Paul Hawken: Carbon is the flow of life (Ep452)

Written By kamea chayne
“I want to take carbon away from an element, the thing that is objectified as if it is singular. I understand carbon as the flow of life itself...”
— Paul Hawken

What is there to question about the dominant framing of “climate crisis”? What does it mean to understand carbon not just as an element but as the flow of life? And how do we begin to recalibrate our senses of delusion or reality in a world where often up is portrayed is down and down as up?

In this conversation, we are joined by Paul Hawken, a world renowned climate expert who invites us to move beyond the fixation on carbon in a reductive, objectified equation of emissions and sequestration, and to look to the roots of why the planet and its communities are experiencing distress to begin with.

How do we counter the climate movement’s co-optation by technological, capitalist interests?

We invite you to…

 

About our guest:

Paul Hawken has started ecological businesses, writes about nature and commerce, and consults with heads of state and CEOs on climatic, economic, and ecological regeneration. He is the author of nine books, including six national and NYT bestsellers: Growing a Business, The Next Economy, The Ecology of Commerce, Blessed Unrest, Drawdown, and Regeneration. His latest book, Carbon: The Book of Life, will be published by Viking/Penguin on March 18, 2025.

Paul is the founder of Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration (regeneration.org), which is the world’s largest, most complete listing and network of solutions to the climate crisis. He lives in Mill Valley, California, at the edge of wilderness in the Cascade Creek watershed with his wife Jasmine and coyotes, foxes, bobcats, ravens, red-tail hawks, pileated woodpeckers, and flocks of nuthatches.

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interview transcript

Note: Our transcripts are minimally edited and do not have word-for-word accuracy. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored.

Paul Hawken: So I want to take carbon away from an element, a thing, the thing that is objectified as if it is singular. I understand carbon as a flow — the flow of life itself. It has memory and energy and can do things no other element can do.

That's why it's the basis of everything on Earth. In fact, 99.9 percent of everything on Earth, rock, stone, life, whatever, has carbon in it. But I wanted to move the conversation to wonder and awe, and appreciation and gratitude, of where we live. And to point out that, frankly, we don't know where we live right now.

There is burgeoning science and discovery, and the emergence of Indigenous wisdom and Traditional Ecological Knowledge along with Western science. The complexity of the world is mind-boggling. I think that is good news. It just brings in a sense of the sacred with the idea or the awareness of how extraordinary life is, whether it's a single cell, under the soil, in the air, the forest, oceans, seas, and so forth. And so right now we are at a moment where it's probably one of the stupidest times ever that human beings have organized themselves.

We have our administration here in the United States to attest to that. But it's also one of the most brilliant times in human history. And I don’t mean “brilliant” in a tech sense, but brilliant in a true way: to be a light, to be lit up. And so, that's sort of the evolution of those three books. I’m writing two more right now, so the evolution continues.

Kaméa Chayne: Thank you so much. There's already so much in what you just shared that I'm curious to explore more throughout our conversation. Something that caught my ear and that I understand and resonate with, but that I know might lead to pushback, especially if it's just taken as a soundbite, is that the climate is fine and perfect. This can be very provocative. If it's taken at face value, people might be like, so you're a climate denier or whatever.

I want to invite you to elaborate on what you're trying to get at when you make these statements. And, how does this welcome us to look deeper into the roots of what feels in crisis?

Paul Hawken: This is a great question. The reason I say that is that the climate cannot have a crisis, because we are currently having one. And the crisis is our relationship to the living world. Climate is the expression of the atmosphere, it’s our relationship to the biosphere. The problem with the term “climate crisis” is that it puts it “out there somewhere”, as if it’s happening to us.

People are being affected, of course. But I'm saying that as a mental construct, we are using the mindset to cause the problem. And the problem is caused by humanity objectifying the living world and selling it to the highest bidder. This includes selling actual human beings, by the way, in the Atlantic passage. Not just animals, but forests, minerals, whales, and so forth. 

