel closer to nature when I see that. I'm in awe, for sure, that's a good thing. But, so we have to think about things that are more, you know, like, down to earth, I guess, you know? And of ways of seeing the world, it was the butterfly, or I give an example of the book about a scientist who, for what curiosity, whatever reason, wanted to know how many roots were on a seed of rye.

• 14:09Paul Hawken?

  One seed, it was a grass seed, of course, you know? And so, I don't know how he did it, probably with electron microscopes and so forth, but I mean, he counted 14 million roots, he and his students, 14 million roots on one seed, that big. Okay, so what? Well, each of those seeds has a hyphae at the end, it's connected to mycelia. And those mycelia and the hyphae and the plant are actually in a conversation. They're doing transactions. And sugar's coming from the rye seed, which is making it from, you know, CO2 and sunlight, and make it into glucose. And the mycelia needs that, that's food for it.

• 14:48Paul Hawken?

  It's down below, it's got phosphorus, nitrogen, you know, potassium, zinc, selenium, and the plant is saying, "I need this." And the mycelia somehow is saying, "Phosphorus, hmm, it's over there." Those people over there beneath whatever have phosphorus, and it comes home, and they exchange it. Okay, that's from one seed of grass. Wow. So what that teaches me...

• 15:18Paul Hawken?

  Is that we don't know where we live. And I say that respectfully. Who could know? Just that one fact, that one scenario. Like, what else don't we know? But when you start to go into nature and see things where you or hear things, or you can watch them, you can read them, you can hear them from somebody you trust, you know? But you start to see nature in a completely different way. And the other example I gave, I live in a redwood country. I have about 20 redwoods between myself and the carport. And I've been walking back and forth for years. And I love the redwoods.

• 16:02Paul Hawken?

  And then I read the work of many botanists, particularly the Italians. I do this amazing analysis of plant perception, plant intelligence. And they pointed out that plants have 20 senses, we have five. And one of the senses plants have is kind of a chiaroscuro thing all over on their branches and the bark and leaves, where they can see movement. They can see like if you were moving past, you know, it's just sort of fuzzy, black and white, you know? You know, they see that. The tree sees that. So I realized I was, you know, writing, reading all this sort of stuff.

• 16:45Paul Hawken?

  And then I walked out from my home, the house, you know? And then I walk, I'm walking by these trees. And I realized they're noticing me and I haven't been noticing them.

• 16:59Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 17:00Paul Hawken?

  And I've never gone back.

• 17:03Rich Roll?

  And if anyone was gonna notice them, it would have been you.

• 17:07Paul Hawken?

  Exactly.

• 17:07Rich Roll?

  You're the guy.

• 17:08Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, yeah, you'd think. And now I feel like, I feel their presence. I really do, because I know they have presence. It's not, this is science. This isn't belief and, you know. So, again, it's that possibility of us seeing the living world. And we are living world too. So I don't want to say, okay, it's nature, then there's people. See, it allows us to see people in a different way, with a kind of a sense of compassion, you know, that maybe we don't have. We haven't touched upon that ourselves. We've been so busy and so, you know, in a sense, troubled by the world, you know.

• 17:52Paul Hawken?

  And so, that is the source of the, that's where it starts. It starts with one person. And who knows what that one person does and so forth. But you look at the, like the biographies, you know, of like, you know, Gandhi. You know, and you look and say, when he was in South Africa as a solicitor and he, you know, basically presided over this meeting of people of color to object to the Black Act, which was gonna make them register and carry. They had to register, right? And this meeting got together and, you know, in the theater that was owned by a Jewish couple,

• 18:34Paul Hawken?

  the only theater that would let them meet in Durban, and said, everybody decided they're gonna get arrested. They're gonna be objectors. They will not do it, okay? And then Gandhi's going home, thinking, oh, shoot. I'm a little skinny brown solicitor in South Africa and I'll be disbarred if I'm arrested. He knew that. Well, why did he get arrested? He did. And when he got arrested, he carried in this thing, paper written by Thoreau called, we all know that one. Leaves of Grass. No, not Leaves of Grass. On Walden? No. On Civil Disobedience. Oh, Civil Disobedience, yeah. I should have known that. But the famous, what we know about that

• 19:19Paul Hawken?

  is Thoreau never named it.

• 19:22Paul Hawken?

  No one knows where the name came from. They think maybe his sister, you know? But they're not sure. But that, he wrote the essay because he objected to the poll tax, which is 25 cents at that time, was a lot of money. And so it disenfranchised people who couldn't pay it, certainly black people as well. I mean, anybody who didn't have the money. He objected to it. He was arrested and he went to jail. And his sister Sophie took him hot chocolate and he got out the next day, okay? And he wrote that essay. So that's one person not wanting to pay the poll tax or writing an essay. And there is Gandhi in South Africa. And then that's the man who led the Salt March that got rid of the Raj in India.

• 20:07Paul Hawken?

  So I'm telling that story because it's possible to understand what one person can do. And even they don't understand it, you know, in real time. So we tend to, you know, minimize the effect of a single individual. Not true. Not true. It's the other way around. You know, we look at power lies of the president, you know, and think, okay, that's powerful. That's not powerful. That's weak. Couldn't be weaker.

• 20:37Rich Roll?

  We're all part of this complex superorganism. I love this stuff about the trees and the mycelium. You know, I've read about old growth trees and the root systems and how they communicate with each other and how they make basically decisions about how resources are going to be allocated, you know, amongst the forest and how the mycelium, you know, is the connective tissue. It's almost like the nervous system amongst that to keep everything in some version of homeostasis. Like, it's so complicated and rich and robust and beautiful. And to your point of like Attenborough versus like what's underneath our feet, right?

• 21:22Rich Roll?

  Like, the magic is here. And the real thesis of the book is like, the answers that we're seeking, like in the way that regeneration was very much saying, like, we don't need to pioneer all these new technological systems. We actually have all of this stuff right now that could be solving. These problems, we just lack the political capital or whatever it is to like scale them up. You're taking it a further step in saying, actually, yeah, that stuff's great, but maybe we don't need any of that because it's right underneath your feet and it's about reframing your relationship.

• 21:57Paul Hawken?

  I would say the two, I would, well, I'd say the two are, each book.

• 22:02Rich Roll?

  They complement each other.

• 22:03Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, I mean, they're a stair step. Drawdown was very much about carbon and sequestration, you know, bring it back home and stop admitting it, okay? And this is the way you do it. And we can talk about that if you want. Regeneration, I knew I was gonna write before carbon. I knew it. And so it wasn't like, okay, now what am I gonna do? I knew that because I feel like, and you're a writer and you're author books, and one thing is you have to stay in your lane in your book. If you get out of your lane, the book is, you know, toss it, like, I didn't, you didn't give, I didn't give you permission to go off on the tangent. I'm reading the book because you said this is what you're gonna write about. And so, but I knew that in a sense, I was creating the book, which is now called solutionism.

• 22:48Paul Hawken?

  The idea that, okay, we're gonna fix it if you do this, this happens and everything's better. And, and I go, it's not really true. And so with regeneration, it was like every aspect of the economy today is, as we know, extractive, okay? And we're killing where we live, we're, you know, it's, it's a, it's a mortality crisis, you know, really. Death of the oceans, death of big fish, death of forests, death of land, death of insects, death of pollinators, you just, chik, chik, chik, chik, chik, chik, okay?

