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The Rich Roll Podcast
Earth's Hidden Wisdom: Paul Hawken On Reframing Carbon, Consciousness & Why Hope Lies Within Nature's Intelligence
01:42:09
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- [00:01]
Rich Roll
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- [04:36]
Paul Hawken
The chances of carbon being created in the solar system, in the universe is so incalculably small as to be impossible. Life is something that is far more extraordinary than even we could possibly know or possibly understand.
- [04:54]
Rich Roll
And so what do you make of that?
- [04:58]
Paul Hawken
How.
- [05:00]
Rich Roll
Paul Hawken is a legend. He's one of the great elder statesmen of environment, 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 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.
- [05:56]
Paul 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 easy to see the fire, it's harder to see the birds.
- [06:30]
Rich 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?
- [06:40]
Paul Hawken
Yeah, it's a Greek word and it's, you know, migrated into English, of course, and other languages, but the core root is still from the, 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.
- [07:06]
Rich 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. This is a reframe on that to say if you want to be reborn first, all must be revealed as a necessary step in that process.
- [07:38]
Paul 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 a 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 ardently attended to by people. But you would have to say the conference 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'm certainly not. I'm just saying. Yeah, but it doesn't work. And it's obvious that it doesn't work on some level.
- [08:52]
Rich Roll
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 find a more sustainable, regenerative way of living on this planet and 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? And when I look at your work, kind of the arc of the last couple books, drawdown, regeneration. Drawdown's like, okay, how are we going to get into the nuts and bolts of drawing down carbon regeneration, more of a rebirth? How can we 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 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 Yuval Noah 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? Like, it's just, you know, to say it's a 10,000 foot view is to understate. You're outside the solar system looking in on this shiny blue dot and trying to make sense of it all together. Is that accurate?
- [11:16]
Paul Hawken
It's very accurate. And it arose from two different directions or sources. The first one really is the climate movement narrative. In other words, there's a narrative. It's been around for decades and it's based on fear, threat reduction, less blaming, you know, 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. And I would say that narrative has completely failed. If we hired an ad agency decades ago and said 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. And you'd fire that agency, Say that's not selling the product, that is not bringing people in. I'm not, again, saying like having 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 that's one source about. We're using carbon as an object, as a thing, like a bad boy, a culprit, we gotta do this, sequester it, stop emitting it. And carbon neutrality, those kind of terms, 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, right? This is 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. You know, here's the problem, you know, this is what we're going to do. This 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 this caused the problem. We've objectified the living world and we've been selling off the living world 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 the story, I got the. No, there's. 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, 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? You know?
- [14:52]
Rich Roll
Yeah. The more you know, the less you know though, right? Like that's sort of what the books.
- [14:56]
Paul Hawken
But I think that what. 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 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 D.C. or Nairobi and having these big meetings and go on for days and days and coming out with something that is a new declaration. It won't work.
- [15:46]
Rich Roll
So rather than lambasting people for making bad decisions and conferences congregated to 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. It's 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 are integral to it and can be part of the solution by reframing our relationship with it.
- [16:37]
Paul 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, 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 of. 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. Was the butterfly or. I give an example of the book about a scientist who, for curiosity, whatever reason, wanted to know how many roots were on a seed of rye. One seed 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. 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. It's over there. Those people over there, beneath whatever, have phosphorus. And it comes up in. And then exchange it. Okay, that's from one seed of grass. So what that teaches me 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. In a redwood country, have about 20 redwoods between myself and the carport. And I've been walking that back and forth for years. And I love the redwoods. And then I read the work of many botanists, particularly the Italians, who do this amazing analysis of plant perception, plant intelligence. And they pointed out the plants have 20 senses, we have five. And one of the senses plants have is kind of a char scroll thing all over on the branches and in the bark and leaves where they can see movement. They can seem like if you were moving past, you know, and it's just sort of fuzzy, black and white, you know, they see that, the tree sees that. So I realized I was writing, reading all this sort of stuff, and then I walked out from my home, the house. And then I'm walking by these trees, and I realize they're noticing me. And I haven't been noticing them, and I've never gone back.
- [20:33]
Rich Roll
And if anyone was gonna notice them, it would have been you.
- [20:37]
Paul Hawken
Exactly.
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Rich Roll
You're the guy. Yeah.