So that is a 500-year history of settler colonial objectification, and seeing things as “other” that you could take, have, capture, sell, or bring back to Europe, or to the United States or whatever, to make money, amass capital and more.

We use phrases like “tackle” or “fight” climate change, yet it’s simply a manifestation of our relationship between the biosphere and the atmosphere. 

And so that's what we have to pay attention to. And that requires the understanding of the inseparability between human beings and the living world as opposed to something that is out there that we can fix. These are very male verbs. I'm being very stereotyped here for a minute. So, you see, the verbs that are being used around climate are very male. They're about war, sports, and technology.

I think that narrative has hurt the ability for people like us and others who are also affected and impacted by what's happening in the world to find different ways of communicating it that are inclusive and expansive, as opposed to being objectifying and antagonistic.

Kaméa Chayne: I resonate with this because I felt similar inclinations to reframe and push back on a lot of mainstream narratives and rhetoric around climate change. I very much also feel this need to challenge rhetoric like “fighting” climate change. I like to think about the analogy of cortisol levels in our bodies as stress hormones. We wouldn't call out our stress hormones and say, “I have a cortisol crisis.” We wouldn’t say, “Cortisol change is the problem” because that's just a symptom, and how the strains on my body are being expressed in this way. 

And if we were to cut to the core, it might feel more grounded to say, “I feel stressed.” The fix wouldn't then be fixated on the chemistry of the cortisol levels, but rather the underlying factors that are bringing me distress.

Paul Hawken: Right. If you lived in LA and somebody said, “The traffic on the 405 is terrible,” and you say, “What should I do?,” and the person says, “Get an EV,” well, that doesn't change anything. In other words, you always want to go upstream to the cause. We should go find out who's putting it in there.

It doesn't mean you don't want to do things that reduce your impact, of course. We used to call it “not going to cause,” which is, you're going to try to clean the pollution that's coming out of the pipe and going into the river or the ocean.

Kaméa Chayne: I feel like when we don't dig deep enough to the roots of the problems, then whatever is being framed as the problems can get hijacked for ulterior motives. 

You talk a lot about how carbon is being framed as the issue. So, what are all the different ways that carbon sequestration is being presented as the solution, and how does that open it up to commodification and commercialization as well?

Paul Hawken: Yes, it's the same mindset. Like I said, the Earth has been bought by the highest bidder for 500 years, along with all the artefacts and all the products in life therein. And now we're selling carbon to the highest bidder. We're selling “nature-based solutions.” It's like, really? A whale is worth $2 million according to the International Monetary Fund.

What does it mean to dollar-denominate the living world and then make it fungible?

And then they say, “Well, we're doing this to save the whale.” Somebody's going to put up $2 million. Okay. Where did the $2 million come from? Where does the money come from, where people, corporations, airlines, and others offset our carbon? 

The money came from basically creating emissions, from extracting the living world. And now you're saying we're going to be in this turbo-wheel, where you've extracted a ton, you've emitted a ton, and we're going to pay you to keep this forest the way it is so that it's sequestering carbon. I mean, this is either magical thinking or madness, depending on which way you look at it.

As I said in the book, there's a fraction of 1 percent of the people who do anything daily about the atmosphere and global warming. And I would ask, how did that happen? How did the most extraordinary crisis in human history become so ignorable, so forgotten, so put aside? 

And that's because the narrative excludes people. It's not an opening. It’s not welcoming. You say, well, of course it's not welcoming, it's a crisis. Welcoming means that we're actually at the threshold of imagining a world where we create more, not less. The world that exists right now is creating less. 

I mean less in terms of forests, fewer trees, fish, insects, and pollinators. It’s just less, less, less. And so whatever you want to call our movement, to me, it's regenerative. Whether you use that word or not, that’s irrelevant. But whether it's people, children, places, or ecosystems, we are about creating more, not less. 

So what you hear about the 50-year climate narrative has been about reducing the threat and fear. And if you don't do that, something terrible is going to happen, or it's worse than you think. For example, Extinction Rebellion was telling children in the UK that they're doomed. They went into classrooms and told children it's too late.