• 23:25Paul Hawken?

  And so what I was saying then is like commerce, business, and governments can see the end of the road that they're on, they're on this road. And now you can see it, that's called degeneration. It was degeneration before they saw it, but I mean, now they can see, you can't go much further, we cannot go much further. So what do we do? Well, you pivot. Can't go that way. What's the pivot? It's to regeneration. Now, what do we do? How do we create more life by providing the goods and services that people need in order to live a good life? And that's a good question. I don't have the answers to all that, but I do have the question. And I think everybody's asking that question more.

• 24:10Paul Hawken?

  Not everybody. More and more people are asking that question on behalf of everybody, which is, "Well, how can we stay here on the earth in a way that actually creates more life for succeeding generations as opposed to we've done the opposite, which is to take more life away?" And so that's drawn on then as regeneration. So "Carb in the Book of Life" is really about, in a sense, how do we connect ourselves to the living world in such a way that actually inspires us and the people around us? And not because we're trying to inspire people, but because you walk out

• 24:52Rich Roll?

  It's intrinsic.

• 24:53Paul Hawken?

  Past the 20 redwood trees and going, "Holy, oh my God, I didn't know I lived here. Now I do." And it's a joy. It's not guilt. It's not something that rests heavily upon your shoulders. We have enough of that already. It's something that actually uplifts you. And it's everywhere. I talk about the owl butterfly in Mexico. And it's a butterfly seven inches big and it comes out at dusk, so it won't be predated. But you look at that owl butterfly or look it up on Google Image and so forth, and it's like, "What?" It has two eye spots and you look exactly, exactly like the eyes of an owl.

• 25:37Paul Hawken?

  I mean, okay. So that is to keep predation away from it. So a bird looking or a bat looking, "Well, I'm out of here. That's an owl," right? Then, "How did it get there?"

• 25:53Paul Hawken?

  You and I, with the best artistic equipment, couldn't draw a picture of an ally as good as the butterfly did. Now, how, where did it come from? And if you read the science, it says, wow, it's genetics, passed on genetics. Okay, great. Where did the image come from? Didn't tell you anything about how a butterfly in Mexico created two wings that look exactly like the eye of an owl to protect itself. So this is also the world we live in, which is like utter mystery of the beauty and the capacity of species. And we're one of them to adapt, to change, to innovate,

• 26:35Paul Hawken?

  and to create beauty by the very expression of its life.

• 26:51Rich Roll?

  There's a humility that you have to have to appreciate those things. And I think humans, we want to feel ourselves to be masters of the universe, and we can solve all these problems. And there's a kind of egoistic piece to that, like a hubris, that these problems can be solved by applying, you know, kind of the scientific methodology that we use to make sense of the universe. But that's by definition reductive. It's sort of like, here's a problem, and, you know, we can identify the variables, isolate them, and solve it. That applies to, you know, decarbonization. It's the same approach with medicine, looking at the human body and saying, well, here's a symptom, and we're gonna, you know,

• 27:35Rich Roll?

  we're gonna throw this pharmaceutical at it. It's gonna resolve that symptom, and the problem goes away, without the humble appreciation for the complexity of the holistic organism. Like, the same principles apply planetarily. And you're saying, like, look, we have to appreciate this complexity, the beauty, with a level of humility. And we can't continue to have this reductive approach of thinking, like, if we solve this problem, we're good, while we're still, you know, pursuing this extractive relationship with the planet at large.

• 28:08Paul Hawken?

  Absolutely. And the pharmaceutical example is really good, actually, because if you see an advertisement on TV for a pharmaceutical, by law, they have to tell you all the side effects and dangers. And sometimes it goes on and on and on.

• 28:25Rich Roll?

  Sure. I mean, it's comedic at this point.

• 28:27Paul Hawken?

  It is. That's what I said. You have to start laughing going, you're gonna swallow that? You know, okay, we don't have to do that with our climate solutions or even our solutions. We have a world that's doing this and doing this. What about the side effects of doing that? We don't talk about it. It's not known to us, at least when you take a drug. It's known and you know that it may absolutely, it may do something for you. Believe this, do that, whatever. But man, you better watch out because a whole bunch of other things could happen to your body. Well, the same thing about the current system, whether it wants to just create more damage

• 29:07Paul Hawken?

  without talking about it or reconciling its actions with the effect. Or it's companies that are doing things that they think are good. You know, in a sense of this is going to help this, like direct air capture. You know, there's, there's a whole world out there of financiers and engineers and big companies that are going to suck air from the atmosphere and, you know, take out the carbon, liquefy it and put it in geological formations, you know, and say that's a solution. And you're even seeing now the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying, we can't get there from here unless we do that.

• 29:47Paul Hawken?

  And, and you don't have to be educated past ninth grade science, maybe seventh grade science to know that actually that'll never work, ever. It's about physics. It's not about belief. And that is that the gas, the CO2, what's up in the atmosphere is called entropy. In other words, you burn something and that's kind of its ash as well, which is a gas, CO2. You know, the carbon was in. The wood, or in the coal, or in the oil, or in the natural gas, right? And you burned it, it's combined with oxygen, it's CO2, and goes up there. We know how CO2 reflects infrared radiation back down when it's in the air, and we get a warmer climate.

• 30:31Paul Hawken?

  Well, direct air capture is these huge machines, gigantic, and use amazing amounts of energy. They say, "Well, we're going to use renewable energy to do this." Okay, renewable is, we'll talk about that. But I mean, the fact is, it takes energy to take this energy out. So you're using entropy to cure entropy. It will never, ever work. And so, and yet, we're pouring billions of dollars into this. And we talk about hope, that's hopium. That's just ridiculous. And, and I'm not trying to be a smartass. I'm just trying to say, do the math.

• 31:13Paul Hawken?

  You know, and stop buffalo-ing or convincing us that we can just live the way we're going to live far into the future, and we're going to have these high-tech bros out there figuring out how to take the carbon back out of the air that we're emitting as fast as possible.

• 31:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, maybe a more relatable example of that is just electric vehicles. Like, these are a good thing. You know, we're not, you know, putting emissions into the atmosphere in the form of exhaust, as we always have. But fundamentally, it's still an extractive technology. We have to power these batteries up. The, the, the source of that power, you know, depends upon where you live, but it's not great. And we still have to create these batteries, which are extractive in terms of how we have to strip mine for these minerals, et cetera. So it's a, it's a step, it's a stopgap, but it's not a solution that is inherently regenerative in any, in any way, right?

• 32:14Rich Roll?

  So that's the real problem that you're getting at. And, and maybe to kind of like, take a step back here. You talk a lot about like, language, nounism, verbiage, the way we talk about the problem. But, but the book really begins with like, how we talk about carbon itself. Like, we think we know what it is. Carbon's bad in the atmosphere, we need to remove it, but like... It's also the building block of life. And do we really understand what this is, where it comes from, why it's important, and what it represents? Like, you start off with just kind of blowing our minds with like, the origins of carbon itself, and reframe like, how we should actually properly think about this.

