Carbon: The Book of Life

by Paul Hawken

Overview

A journey into the world of carbon, the most versatile element on the planet, by the New York Times bestselling author Paul Hawken

Carbon is the only element that animates the entirety of the living world. Though comprising a tiny fraction of Earth’s composition, our planet is lifeless without it. Yet it is maligned as the driver of climate change, scorned as an errant element blamed for the possible demise of civilization.

Here, Paul Hawken looks at the flow of life through the lens of carbon. Embracing a panoramic view of carbon’s omnipresence, he explores how this ubiquitous and essential element extends into every aperture of existence and shapes the entire fabric of life. Hawken charts a course across our planetary history, guiding us into the realms of plants, animals, insects, fungi, food, and farms to offer a new narrative for embracing carbon’s life-giving power and its possibilities for the future of human endeavor.

In this stirring, hopeful, and deeply humane book, Hawken illuminates the subtle connections between carbon and our collective human experience and asks us to see nature, carbon, and ourselves as exquisitely intertwined—inseparably connected.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525427445
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/18/2025
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, and bestselling author who is one of the leading voices calling for the regeneration of nature and humanity. He has authored and edited eight books published in thirty languages in over fifty countries that have sold over two million copies, including Drawdown, Blessed Unrest, and Regeneration. He is a renowned lecturer who has keynoted conferences and led workshops on the impact of commerce on the environment and consults with NGOs, governments, and corporations worldwide.

Editorial Reviews

Advance Praise for Carbon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Publisher