That is emblematic of the rhetoric, the climate narrative, and so forth. So you can understand the nature of the cause and the problem and explain it, but if you stop there and just say, [speaks gibberish], basically you haven't done anything at all. If you don’t describe a way forward that is inclusive, kind, and compassionate, that works better than what we're doing now, then you’re going to keep running into this wall of ignorance.

Which is what we're running into in the United States with the very word climate, not even climate change, being banned from government documents. That's the big hole we’ve dug. When I say we, I don't know who we is. Maybe that's not the right pronoun, but I'm saying a big hole has been dug by the rhetoric and that rhetoric belongs to the IPCC and COP 15, 20, 25, 29. They're using that rhetoric to this day.

People listened and they said, “I hope somebody does something about it because I can't and I'm not interested in that way of being and thinking about the world, my children, family and friends.” And so to me, what I love about Green Dreamer, but also what I'm trying to get to in Carbon: The Book of Life, is saying, let's go look this way. We used to look that way. This world we live in, that we occupy, that we're so blessed to be in, is just wondrous.

I know it's harder for people in cities to understand that. We have to think about what that means, but you, I, and others who are more proximate can't just be privileged people who get to go to nature all the time and come back in our Volvos.

We have to figure out some way to bring that wonder, discovery, complexity, and sense of miracles back to our hearts.

Not just for ourselves but for our beings, children, families, cities, and towns. I’m not a church-goer, but one of the things I think that's been overlooked is churches, and mosques, and synagogues. You can argue about who they worship or what's worshipped, or what's believed. But the fact is that they do that on Sunday or Saturday.

In between those days, all these organizations in the world have been around helping people with aid, support, kindness, and compassion. That's what they've been about. Have they also done terrible things? Yes, of course. But I'm talking about the local mosque, the local church, the local synagogue. That's what they do during the week. And religion somehow got this separated from the sanctity and the sacredness of the living world. 

Kaméa Chayne: That could be a whole conversation in and of itself. But I do agree that rhetoric and narrative change are so necessary during these times. And it's not just semantics, but it's sowing the seeds so that we can germinate different possibilities and more regenerative futures. Then it also invites different ways of looking at what the crises are, and how we begin and approach the healing process. 

On that note, I've also been curious to question even common verbiage like MAPA, which in climate spaces refers to “Most Affected Peoples and Areas,” or “the most vulnerable people.” I kind of see it as communities that are the most in tune with the distress of the land, water, and our planet's language and expressions. That framing then doesn't ask for saving, it asks for deeper listening as well.

So it's not like they're the most vulnerable, and like they're the victims that need us to go save them. Instead, we should listen to what these communities have to say. 

Because oftentimes, the farmers, the land-based subsistence communities, are the most directly in tune with the fact that there are prolonged seasons of drought. Or they can tell and sense over the years that this place and the water cycles are different, and all of those things. So that's something I'd be curious to hear you expand on as well.

Paul Hawken: I agree so much. 

Part of the warning system for the climate movement has been that we face a dire future existential threat. But that is the rhetoric of the privileged.

We're there now. That has been told to us for decades. And there are five to six billion people, depending on how you count it, who face an existential threat every morning when they wake up. It can be flood, fire, but usually it's food, security, safety, education, health, and housing. And they don't have it, it doesn't exist, they're poor. They're struggling. It’s in the North as well, particularly in the United States.

And if we're serious about reversing global warming, we have to pay attention to those five to six billion people so that they don’t live with an existential threat. They wake up with it, it's not conceptual. For us it has been conceptual, us being privileged people who live in the North and have evolved economies.

I think sometimes when people say regeneration, they immediately think about agriculture. Great, it should. But it goes to people, children, and women. It goes to the needs human beings have that we're all here and together. And so again, when I say regeneration, I try to look at it with as broad an understanding as possible, as opposed to the way the word is being used almost casually.