• 32:59Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, I had to do that myself. Like, where did it come from? And, you know, what does it do? And we know it's, there's no other element like it in change. It has memory and stores energy. Okay. So, carbon does that, you know? Salt doesn't do that. Phosphor doesn't do that. You know, helium doesn't do that. Okay. But what we know is that its ubiquity is astonishing. And the best way to think of carbon is a flow, like water, like a river, as a flow, or the wind, actually, is a flow. It's the only way to understand it in terms of its presence, and what it does, and where it is.

• 33:41Paul Hawken?

  Every cell, and you have thirty-two, thirty-four, thirty-six trillion cells, you know, in your body, every single cell has 1.2 trillion atoms of carbon. Okay? Well, what's it?

• 33:55Rich Roll?

  It's too many. Our brains can't process that.

• 33:57Paul Hawken?

  No, you can't handle it. It's forty-four octillion, that's the number, by the way. But it's...

• 34:01Rich Roll?

  I don't know what that means.

• 34:02Paul Hawken?

  That's what no one else says either, including me. But the point being is, what is the carbon doing in that cell? And, well, it's chemistry, the same that you see outside of the cell. And so, it's basically a chemistry experiment called the cell, you know? And eukaryotic cell. And so, without carbon, there's no such thing. And, but everywhere we look in the world, both, you know, living and actually just, you know, geologic, carbon's there.

• 34:36Paul Hawken?

  And in terms of the earth itself, the flow of carbon is astonishing and beautiful. And but it's abstract. That's an abstraction. But what I'm trying to do is take it away from its objectification as it's a thing. You know, and we just figure out this thing. We're going to fix it. But actually, that way of thinking has caused, as I said, caused the problem. We're going to fix things. No, we're not. We're going to live with things in a way that is, you know, supportive.

• 35:10Rich Roll?

  You have this beautiful line in the book, speaking to the poetry of all of this. Carbon is presented as the narrator of life, the courier of existence, and the lattice that permeates cultures and organisms. I've never thought about carbon in that way.

• 35:26Paul Hawken?

  Right, yeah.

• 35:28Rich Roll?

  And the origins of carbon itself, can you talk a little bit about that?

• 35:31Paul Hawken?

  Well, sure, yeah, because it was commonly thought, I think, until the 40s or 50s, that all the elements on earth came from the Big Bang, which is 13.8 billion years ago. And Fred Hoyle, who is an astronomer in the UK, coined the term Big Bang because he thought it was just BS. He said, the idea that everything that we have, all the elements and so forth, you know, were created in a, you know, millisecond from an explosion 13.8 billion years ago. He said, that was ridiculous. And he was proven right. And so, most of the elements, we don't, we didn't know where they came from. They did not come from the Big Bang. Only hydrogen and helium did.

• 36:16Paul Hawken?

  So, but nobody knew where carbon came from. And just to get into chemistry, I mean, there's, you know, in hydrogen, you know, there's, hydrogen makes helium. That's fusion. That's the sun, okay? And there's an extra neutron. That neutron creates an extraordinary amount of energy, you know, when they come together. And that's why we have sunlight and heat and warmth. But what Hoyle wanted to know is, okay, but yeah, great, but then...

• 36:49Paul Hawken?

  Where did carbon come from? Because you would think, if you count the protons and neutrons and electrons, you would think, wow, three times helium is carbon. Three times, it's four, which is 12. And, you know, and so carbon is 666 and helium is 222. And in terms of particles. And that was accepted, except what physicists discovered is that two helium can't make a carbon because of, it's called resonance or vibration or the gradients. They, they, they just can't mix into the other. They can't form, they can't fuse into carbon.

• 37:32Paul Hawken?

  So that was accepted, but no one knew where carbon came from. How, and they looked into space because you have these beautiful spectrometers, you know, they can look out into space and then deduce what they're seeing by color, by the vibration of what's out there. And nobody could find, you know, carbon that way either that is in our bodies, is in your cells, you know. And so Hoyle came up with the theory and it was basically when the stars are dying, they become giant red stars. And in that moment, beryllium, which is two helium molecules, can capture another helium

• 38:12Paul Hawken?

  molecule and that becomes C12, that becomes carbon, right? And, but the thing is, it's a trillionth of a trillionth of a second that happens every 2,500 times beryllium is made. So you do the math on that one, it's like, you're giving a kid. And yet, carbon is ubiquitous, it's in 99% of everything on earth, it's in every living, you know. Well, the math didn't make sense, you know, like how could, and yet... Hoyle insisted that was true. And he went to Caltech and he gave a talk about it. And he was almost derided on stage. People, physicists were going, who invited him? What's he saying?

• 38:56Paul Hawken?

  This is, you know. And one scientist said, this is the most outrageous prediction ever made by a scientist. It's the worst. And, but they, he convinced people to test it. And so they got a spectrometer to bomb nitrogen with protons and strip away and see if they could form the C12 that's everywhere in the world. And they did.

• 39:21Rich Roll?

  Basically recreating, you know, what would happen out in, you know, the outer stellar galaxy.

• 39:27Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 39:28Rich Roll?

  To see if you could create the formation of carbon. It's astonishing that, that, you know, the universe conspired to create carbon in the first place. It's this unlikely event that can only occur under very specific circumstances.

• 39:41Paul Hawken?

  Yes, and to this day, really, world renowned physicists in Cambridge and Oxford and other universities say, like, the chances of carbon being created in the solar, in the solar system, in, you know, any system in the universe, is so incalculably small as it'd be impossible.

• 40:12Rich Roll?

  And yet it's robust here on planet Earth.

• 40:15Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 40:15Rich Roll?

  And so what do you make of that? Like, what do you, what do you infer from that?

• 40:20Paul Hawken?

  Ah, like, you know, in other words, the scientists can go all the way to that point, you know, of creation and describe it. And they know the resonances and the gradients and all the things that would have to be just right in order for that one single atom to be created. Okay, got that. But they can't explain.

• 40:43Paul Hawken?

  The ubiquity and how much of it is in the universe or that it exists at all. And accept it, denote it, but they can't really explain how all the things came together. It's just the number, you know, 44 arctilian is beyond that number. So how, who, where, what, you know? The very fact that we don't know should give us some actually pleasure. That life is something that is far more extraordinary than even we could possibly know or possibly understand.

• 41:22Rich Roll?

  And yet, there are, you know, trillions upon trillions of, you know, stars out there, you know, numbers we can't fathom. I would have to imagine there are other planets that have the capacity to host carbon-based life.

• 41:39Paul Hawken?

  Absolutely. I mean, and it's hard for us to scope the universe, how big it is, but you talk about giant red stars, that's what our sun's gonna do. As it dies, it gets bigger and bigger and then explodes into a supernova. Eighty-six thousand suns explode into supernovae every single day in the universe.

• 42:02Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 42:02Paul Hawken?

  So now we can see the universe as actually kind of a garden, or maybe that's not the wrong word, but you know, it's a...

• 42:10Rich Roll?

  A generative force.

• 42:11Paul Hawken?

  It's generative, yeah. And it's not just there like frozen, you know, in the Hubble telescope, you know? It's like, it's active when you look at it from that point of view. And it's generating these super, you know, the supernovae and then these clouds are huge and they float around for a hundred million years and inside they're protected from cosmic rays and they're creating elements inside these clouds, you know? I mean, it's hard to look at it from that point of view and not say, is this alive? You know, I mean, you could say, describe it physically, it's all physical, but...

• 42:49Paul Hawken?