- [20:39]
Paul Hawken
Yeah, you'd think. And now 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. Allow 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, 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, 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 going to make them register and carry things. They had to register, right? And this meeting got together and, you know, in the theater that was owned by a Jewish couple, the only theater that would let them meet in Durban and said, everybody decided they're going to get arrested. They're going to 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. 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. You know, not leaves on Walden. No, on civil disobedience.
- [22:44]
Rich Roll
Oh, civil disobedience. Yeah. I should have known that.
- [22:46]
Paul Hawken
But the famous. What we know about that is Thoreau never named it. 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 was 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. So I'm telling that story because it's possible to understand what one person can do. And even they don't understand it 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.
- [24:07]
Rich 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 Attenborough versus what's underneath our feet. Right. The magic is here. And the real thesis of the book is the answers that we're seeking in the way that regeneration was very much saying, 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 scale them up. You're taking it a further step and 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 with the two.
- [25:30]
Paul Hawken
Well, I'd say the two are each other and they complement each other. 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 going to write before carbon. I knew it. And so it wasn't like, okay, now what am I going to do? I knew that because I feel like. And you're a writer and you 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 you didn't get into. I didn't give you permission to go off on a tangent. I'm reading the book because you said, this is what you've got to write about. But I knew that, in a sense I was creating the book which is now called Solutionism. The idea that, okay, we're going to fix it if you do this, this happens, and everything's better. 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 check, check, check, check, check, check. Okay. 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 that 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? You know, 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. Not everybody. More and more people are asking that question for. 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. So that's drawn, then. That's regeneration. So carbon, 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 past the 20 redwood trees and going, holy. Oh, my God, I didn't know I lived here. Now I do, you know, and it's a joy that's. It's not guilt, you know, it's not something that rests heavily upon your shoulders, you know, 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, you know, and it's butterfly 7 inches big, and it comes out at dusk, you know, so it won't be predated. But you look at that owl butterfly or go look it up on Google Image and so forth, and it's like, what has two Eye spots. And they look exactly, exactly like the eyes of an owl. I mean, okay, so that is to keep predation away from it. So a bird looking or a bat looking, I'm out of here. That's an owl, right? Then how did it get there? 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, that'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, and to create beauty by the very expression of its life.
- [30:13]
Rich Roll
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- [34:26]
Paul 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, goes on and on and on.
- [34:44]
Rich Roll
I mean, it's comedic at this point.
- [34:45]
Paul Hawken
It is. I said you have to start laughing, going, you're going to 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 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 that this is going to help this, like direct air capture. You know, 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. And you don't have to be educated past 9th grade science, maybe 7th 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? Then you burned it. It's combined with oxygen and CO2 and goes up there. And we know how CO2 reflects infrared radiation back down when it's in the air and we get a warmer climate. Well, Director 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 I'm not trying to be a smart ass. I'm just trying to say do the math, you know, and stop buffaloing 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.
- [37:47]
Rich 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. And 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. So that's the real problem that you're getting at. 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.
- [39:17]
Paul 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 chains. 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 as a flow. It's the only way to understand it in terms of its presence and what it does and where it is. Every cell. And you have 32, 34, 36 trillion cells, you know, in your body, every single cell has 1.2 trillion atoms of carbon.
- [40:11]
Rich Roll
Okay, well, it's too many. Our brains can't.
- [40:15]
Paul Hawken
No, you can't handle it. It's 44 octillion. That's a number, by the way. But it's.
- [40:19]
Rich Roll
I don't know what that means.
- [40:20]
Paul Hawken
No one else does 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 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. And in terms of the Earth itself, the flow of carbon is astonishing and beautiful. But it. Abstract, that's an abstraction. But what I'm trying to do is take it away from its objectification. It's a thing, you know, and we just figured 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.
- [41:28]
Rich 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.
- [41:44]
Paul Hawken
Right, yeah.