Kaméa Chayne: I think the final example I'm curious to have you expand on in terms of reframing and language is how English tends to be a noun-heavy language. And the whole scientific field around biodiversity and taxonomy is based on nounifying every being at every scale and level. That is the very foundation that then structures the rest of how we approach conversations and solutions to protecting biodiversity, and talking about saving endangered species and so forth. 

I'm curious, how would our entire approach change if we saw every being as verbs and centered on relationships as opposed to singling out individuals, even in the more-than-human world?  What have you thought through in terms of how our noun-heavy language around conservation has, in a sense, limited us in terms of where we go with it? What might we be able to learn from languages and framings that are more verb-centered?

Paul Hawken: When I said to my editor, “This chapter is called Parlance,” she said, “Why?” This is about the environment and the Earth and climate, and so forth. And I said, well, read it and you'll see why. But it goes right to what you're talking about with nounism. And that arose out of the Enlightenment in the West, which is the Scientific Revolution. And it involved identification and naming. 

You can't identify something unless you can describe the difference. What grass, what seeds, what annuals? What are perennials? I mean, it just keeps going down. It’s the same with species and with parts of species. I forget how many different kinds of moths there are. There are 170,000 different moths now that we've identified. New ones come every day. But in the process, that's beautiful. That's science at its best in some ways.

But also to identify, name, and emphasize nouns is to separate things. Because what you're saying is, it’s not this, it's not this, it's not this, it's not this. And so if it's not that, then how do they connect? And that isn't the province of science on a larger level. Because if you're trying to get peer review, you're trying to discover something, you're trying to recognize that it's more about discovery. And discovery means what? But it's not about looking at it as a system.

And so the difference between Western languages and Indigenous languages is the fact that a verb is always about a relationship, so it's about A to B.

If language is about relationships, it doesn’t separate people, places, and things. It’s inclusive. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer is good at explaining it in a very gentle but clear way about how that affects perception, and then how perception affects relationships. How does relationship respect, change, honor, listen, and bring cohesion? It could be tribal, it could be community, but that language takes us to a very different place than that of atomization, which is really what naming does.

English is the biggest language in the world, and part of it is because it names everything. There are over a million words, and that doesn't count the 350,000 chemicals. It doesn't count so many other things that are part of the English language. And so it's dominant, it's used, but it's affecting our perception of each other and where we are and where we live.

Kaméa Chayne: There's such a rich diversity of narratives and perspectives. So all of these things already exist. But I think it's important for us to pull back the curtains and understand why certain narratives might feel more pervasive and mainstream and push more broadly, and why others might continue to be sidelined or discredited. 

So on this front, with you being so immersed in climate science and research spaces for so long, I wonder what you'd like to share in terms of how money and funding for research and corporate interests have helped to shape the trajectory of climate science storytelling and solutionism.

Paul Hawken: Well, you certainly see it in offsets. There should be no such thing, it should be onsets. Corporations should be paying for the past, not for the present. They should pay for all the emissions they've made and pay that to people who are actively restoring, regenerating, and renewing the living world, as well as cultures and places. They're not, but they're trying to. Like I said, it's a gerbil wheel. It doesn't get us anywhere.

The climate issue has had a technological capitalistic takeover. As if it couldn’t happen unless business fixes things.

It's become an interesting back-and-forth because I don't think any corporation committed itself to it. I just heard, or read, today that Southwest Airlines announced that they're giving up all research and development on Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). And I can say fairly confidently there never will be such a thing because of the nature of flights and airplanes.

The fact that they're putting it aside means that they weren't that committed to it in the first place. And now it's a new administration getting rid of those things. We don't have to do that. We'll save some money. And at the same time, you'll have things like “direct air capture,” which has attracted billions of dollars of money, and is a technology that's going to suck air and take out the carbon.