  Part of you has to say, really? It's like, is that all it is? It's just physics? So that's what Hoyle said. You can't explain it with physics enough sufficiently.

• 43:01Rich Roll?

  Well, what is true for the macro is true for the micro. And the same example that we were discussing about, you know, how medicine treats the physical body and how we sort of diagnose the planet, the similarities with that. The idea that the galaxy would operate as this massive super organism that is generative is true. And yet, at the very kind of microorganism level, at the cellular level, these same things are happening at the, you know, all the way from the subatomic all the way to the galactic, you know, universal or whatever. And this book is sort of like, okay, here's carbon. Head explodes. Now let's talk about plants. Let's talk about animals, insects, fungi, food, farms.

• 43:46Rich Roll?

  You kind of canvas all of these things. But the fungi, to me, feels like the most interesting. You kind of call it the dark, it's sort of the dark energy of planetary life because we know so little about it. And you have these crazy numbers about like, I mean, we only, I think we only have identified like 10% of the fungal species that actually exist. Like, we're just at the beginning of understanding what it even is, let alone the crucial role that it's playing with respect to our biosphere.

• 44:18Paul Hawken?

  It's interesting, when I wrote that chapter, I called it the queendom. There's five kingdoms, and one of them is fungi. And the reason I called it the queendom is because without that queendom, or whatever you want to call it, there wouldn't be the other four kingdoms. Okay? That's the mother. Okay? And so when Merlin Sheldrake, who wrote A Tank of Life, a beautiful, beautiful book about fungi.

• 44:43Rich Roll?

  Is it fungi? I always say fungi. It's fungi, doesn't matter.

• 44:47Paul Hawken?

  Fungi, fungal.

• 44:49Rich Roll?

  Keep going, sorry.

• 44:51Paul Hawken?

  But anyway, he read the chapter for me. And then he said, but I wouldn't call it queendom. I said, well, why not? I kind of love it. And he said, well, there's too much royalty in there already.

• 45:09Rich Roll?

  You can't help but stratify it.

• 45:11Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Rich Roll?

  Even when you're trying to give it the feminine gender.

• 45:15Paul Hawken?

  Well, he's English. And so, we agree on kingdom, which is, it's the kin-dum.

• 45:22Rich Roll?

  So, talk a little bit more about the role that it plays that we might not.

• 45:27Paul Hawken?

  We don't fully know. We just know what I explained earlier about, you know, basically connecting, you know, to the root systems of every plant, almost everywhere, not quite every plant, but there's some exceptions, but virtually every plant on Earth. And then, and Toby Keers, who's doing really amazing science in Amsterdam, she's actually from the Bay Area, but they're now able to video the process of mycelium, knows what's going on in there. And what you see is two things. You can hear it, there's a clicking sound, it's like making clicking sounds.

• 46:12Paul Hawken?

  And then it's transporting nutrients. But when you look at it, though, you would think, okay, it's like it's a highway, you know, it's going along. No, it's going in opposite directions in the same vessel, the same mycelium. Things are going in opposite directions. Why?

• 46:30Rich Roll?

  Like arteries and veins at the same time.

• 46:33Paul Hawken?

  Yes.

• 46:34Rich Roll?

  In one vessel.

• 46:35Paul Hawken?

  In one vessel, because they must be encoded in some way for this nitrogen to go here and this phosphorus go there and to that root into this plant. I mean, it's like a stock exchange or a marketplace or, I mean, except the dimension of it in terms of numbers is so fantastic and so unbelievable. So, yeah.

• 47:00Paul Hawken?

  And those clicking sounds, Adam Adamaski at the Royal Society in London has been recording them for years. And what he says is that actually, they're making words. There was, there's, there's patterns, pattern recognition, and they're repeating these things, okay? He went on to say, and some mycolologists disagree, so I want to be really clear about that. But he went on to say, yeah, but they're stringing these words together in sentences, what we call sentences, but he said. And those sentences as complex as Indo-European languages. So let's step back and say, he's not right, but he's not wrong. Better say, there's something going on there.

• 47:43Paul Hawken?

  You have to just really think, well, wow, this is one crazy organism in terms of its capabilities and what's going on down there. And the honest answer is, we don't know. We, we do know molecularly what's being transported in terms of nutrients that are being fed to the plants. And the plants are demanding them, by the way. They're saying, I want this, I want this, I want that. You know, it's not just here. I got nitrogen, that's all you're gonna get. I mean, the mycelia actually are mapping out the territory, knowing whether it's rich in phosphorus or rich in this or where I can get selenium, which is not as so common as a mineral in soils. And, and then going right to the source or that requestor, which is another plant somewhere,

• 48:27Paul Hawken?

  and, and doing the transaction and getting carbohydrates. So we do know that. And we know that the, you know, these fungal, would you call them, you know, organisms can be gigantic. One, one can be acres and acres and acres and acres, you know, 50 acres can be one species, one organism.

• 48:51Rich Roll?

  You talk about the, the Oregon National Forest, where I think it's like a four, four square miles of, of like fungal beds, I don't know what you call them, that have been there for thousands of years.

• 49:04Paul Hawken?

  Mm-hmm, it's one species.

• 49:06Rich Roll?

  One species.

• 49:07Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 49:08Rich Roll?

  This idea that, that there's such a, you know, on first inspection, like a rudimentary life form.

• 49:16Rich Roll?

  And yet, the complexity of the communication and the functionality of this is mind-boggling. Like, how is that even happening?

• 49:26Paul Hawken?

  Well, and the importance of it, because we have basically engaged in agricultural system that effectively destroys the fungi in the soil.

• 49:37Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's just been an afterthought, right? Like, we just don't really think about it or consider it as important. It's just these weird things that sprout up when it rains.

• 49:47Paul Hawken?

  Well, yeah, that's the seed, that's the fruit of the fungi. But the mycelia, you know, are destroyed by plowing, they're destroyed by chemical fertilizer, they're destroyed by herbicides. And so, but the roots of a plant depend on this relationship in order to be nutrient-dense. Now, it's for the food itself to be the most nutritious as possible. And so, what we're doing is by putting in NPK, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus in a chemical form and top-dressing the soil with it, we get tremendous production. The plants are weak, tend to get infested, you keep doing that, the soil dies.

• 50:32Paul Hawken?

  We have to put herbicides because weeds then colonize sick soil. And we have glyphosate, and so whenever we have pesticides like glyphosate, we have sick plants and so forth that are not nutrient-dense, right? And all because we've really destroyed the source of life, which is soil. And so, in the book, I talk about, you know, dark earth for sure. And, but soil is not to be seen as a medium, just because we can take a bag or something and pour it into a pot and grow something, we think it's just a medium. But in the ground, it's actually an organism. It's one of the most complex, it's the biggest organism on earth, is the soil.

• 51:11Paul Hawken?

  And it's alive, and it makes sounds, and you can hear it if you stick microphones down there and listen to it. And, and that life is what creates life, right? All life comes from the soil, no place else.

• 51:31Paul Hawken?