CO₂ (carbon dioxide) makes up about 400 parts per million (ppm) of air, so you need a large volume of air, not just for the CO₂, but also for the O₂ (oxygen). So you just want the carbon, and then you want to separate it and liquefy it. But liquefying it takes a lot of energy. And then you want to pump it into geological formations, or in some cases, leave it as a gas and pump it into depleted oil wells so you can get more oil. And literally, the company is going to call this “carbon-neutral fuel.”

I'm laughing because it's so wildly ridiculous in terms of physics, and this is not just my opinion. I have opinions about it, too. But we all learned the first and second laws of thermodynamics, even if we probably put them away because they didn't apply to what we did. And the second law is that energy goes in one direction. Ice in your glass doesn't get colder in the room, it gets warmer. Energy only goes in one direction. 

And when you burn something like coal, gas, or oil, you get ash. That's called entropy. That's when a lot of energy was released, and what you have is the entropic result. So, CO₂ in the atmosphere is entropy. In other words, we burned it, and the gas went up. Now, direct air capture is going to take that CO₂ , bring it down to Earth, liquefy it, and then put it down into geological formations somewhere that they can find and drill down and open and all that sort of stuff. 

It's just a fantastic vision of the future. I say fantastic in the worst sense of the word. But that's entropy. In other words, it takes so much energy to suck the energy down, to separate the carbon from the CO₂ , to liquefy it, and to pump it with huge machines. And they say, “We're going to use renewable energy.” Well, renewable energy isn't renewable in that direct sense. It takes energy to make solar panels and wind turbines. It doesn't come for free. And they wear out. 

Lots of solar panels are now in a landfill in California. Nobody knows what to do with them. It costs more money to recycle them than their value.

If you're using a lot of energy to do something, you're creating entropy. So this idea that we're going to use entropy to fix entropy in the past is like saying, “We have this great idea. We're going to make cows out of cow patties.” Because a cow patty is simply entropy. A cow ate and pooped. But that poop is not nutritious for that cow. 

The corporate entry into solving the climate crisis has just been one of, you could say, greed, but I feel like a blindness. Like having blinders on.

Kaméa Chayne: It's just kind of the same logic of the system. It goes to support this idea that problem creation and then problem solving is more profitable for the system than just preventing the problem from beginning with. It involves problem creation and problem solving in ways that create more problems that we will then need another commercial solution to solve. The more problems we create and the more problem-solving things there are, the more profitable that whole system can be. 

But what we're trying to address is, how do we heal and address the traumas created by the initial problem to begin with?

Paul Hawken: I do want to say there are some brilliant people with some brilliant imaginations, design ideas, and are creating things that will provide us with the things we need as people. They do the opposite, they do not just sequester carbon, but create more life.

I’m not against technology. I am against something that is blind, that is ignorant. There is a code out there, it’s called life.

I'm close to Silicon Valley, and I see it, I hear about it, and I know people who made tons of money and invested in it. And it's like, okay, but how is that working for you? How's that working for us? It's not working, and we know that we see it. And there's so much that does work for us that we know, and that it is overshadowed by money, capitalism, wealth, privilege, oppression, and force. Yes, no question. I'm not naive, and neither are any of your listeners.

At the same time, there are some other people out there who are doing things that are just brilliant and extraordinary. And in all cultures, too, I'm not just talking about Western culture or certainly not Silicon Valley. I'm talking about understanding, comprehension and care that rests within humanity. It’s rising. 

When I was a youth, I lived in the Sierras and we’d have fires. California always had fires. And we didn't have a big fire department, so we all learned how to be firefighters and work with that. After a fire, you're tamping it down, you're making sure there's no hot spots and walking over it, looking at it, and so on. But as you’re tamping it down, it's just a big black charcoal mess. You look at it and think, my god, this beautiful forest, or this grassland, or this meadow, is gone.

But since I lived there, what's happened is that you then go there in the spring. Let's say that it was in the summer and in the spring after it rains, and this grass coming up is greener than any grass you've ever seen because it's been fertilized by the ash. And you start to see many wildflowers. Wildflowers that haven't been seen for 50, 60, 70, 100 years. How? Where'd they come from? 

These flowers can only open under intense heat. And so this is where we are. This is my analogy, which is that it’s easy right now and it's happening more and more to see the blackened ground, to see what's been destroyed and what's being emulated by ignorance. 

But at the same time, what I also see, and I know you see it because you invite them on Green Dreamer and which is why I listen to it, is that people all over the world are acting and instituting and connecting and creating a change that may be seen as marginal because it's small. It may not light up the amygdala like the news cycle does, but it's here and it's growing. That’s what keeps me happy, awake, and excited every day. This is coming. This is a new life.

Kaméa Chayne: It feels like there's a growing kind of consciousness revolution. Something that you talk about is correcting or recalibrating what we understand as real or delusional. And I resonate with that because this modern world, at least often, makes me feel like I'm crazy. I think oftentimes the people who are pushing back against how our socio-political, economic systems function are the ones labelled as extreme, fringe, outcasted, or delusional. Like, that's just not how the world works. 

And this is kind of unrelated, but also related, but I was learning about what happened to the pilot who had flown the helicopter that carried Kobe Bryant and his friends and their kids. And I learned about how helicopter pilots, when they're entering places with no visibility of the ground relative to the sky, become disoriented.

Even when they feel like they're driving the helicopter upwards because they feel that spatial pressure on their bodies and in their eardrums in a particular way, they might be going completely sideways or even downwards. And so that's what had happened to that pilot. Unfortunately, he was verbally reporting to the traffic towers that he was increasing in elevation, and he was driving upwards when, in fact, it showed that they were going down.

I offered this example also as an analogy to a collective experience of societal disorientation, where what's often portrayed as what we should strive towards to keep progressing, advancing, and moving forward and upwards is what might bring us down. So, I would just invite you to add to this and how we might recalibrate our realities versus delusion.

Paul Hawken: We want to do what the pilot didn't do, which is as soon as you know that you're flying blind, you stop in the air. You stop and you hover. You do know that, and you do know how to do that. I don't know what's going on here. I have to wait. I have to find out. But you don't try to get ahead when you don't know what's up and down, or what's below. I think we all have to reach those points. More than once. I have grieved a lot. It's not that I'm happy-go-lucky about this. I immerse myself in literature, daily.

It feels like I live in an insane asylum when reading the news and articles. And then I also immerse myself in books and podcasts and people and things that are just extraordinary. And I do both every day. It's kind of a whipsaw. But if I'm going to write, and I am, then I have to have a sense of the zeitgeist. What are we feeling, whatever we are? What are we experiencing? How do we see the world? What is coming at us?

I'm writing to the amalgam of a human being who's roughly experiencing the same thing I am. Roughly in the sense of trying to figure out what's going on, where we live, and what to do about time, a job, a family, a wife, children, community, purpose, meaning, dignity, all those things that human beings think about.

If we go too fast, even if we have good intentions, we may make the wrong move.

So I think things like stopping, meditating, walking slowly in sacred places, or being around people who are almost like mentors in their presence are nourishment.

Kaméa Chayne: Thank you for this. As we wind down our conversation, I think I want to land on this question of what does all of this mean for us? Because we talked a lot about language, worldview perspective shifts, and different ways of walking and seeing, and knowing. 

When I think about this question, I think back on a frustrating conversation that I had with a friend a few years ago, where I was first trying to explain these vital worldview shifts that we need to make, and I was struggling to condense and simmer down what I had learned and unlearned across 10 years into a neat little summary for her. 

In the end, she was like, “These things feel very philosophical and hard for me to grasp. But I just want to know what this means in terms of what policies we support or what actions we take?” I think I was frustrated by how we went this whole way for her to want to bypass the deeper inquiries and just jump to the solutions and what we should do. 

So, how would you address questions like this that might want to skip over the deeper invitations? And how would you either navigate this sort of communication, or anything else you'd like to add in terms of guidance for us in supporting the narrative changes that we need?