  And so that's why every single culture on earth that we know of has called the earth mother, mother, always. No one said father earth, because everyone knew that life came from the earth, from the female. And we're the one who, the male, you know, basically, you know, Fritz Haber, the German chemist, invented a way to bypass all that. And that's the agriculture that we have today, which is, you know, polluting rivers and ocean that is killing the soil,

• 52:11Paul Hawken?

  that is producing tremendously greater amounts of food in terms of corn, soy. But so much so that we take 35% of the corn we grow and put it into gas tanks as ethanol. And then another, I forget, 70% of what's left goes to animals for CAFOs, confined area feeding operations. So we're growing all this corn and soy in a very, very damaging way. The second highest rate of cancer in the United States is Iowa. Not surprised, you know, because of the chemical use. The spraying. Yeah, spraying. And so, so, but these are all things that we can change

• 52:54Paul Hawken?

  and are changing and that will produce more food, healthier food, a healthier environment, healthier farmers, more resilient systems, you know, that aren't so subject to disruption from heat and water. The problem with global warming is that water is too much water, too little, too much heat or too much cold. I mean, it starts to whipsaw the jet stream up and down. So you get these strange anomalous things that were... That are difficult for farmers to deal with. I mean, either flood the fields or kill the crops, whether it's too much water or too little.

• 53:35Paul Hawken?

  And so, one of the things that has to be done is to look at agriculture, because if we don't have food, that's game over. And so, how can we create systems that are resilient? Because we all have to be resilient going into these next decades, given the vagaries of a heating planet and the effects and impacts it's going to have on water, rivers, streams, deserts, fields, crops, oceans, et cetera.

• 54:03Rich Roll?

  You've mentioned that things are changing, and I want to press you on that a little bit. It feels to me like, yes, there is progress in certain pockets, but short of overhauling our system such that it's premised upon an appreciation for the long-term incentives of restoring our soil and creating regenerative systems and doing all the things that you're talking about, we're stuck in a paradigm that prioritizes the short-term benefits and incentives. Like, we're set up to be extractive.

• 54:46Rich Roll?

  All of the incentives of our system, basically emphasize that. And unless we blow up the system and create a new one, like, how are we going to get out of this kind of auroboris? Where we're eating our tail, right? Like, we're never going to transcend this unless we reach some kind of tipping point, no threshold where we can't step back from, where we're actually grocking the fact that we're not going to be able to grow food anymore in kind of like an interstellar situation. I don't know. Like, it's hard for me to hold on to that level of hopefulness that you seem to inhabit.

• 55:28Paul Hawken?

  Two things there. When I was talking to an indigenous person once, and saying "we da da da da da, we da da da da", and he looked at me in the eye and said, "Who's 'we'?"

• 55:45Paul Hawken?

  Good question. Because the rhetoric around what's going on is as if everybody thought, did, assumed, knew what we're talking about, or was causative, that was the cause. And so I think we have to talk about the state of the world and the actors who seem to be completely oblivious to where we live and what's going on from their actions, you know, corporate CEOs, companies, the stock market, capitalism, and politicians who enfranchise that. And so, okay, we can be aware of that and so forth, but we really want to talk about

• 56:30Paul Hawken?

  it in a different way. And you talked about earlier about language. The language we have inherited is English, you know, as students, as in a culture. And English, in really all the European languages, are very much about nouns, German very much so, English the most so, because it's a kind of a language that just took words from five or six different languages. But words, they came from the Enlightenment, that's about naming things. And we are very good about naming. To name something separates it. It's a this and not a that. That's what science does. And then let's study this because it's different than that. And, okay, great science.

• 57:14Paul Hawken?

  But the indigenous languages, and I point to them because, you know, their cultures go back, now that I see, in Australia over 100,000 years, but certainly 60,000 for sure. And so how do they manage to stay there for all that time? And if you look at those languages, there are languages that are about verbs, the verbs, because verbs are relational. They're about relation. They're about connection. They're about never losing that in our parlance and how we speak to each other or about the world in a way that separates us, or separates you, or separates us from each other, or from the world that supports us, our mother.

• 57:55Paul Hawken?

  And so I think what you're seeing right now is a coming together of that intelligence and that wisdom with Western science. And there's amazing discoveries and understandings that are emerging from that. And you talk about hope. I mean, one of the things that I love right now is that science is just exploding with observations and tests and understanding of the world is completely different than what we were taught.

• 58:28Rich Roll?

  What would be an example of that?

• 58:31Paul Hawken?

  I gave you some about roots, about plants, about butterflies, about, I'll give you more, you know, just like, what's going on there? What we're discovering is what we don't know. That's what's so wonderful about it, is that we don't know, as opposed to, oh, we know, this is true, this is true, this is true.

• 58:49Rich Roll?

  That creates the openness.

• 58:51Paul Hawken?

  That's empirical science.

• 58:52Rich Roll?

  All those discoveries, like, holy shit, like, we only are touching the surface of this, there's so much more to discover. And therein lies that humility that can put you on a different trajectory in your exploration.

• 59:04Paul Hawken?

  Traditional ecological knowledge really always looks at life as a complex system, and it is. And Western thought tends to look at systems as parts and pieces.

• 59:25Rich Roll?

  I forget which culture it is in the book that you talk about, but a culture that would name all of the trees based upon the sound that the branches would make at sunset in October, right? So you're somebody who's keyed in to nature, you know, probably more than anybody I know, and you walk past the redwoods without really paying too much attention. These people, you know, are taking it to a whole other level, right?

• 59:54Paul Hawken?

  They did.

• 59:55Rich Roll?

  But, like, are we gonna do that? Like, if Paul Hawken, you know, walks past his redwoods, you know, on the way to the carport and has to remind himself to pay attention, you know, where's the hope for the rest of us?

• 1:00:10Paul Hawken?

  Well, the native Canadians were referred to as a mickmack.

• 1:00:17Paul Hawken?

  And what they did was extraordinary, which they can name the sound the tree was making, not the sound the wind was making. We have words for that.

• 1:00:29Rich Roll?

  Right, but the tree rustling, when the wind blows, what the branch is making.

• 1:00:34Paul Hawken?

  The tree had a specific sound, like we have a sound, our voices have a specific sound. You know, you can close your eyes, oh, that's rich, you know, you have a very distinctive sound. And these trees did too. But the thing about it was, they could hear it, but they could name it. They could give it a specific name, right? And remember the name. That was the name of the tree, that sound it made in October, you know, and every year. And so they could go back five years later, 10 years later, and listen to the sound and know that the tree had suffered or changed, or was good, doing good. There was, they could tell the condition of the tree from the sound, and they didn't write it down.

• 1:01:16Paul Hawken?

  They remembered the name of the sound. With our million words in English, we have no such word for the sound a tree makes, the tree makes. You can say "softing," that's the sound the wind makes. So what do we get from that? Just like this extraordinary understanding of the living world, if the living world is all you have, you don't have anything else. Nothing's being imported, there is no, nobody's going to rescue you, save you. You become very, very aware. And that awareness, I think, is, again, I use the word "exploring," it's probably the wrong word, but just is burgeoning all over the

• 1:01:57Paul Hawken?

  world, from the interaction between Western scientists and traditional knowledge holders in indigenous cultures around the world. And it's just marvelous and beautiful to see that exploration, the understandings that are arising. And again, what is arising is like, how much we don't know. And that's a really wonderful thing, because, you know, it's discovery, it's delight, it's possibility. And I just think, if people can...

• 1:02:31Paul Hawken?