Paul Hawken: People who know me know me as a doer, not a writer. I write and I do. I've always been involved with getting things done. We say, “GST,” you can figure out what the S means. I'm a strong advocate for myself to do that as opposed to philosophize, or ponder, or suggest new paradigms and new ways of thinking, and say, we should look at it this way instead of that way. I don't argue against that. I'm just saying that I would go stir crazy if that's all I did. 

I do write, but I've never considered myself a writer. I’m involved with people who have techniques and inventions and things that are extraordinary to me, and are coming and will make a real difference to people. They will make a difference whether it's to the smallholder in Côte d'Ivoire or Ghana, to the big farmer in Iowa, or whether it's to people who live in hurricane-prone places where they get their home just blown away and become homeless overnight, like the Philippines, for example.

These events are techniques that can lower the temperature. It sounds fantastical, but it's not. It's, again, physics, by lowering the heating in neighborhood streets, the planet as a whole, and cities using a very simple, brilliant invention that requires no energy at all.

I feel like all of us have to find our “do” place, not just our “be” place. 

I feel like one purpose connecting to the living world, in having that experience of seeing it differently and experiencing it in a way that gives you a sense of awe and wonder, is that it changes you.

It's not observational, like watching TV programs. When you have that experience, you do not see the world the same way. You don't see yourself the same way. That may seem oblique to the problem at hand. [You think], I ought to do something, I want to make a difference. But that makes the biggest difference of all, because you don't see yourself as distinct and separate, and “other” from the rest of the world. As odious as the pronouncements that are coming out of the U.S. government right now and so forth, they're not “other.” That's part of us, too.

A call to action is a call to being and becoming. You'll know what to do. If you don't, you have a friend who knows, or you'll join with others, or you'll figure it out. You'll learn. We're human beings. We're brilliant and we care. I'm a little bit suspicious when somebody says and knows what humans should do. I mean, it's not that they are wrong. It's just that it's not the way a change arises. 

Change on this planet isn't top-down. We have a top-down capitalist system for sure, but nature is not top-down. It never will be. And that's the beauty of it. That's its diversity. That's why it's so complex and different, because it emerges from itself. And so the only call to action I would put out there is to observe that that is true. And then what does that mean to you?

To know that, to see that. And because change, as I've said in the book, always starts with one person, always, just like life starts with a single cell. Life always starts as a community. And then the community comes from one person to two, four, eight, six, ten. It's very difficult to do that when you sort of look to the side and you look at the world de-evolving.

You inhale, you breathe, and it's hard to do that. I’m trying to make this simple, but it always goes back to this place. The grief that we feel is so important. Take it on, be it, feel it, go deeper.

Grief is an aspect of love. You cannot have grief unless you love somebody, someplace, or the world as a whole.

That love comes from one area, one place, one heart. And the heart always tells us the truth. And so the grief is kind of the pathway, the doorway, to a truth within ourselves, and that truth will tell us what to do. And so if I had a call to action, I'd ask everybody to ignore it.

Kaméa Chayne: Maybe the deeper message and invitation is to realize that, like all the things we talked about today in terms of learning to reframe how we perceive the problem and the crisis, when we come to have a different understanding of what is “wrong” or what needs mending or healing, then it also shifts our ideas in terms of what I should do or how I better align myself and what I can act on. 

Even my sense of pleasure, desire, and what I take an interest in in my spare time, and my curiosities have changed. This has happened to me. So, speaking from personal experience, my ideas of fun and pleasure and things I'm curious about and what I want to spend more of my daily time doing, because it brings me more meaning, has shifted so much over the last 10 years as I've come to see the world differently and relate to the world differently. So those things have gone hand in hand for me.

Paul Hawken: Absolutely. This is a time of rapid evolution and de-evolution. One of the mottos I have from Byron Katie is “Even the present is in the past right now.” In other words, that's where we live. There is no present, it's all change. There is a change. That's the world we want to live in and dwell in.

I think you inquired as to what my favorite book is. There's a book I love by Frans de Waal called, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? The answer to which is, no, but in a beautiful way. You read his book and you realize what's out there. The communication, the connection between the 3.4 trillion creatures on land and sea. They're communicating, they're talking every single day, and it's like, what are they talking about? Well, take a look, take a listen, read. 

It's astonishing what our co-creators, our co-creatures, and our cohabitants are doing and saying, how they say it, and how they know what they know. In many cases, they’ve been doing it much longer than we have. And they know a lot. 

// musical intermission //

Kaméa Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books that you've read lately, or publications you follow?

Paul Hawken: How to Speak Whale by Tom Mustill. It's a beautiful book about cetaceans and the sea by a person who lived it and been there. 

The book starts when he was out of Monterey Bay and a whale came under his kayak and flew out into the air. And it's just a beautiful book about what he did in his life to discover what whales are saying and how they're communicating. It's so extraordinary, and it just makes you see the world differently. I'm very much into that right now.

Earlier in my book, I think I said that science is merging. Indigenous awareness and Western science is merging into a new understanding of the world where we don't know what's going on. And it's much more complex than we thought. It's about mystery now, not about this is true or this is not true. Or we know, or we don't know. It's the opposite. And it's such a beautiful space to go in.

Kaméa Chayne: What is a motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

Paul Hawken: Staying present and also knowing that means no such thing. It’s really about perception about the tendency of the mind. They say you have 3,000 to 4,000 thoughts a day. You can't turn them off, even monks can't turn them off. What you can do is just let them go by rather than allowing those things to become the present and stay there. And then as soon as they're there, they evoke emotions and attachments and fear or delusion. 

It’s not an easy thing to do. It's not just a slogan, but it's a reminder, and I have to be reminded every single day. I have to remind myself, and I have little things around saying, “Hey, wake up.” So, that’s my motto.

Kaméa Chayne: And finally, what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?

Paul Hawken: I would say there are two people: Robin Wall Kimmerer and Bayo Akomolafe. I know Bayo. I don't know Robin Wall Kimmerer. The universality of their way of seeing the world makes complete sense to me. It's almost like I can exhale. 

Bayo is more exciting in the sense of saying things in such a way that you never would have thought of it that way. And his use of language is extraordinary. Robin Wall Kimmerer makes so much sense. I'm not saying there aren't other people like Robin, there are, especially other Indigenous people. But it seems so obvious when you read and listen to what she says. She says it was such grace and humility.

Kaméa Chayne: I definitely echo your sentiment of feeling very inspired by both of their work. And also as we close off, I really want to thank you as well. I have learned a lot from you over the years and it's just been an honour to share this space and conversation together. 

So, as we close off here, where can people go to find your work and your books, and what final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as Green Dreamers?

Paul Hawken: You can go to paulhawken.com on the internet, and there are events and information about the new book that came out in March and the books that are coming. 

I'm pretty shy, I'm not a big social media person. I don't want to spend the time doing that, frankly. It doesn't mean I don't want to connect with human beings. I do, but I don't want that kind of connection. 

And so there's not a lot out there. It's kind of like now this book is being published, my publisher is sort of saying, “Hey, stand up and let people find you.” So there is paulhawken.com, which my wife created. And if you want to connect to me, there's an email there too.

Kaméa Chayne: And any final words of wisdom you'd like to leave with us as Green Dreamers?

Paul Hawken: I would just say to your listeners, keep listening to you, for one, and find those voices. There are more. There are others. I mentioned Manda Scott’s podcast “Accidental Gods” and Nate Hagen’s “The Great Simplification.”

I feel like the best media right now is not social media, it's podcasts. And there's an offshoot of that with Substack in written form, but I think podcast is even better because you hear the sound, you hear the voice of the being. And sound is the real deal. And you can tell from the sound if you trust the person.

The whole body is so wise. We're just animals like that, in a good way. I feel like podcasts are a doorway, a passage, an entry to extraordinary people and events that are happening in the world.

 

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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