  Imagine such a thing, because it's true, that there is a world emerging, you know, despite the best efforts of greed, hate and delusion, corporations and profit-making and extractive economies. I think it's important for us to know that, you know, to be aware of what's happening and how ridiculous it is in terms of our stewardship of the earth. But at the same time, something's happening.

• 1:03:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:03:02Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Rich Roll?

  Beauty persists with a resilience that is remarkable. And to your point around awareness, like, it proves the adage that, you know, on some level, like, all the answers reside in, you know, our capacity to develop our awareness, to like, be present, whether it's the nature of our own minds or what's happening right beneath our feet. By slowing down and actually like, being present and attuning our focus and our attention to things we often overlooked. That's where there's all this mystery to be explored. Like, in meditation, when a thought pops up, where did that thought come from?

• 1:03:47Rich Roll?

  I didn't think that thought, it simply arose. And then what happens when it vanishes? Where does it go? And where is all of this happening? Like, you know, like, these sort of, you know, more existential questions of, you know, what it means to be alive and be a conscious being, apply in the same way to all of the unseen things that are happening all around us all the time.

• 1:04:12Paul Hawken?

  I have this experience. I've only been invited once to talk to writers, as a writer, a conference, you know. They have writers' conferences.

• 1:04:25Paul Hawken?

  And I described something there, which I hadn't ever said aloud before, but sometimes when I'm writing, I'll write a couple of paragraphs and fiction writers often write a thousand words or something, then go look the next day and see if, you know, it's any good. I write a couple of paragraphs and go right back to the top and edit it. I'm going in like this all the way down.

• 1:04:47Rich Roll?

  I kind of do that, too. It's not a recommended approach.

• 1:04:51Paul Hawken?

  No, it's not, but I do it. And but there's times when I go back to the top and I start to read it going, I don't know, I didn't write that. I have no recollection of writing that or having those thoughts. So it doesn't make me special. In fact, it's the other way around. It just makes me observant or aware that when you're writing, it's not just disgorging what you think, okay, and what you believe, or what you've read, or what you have learned. There's something else going on, or it's possible. Certainly

• 1:05:30Paul Hawken?

  that's true for poets. We know that. But great literature, I don't know, I don't talk to that many writers about the process, but it's definitely not a deductive, deliberate process. It's something different.

• 1:05:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a download from the unified field of consciousness, Paul.

• 1:05:53Paul Hawken?

  Thank you. Now I know.

• 1:05:56Rich Roll?

  And yet, you know, you could take credit for having, you know, yeah, sat there and given expression to it. But it is interesting. Like, this is a very different book. Like, the last two books were these big books that were almost, you know, as much manuals as they were books. But this is like a book book. This is a literary, poetic, you know, kind of adventure that you take the reader on.

• 1:06:19Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, because that's where I wanted to go. I mean, I wanted to go into the mystery. And I went to, you know, Ed Young and Carl Zimmer and Merlin and Elizabeth Colbert. I mean, I mean, other writers, really beautiful writers, you know, and just absorbed. I almost want to put on the back of the book, these are all the books I read, you know, just to open that up. I may do it on a website. Just say, look at, look. Look at this one, look at this one, look at this one, you know. And I'm not the origin, but I am storytelling. And what's emerging, again, I'll say this, I mean,

• 1:07:03Paul Hawken?

  from observational science, is just heartwarming and beautiful and breathtaking. Anthony James was a person in South Africa, and he had a reserve, a wildlife reserve, in an area in northern South Africa where elephants had been extirpated a long time ago. There was no elephants around. And somebody called him and said, "I have, from another reserve in the south, I have eight elephants that are just acting so badly that we're gonna shoot them all." He said, "You can have them if you want." He said, "I'll take them."

• 1:07:44Paul Hawken?

  Well, he got them there somehow in trucks, and he made a special place for them to kind of season them into the property. You know, they couldn't get out, it was electrified and this and that. And he just tore the shit out of it. And everywhere on the property. And then he tore down the electric fences, you know, and they had to go capture them again. And it was just hell. But he got them back, and he spent years, and he had a Land Rover, of course. And he'd go park nearby, and just with the Land Rover. And they could see it, and they'd watch, and then, okay. At first, they started to come near it like it was a threat, but then eventually he realized it wasn't a threat.

• 1:08:29Paul Hawken?

  And then he would get out and stand there, just next to the Land Rover. And then, as time went on, he would actually move out further from the Land Rover, and then closer, and they began to trust him as a person. As a human being, obviously, they had been treated really, really badly by human beings, you know, you don't become that destructive as an elephant for no reason. And eventually, they started to come up to his house and and all of them, all eight of them, and his wife is a French chef, and they would take everything in the garden, because they didn't know it was a garden, you know, they just ate it.

• 1:09:14Paul Hawken?

  And, but they got used to that. And, and then one time, he was in Durban, and I, the elephants were coming to the house. And he called his wife and said, "The plane's been canceled." And she noticed right away that the elephants stopped and turned around and went away. Okay. He died someplace else. He didn't die there on the land. And the next day, he had eighteen elephants by then. They surrounded the house and stood there all day. A year later, on the exact day, they came back, stood around the house,

• 1:09:59Paul Hawken?

  right, for the whole day. And so it went. So what we're talking about was, what do we know? How do, how do they know? How do we know what they know? We don't. And, and so, that's the world I'm talking about, which is not the world that I know. "Hey, read my book, I can explain everything." I don't explain it at all. I am not, I'm ignorant. But I care about discovering where we live, or where I live, and just in discovering what I don't know.

• 1:10:40Paul Hawken?

  And we know there's 3.4 trillion creatures, you know, on land and ocean. And every single day, they're communicating, not just once a day, by the way. They're communicating. They're making sounds.

• 1:10:54Paul Hawken?

  What are they saying? They're talking. Those elephants were obviously talking to each other, but we have no idea. And so we live on a planet where just suffused with intelligence and sentience from creatures we never thought had any sentience at all. We know now that insects are sentient. They have feelings. It's like, oh, come on, you know, people, you know. And some anthropologists will go, ah, you know, that's crazy. No, we do know that from Lars Chikka work and other people's work. So I'm just trying to like, open the curtain a little bit for the reader and going, this, you know, and verify it.

• 1:11:39Paul Hawken?

  There's notes, there's footnotes, there's sources. You know, you can look it up yourself. It's not me, I'm not the source. And just like, what happens to you when you know that's the world that we're losing? And that's a world we've never really understood. And that's a world we thought was dumb as a rock. I mean, it may have four legs and a tail, but we never gave it any thought that it had language. Mother bats speak a dialect in their ultrasonic thing. And they name their children. And they teach their children to avoid certain male bats because they're not cool. Right? That's, they call that motherese, that language. They don't know what to call it.

• 1:12:24Paul Hawken?

  And if you take that ultrasonic sound, which we can't hear, and you slow it down, so in the audible range, it is so beautiful. It's one of the most beautiful sound you've ever heard. And we are the only culture that demonizes bats. They're sacred everywhere else in the world. And so maybe they're not demons. It's just that, just that trying to open up, you know, just that way of seeing where we live. I, I mean, the scorpion came into my house this week, you know? I mean, I am so gentle with that scorpion. I do not want it to be in my house. I don't want to be bit by one, okay? I know that one, but I don't kill it.

• 1:13:10Paul Hawken?

  I take it out to its ecosystem, you know, which is not my house. And that came from just seeing the insect world in a new way. And like, I just can't kill mosquitoes very easily, but I will kill a mosquito. I mean, I confess, if it's keeping me awake. But I can't kill anything else.

• 1:13:33Rich Roll?

  I'm not surprised to hear that. But you ready for this?

• 1:13:37Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:38Rich Roll?

  The story that you just told of the elephants actually came up on the podcast yesterday.

• 1:13:44Paul Hawken?

  Anthony James?

• 1:13:45Rich Roll?

  Same story. And it came up in the context of a discussion around a lack of appreciation or a hubris that we have around the sentience and and emotional intelligence and interior lives of our fellow creatures. But it was in the context of a larger conversation about something else altogether different. I was hosting a podcast with the host of this podcast series called Telepathy Tapes, where she spends, I don't know if you've heard of this, she spends time with non-speaking, neurodivergent autistic people.

• 1:14:25Rich Roll?

  And it's this exploration of, you know, the possibility of extra perceptual abilities. But in the context of this, you know, you know, take, take what you will from that. But just to ask the question is also to expand your horizon of appreciation for the complexity of, you know, other living creatures. And she talks about Rupert Sheldrake and like his experiments with animal consciousness, et cetera. And, and that story of the elephants like comes up as an illustration of that point. Like, we think we know, but what do we really know? And when we look up and we see the swarms of birds who all pivot at the exact same time

• 1:15:07Rich Roll?

  and never collide with each other, or, you know, the migratory patterns of whales and the way they communicate across vast distances, like, all of these things, we go, yeah, wow, that's crazy. And then we never think about it again, let alone like try to get to, you know, the root of like, how this is even happening to begin with, that these organisms could be collaborating and communicating with each other in a way that we have a hard time believing is possible because of the simplicity of their, you know, their, their brains.

• 1:15:40Paul Hawken?

  Not so simple, though.

• 1:15:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:41Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, it's that somebody, I forget, did a calculation. Why can bees do the waggle dance and do all this stuff and convey all this information to each other? And the bee brain is very, very small compared to our brain, except at any given moment, it can have a million different connections within that brain. Okay, so it's not size. Size does something too, for sure, you know, but we have been reductionist in the sense of the smaller brain, the smaller intelligence, and that doesn't play out.

• 1:16:16Rich Roll?

  Also reductionist in what we consider to be intelligence.

• 1:16:21Paul Hawken?

  Yes.

• 1:16:21Rich Roll?

  You know, we're intelligent because we can do these certain things, but, you know, perhaps it's more intelligent to not live in an extractive relationship with the world, but more in a symbiotic one of harmony where, you know, I mean, if you're a dolphin cruising around with your family members, having a good old time, like, that's probably a better life than most of us are living.

• 1:16:47Paul Hawken?

  Well, we're the only species that dysregulates the climate. There's eight point, they say, four, five, six species, million species. Okay, we're the only one. The rest of them don't do that. And so intelligent? I question that. I mean, if we're so intelligent, why would we destroy the atmosphere? We know it. I mean, and we know it since the 19th century, and we know it very well. The science is locked. No argument about the science. And because it's really simple, the science, you know, it's really about how to triatomic,

• 1:17:25Paul Hawken?

  you know, molecules, you know, re-radiate, you know, heat back to earth that comes up from infrared. I mean, this is so simple. It's like Climate 101, you know? So we've known that since 1856. Eunice Foot demonstrated that, a woman scientist in the United States, 1856, demonstrably. And she wasn't listened to because she couldn't go to scientific conferences because she was a woman. Scientists didn't allow women in the conferences, but, so, I mean...

• 1:17:58Paul Hawken?

  And yet, we still do it. So it's really interesting to see what is intelligence in this context, you know? I mean, are we brilliant? Yes, no question about it. And I would say also, not to be a gainsayer, but I mean, we live in one of the craziest, stupidest times in history in terms of our relationship to each other and to the living world. But I also think we live in the most brilliant time in history. So both are happening at the same time. And there is a brilliance in the world that's arising and emerging and present today that is so heartwarming and so inspiring and so extraordinary. So I'm not here to, you know, I'm here to be curious and observe.

• 1:18:41Paul Hawken?

  I see both at the same time. And what will emerge? What will finally happen? Will we survive even? I don't know. But I know that I want to be here and do whatever I can, you know? And so doing, it just changes my life, you know, and who I meet and what I read and, you know, everything and where I live, all that sort of stuff. And it can change everybody's life.

• 1:19:07Rich Roll?

  It feels like part of the problem has something to do with our proclivity for pursuing self-interest, like the idea that what's important is like what I want to do and what I need to get and like how I'm going to get it as opposed to, you know, what's good for the commons. And I don't think it's a genetic wiring that we have. When you look back on indigenous cultures and you talk about this in the book, like it seems like people were really all about the commons back then. It's systems that have been laid on top of us that have, you know, tweaked and thwarted our better interests and, you know, deluded us into believing that like getting what,

• 1:19:52Rich Roll?

  you know, what's ours is really what life is about.

• 1:19:54Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, Nate Hagens, who is a podcaster, talks about the carbon pulse, that really when we discovered, you know, coal gas and oil, it was a huge change in human civilization because of what it gave us in terms of fossil fuel slaves, you know? I mean. It used to be we'd have to have a person do work for us. And each person could only do the amount of work they could consume in terms of calories. You know, and that was it. And then wood helped, and that was kind of a breakthrough. But it didn't really change what a person could do. Fossil fuels, oil, coal, changed what a person could do, what they could make and what we could make and so forth.

• 1:20:37Paul Hawken?

  And so the carbon pulse is this increase in the use of carbon-based fuels. You know, to this day, to this minute, you know, we have increased. It doesn't level off. It doesn't, oh, we have enough. No one's ever said that. And so if we don't recognize that, then we're going to supulse ourselves right out of our civilization. And we have these fossil fuel slaves. And we're taking for granted, we grew up in it, we have our cars, we have our gas stations. Everywhere I drive, you know, I'm in L.A. Just look at the patterns of retail, the patterns of the consumption, the patterns of, you know, at the airport and so forth, you know.

• 1:21:22Paul Hawken?

  I mean, and the increase in convenience and speed and quickness and facility and convenience, you know, that impels the culture, all those increasing footprint that we're having, you know, and the impact we're having and so forth.

• 1:21:41Rich Roll?

  Along with our entitlement to that footprint.

• 1:21:44Paul Hawken?

  Of course, we grew up that way. And, you know, I'm going to take care of my family and this and that. So that's all left brain thinking. And what's happened historically, if you look back over like last 2,000 years, you get these kind of shifts in humanity to the left brain, which is a problem-solving brain. But the right brain is synthesis, is really different, quite different, you know, and looks at connections and systems and looks at the whole. We look at systems, the right brain looks at complex, you know, interactive systems, you know.

• 1:22:21Rich Roll?

  Relationships.

• 1:22:22Paul Hawken?

  It's always about relationships. And so we're all, look at, we have a presence, all left brain. It's all about getting, taking, wanting, you know, and...

• 1:22:36Paul Hawken?

  And so we're there. How do we get there? I don't know. I don't know how it matriculated that way. But I do know that there are some just extraordinary people who are walk amongst us, who are doing fantastic things. And if I was a betting man, I'd put my money on that side than the one that's in power now.

• 1:22:56Rich Roll?

  That's good to hear, because it is, I agree with you. It is a situation in which we're kind of escalating. We're hurtling towards catastrophe on one level. And then, kind of on a parallel track, we're just, we're the acceleration of technological innovation and like, kind of first principles thinking in terms of problem solving and a more expansive appreciation for the natural world. Like, all of these things are kind of all happening at once, and they're all speeding up together. But it is a ticking clock. Like, there is a deadline here. We're sort of quickly approaching this precipice.

• 1:23:39Rich Roll?

  And it's like, which version of ourself is gonna get there first? Before it's too late? It's weird how it's like, everything feels really sped up, though.

• 1:23:51Paul Hawken?

  Well, the existing system is self-terminating. There's no question about that. And it's accelerating that we're in the self-terminating system. And, period. So, I'll give you an example about growing up and fighting fires. I'm not sure I like the verb, but you dealt with fire. Where I lived, up in the Sierras. And I was a teenager and I lived in Nevada City with the family who took me in. I didn't have a home. And you'd marshal everybody who was able-bodied to fight the fire. We didn't have a big brig in the farm in there. Couldn't afford it. And they taught you what to do and everything like that. And afterwards, you tamp it down.

• 1:24:37Paul Hawken?

  With your boots and make sure there's no hotspots. There's nothing, there's no embers in there. And you find them, they're embers, you know, like a manzanita will stay hot for a long time, you know, and the ash is orbit, so you don't see it. And then you get a wind that night and then blow embers, restart a fire. So you have to walk the fire where it burned. And then you eventually go home or whatever, you know, and you look at this wasteland. It's all black, the trees, you know, everything is just gone, you know. But I do also remember, like in the spring, the grass is greener than you've ever seen because of the ash feeds it. Those are nutrients.

• 1:25:19Paul Hawken?

  And you see wildflowers that you've never seen before, or I was told that hadn't been seen before. Because there's certain wildflowers that only break open the corpus under extreme heat. They're not annuals. And so I use that today as an analogy for what's happening. The world's on fire. It's on fire, there's no question about it. But at the same time, the fire and the wildflowers and their emergence is happening at the same time, not sequentially. And it's easy to see the fire.

• 1:26:01Paul Hawken?

  It's harder to see the birth, the emergence, because it's not centralized. It doesn't have a voice. It wasn't elected. It doesn't make the news cycle. It doesn't light up the amygdala for click-throughs. It's the best of humanity, and there's a lot of it out there. I feel this extraordinary human beings in communities and villages and villages all over the world who actually see the fire. They're singed by the fire.

• 1:26:38Paul Hawken?

  And they're coming together. And I use the word regeneration, but restoration, renewal, whatever word works for it, doesn't matter. But they're creating more life for themselves, their children, their future, their land. And not only more life on a biological level, but also in terms of schooling, education, the welfare of the children, the welfare of all the creatures and animals that live around them that they have, that they now, I guess, value in a way that they never had before because they never knew they were, they were never threatened before and now they are.

• 1:27:16Rich Roll?

  Well, that example of, that you just provided, you know, illustrates this notion that like, everything is an opportunity for rebirth and regrowth and hidden within whatever name your crisis, you know, there's, there's some, there's some possibility for something to blossom that couldn't have otherwise. And you're nothing if not hopeful, like hope is a, you know, recurring sort of theme or strain in all of your work. And I can't help but think like, in this particular moment that we're all experiencing right now, where there's so much political division and uncertainty, for somebody who's

• 1:27:58Rich Roll?

  listening to this, who does find themselves doom scrolling and feeling a lack of agency or struggles to find anything to hold on to, to feel that hope and, you know, and identify that wildflower, like, how does, how does one go about doing that? Like, what are you, what are you really trying to say in this book to the reader?

• 1:28:21Paul Hawken?

  It doesn't have to be a wildflower, it can be a child. The suffering around us of children is extraordinary, the suffering of migrants is extraordinary. Talk about, if you're gonna use the word regeneration, which I have, of course, you wanna do it as, with the biggest arms as possible. Because if we're not restoring, renewing the lives of the six billion people who wake up every single morning on earth.

• 1:28:59Paul Hawken?

  Facing existential threat. It could be food, it could be security, it could be school, it could be jobs, it could be money, it could be income, I mean, just, and this is in the United States too. This is not some other country. And that's, the bulk of humanity is waking up every morning with that. And you wonder, they're gonna do something about climate or biodiversity? No, they're not. They have to take care of themselves and their family and their children first. So if there is to be a genuine climate biodiversity slash movement, and I think people do understand this, who I mentioned earlier, you know, you have to do it in such a way that it improves the lives of those 6 billion people,

• 1:29:40Paul Hawken?

  you know, who are not, you know, basically, they're extractive, but that's because they've been forced to, they have no other choice, you know, because they're right there at the margins, you know. But, so, it's, it's not about butterflies, it's not about, it's about whatever you see, ever, you know, whatever you care about, whatever causes grief is your pathway. And grief is like the gift of the angels, because grief can only come from one place, and that comes from love. You can't feel grief if you have no love.

• 1:30:21Paul Hawken?

  And love comes from the heart, and the heart is the organ that unfathomably tells the truth. Never lie to you or anyone else. And so, I don't mean to say, "Oh, it's out there in nature somewhere." I'm just saying that everything that we have taken for granted in terms of the living world is sent in alive, communicating, just as we are, but not destroying its habitat, not destroying its children, not destroying others. And, and so, it's just so much to take in and learn and so forth, but you can do it right in your neighborhood, right where you are.

• 1:31:05Paul Hawken?

  And the thing, churches kind of got a bad rap, especially in the last election cycle because of, but let's put that aside, you know, a mosque and synagogues and, and churches, you know, forget what happens on Friday night or Saturday or Sunday, and la la la, okay. All the other time, what do churches do? They take care of people. They care. You know? And that's what all religions have done and so forth. So you can gainsay religion for all the things it's done. They're really stupid. Catholic Church probably lead the pack on that. But you can't gainsay the fact that the parishioners and the people, the attendants,

• 1:31:46Paul Hawken?

  people who worship, the people who pray five times a day, they actually do things besides that, which is to take care of other people in other places, you know? That's us. That's also us. And that's kind of overwritten or not looked at, you know?

• 1:32:06Rich Roll?

  I think that's a really beautiful place to end it. Like, I feel like I have a lot of other questions for you, but that was such a poetic way to punctuate what is a very poetic book. A deeply soulful book. Like, you're a soulful guy, right? You've written all of these amazing books that really get into the brass tacks of the problem and the solution with respect to the environment. But, you know, this is your soul song. And I think what you just said is, you know, a really eloquent way of encapsulating the message that you're trying to carry. It's really a beautiful thing that you've created. Thank you.

• 1:32:45Paul Hawken?

  Thank you. Thank you, Rich. It's lovely being here with you always.

• 1:32:57Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at mealplanner.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review. view and/or comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be

• 1:33:42Rich Roll?

  possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae, with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. Content management by Shanice Savoy, copywriting by Ben Pryor. And of course, our theme music was created, all the way back in 2012, by

• 1:34:26Rich Roll?

  Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Blats.