- [41:45]
Rich Roll
And the origins of carbon itself. Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [41:49]
Paul 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 didn't know where they came from. They did not come from the Big Bang. Only hydrogen and helium did. 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 where did carbon come from? Because you would think if you count the protons and neutrons and electrons, you would think, well, three times helium is carbon, you know, three times 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 what's called resonance or vibration or their gradients. They just can't mix into the other. They can't form, they can't fuse into carbon. So that was accepted, but no one knew where carbon came from. And they looked into space because you have these beautiful spectrometers that can look out into space and then deduce what they're seeing by color, by the vibration of what's out there. And nobody can. Could find, you know, carbon that way either that is in our bodies. It's 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 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 could be kidding. And yet carbon is ubiquitous. It's in 99% of everything on Earth. It's in every living. Well, the math didn't make sense, you know, like, how could you. 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. The physicists were going, who invited him? What's he saying? This is, you know, and one scientist said, this is the most outrageous prediction ever made by a scientist. Means it's the worst. But 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.
- [45:39]
Rich Roll
Basically recreating, you know, what would happen out in, you know, the outer stellar galaxy.
- [45:45]
Paul Hawken
Yeah.
- [45:46]
Rich 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.
- [45:59]
Paul Hawken
Yes. This day, really. World renowned physicists in Cambridge and Oxford and other universities say, like the chances of carbon being created in the solar system in, you know, any system in the universe is so incalculably small as.
- [46:28]
Rich Roll
It be impossible, and yet it's robust here on planet Earth.
- [46:33]
Paul Hawken
Yeah.
- [46:33]
Rich Roll
And so what do you make of that? Like, what do you, what do you infer from that awe?
- [46:39]
Paul Hawken
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 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, octillion 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.
- [47:40]
Rich 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.
- [47:57]
Paul Hawken
Absolutely. It's hard for us to scope the universe, how big it is. But you talk about the giant red stars, that's what our sun's going to do. As it dies, it gets bigger and bigger and then it explodes into a supernova. 86,000 suns explode into supernovae every single day in the universe.
- [48:20]
Rich Roll
Wow.
- [48:21]
Paul Hawken
So now we can see the universe as actually kind of a garden, or maybe that's not the right word.
- [48:26]
Rich Roll
But you know, it's, it's a generative force.
- [48:29]
Paul 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 100 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. But part of you has a 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.
- [49:19]
Rich Roll
Well, what is true for the macro is true for the micro. And the same example that we were discussing about 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 superorganism 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. 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.
- [50:36]
Paul 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 Entangled Life, a beautiful, beautiful book about fungi.
- [51:01]
Rich Roll
Is it fungi? I always say fungi.
- [51:04]
Paul Hawken
Either way, fungi.
- [51:04]
Rich Roll
Doesn't matter.
- [51:05]
Paul Hawken
Fungi, fungal.
- [51:07]
Rich Roll
Keep going. Sorry.
- [51:10]
Paul Hawken
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.
- [51:27]
Rich Roll
You can't help but stratify it. Yeah. Even when you're trying to give it the feminine gender.
- [51:33]
Paul Hawken
Well, he's English, and so we agreed on Kindom, which is it's the kin. Dumb.
- [51:41]
Rich Roll
So talk a little bit more about the role that it plays that we might not.
- [51:45]
Paul 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 Kears, who's doing really amazing science in Amsterdam, she's actually from the Bay Area. But they're now able to video the. The process of mycelium. 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, and then it's transporting nutrients. But when you look at it, though, you would think, okay, it's like a highway. It's going along. It's not. No, it's going in opposite directions. In the same vessel, the same mycelia, things are going opposite directions. Why?
- [52:48]
Rich Roll
Well, like arteries and veins at the same time.
- [52:51]
Paul Hawken
Yes.
- [52:52]
Rich Roll
In one vessel.
- [52:53]
Paul 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. And those clicking sounds, Adam Adamsky at the Royal Society in London has been recording them for years. And what he says is that actually they're making words. There's patterns, pattern recognition, and they're repeating these things. Okay. He went on to say, and some psychologists 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. That is, say there's something going on there. 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 do know molecularly what's being transported in terms of nutrients that are being fed to the plants. 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 going to 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 so common as a mineral in soils, and then going right to the source or that requester, which is another plant somewhere. 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 with one. One can be acres and acres and acres and acres. You know, 50 acres can be one species, one.
- [55:08]
Rich Roll
We're going to talk about the, the Oregon National Forest where I think it's like a four, four square miles of like fungal beds, I don't know what you call them, that have been there for thousands of years.
- [55:23]
Paul Hawken
One species.
- [55:24]
Rich Roll
One species, yeah. This idea that there's such a, on first inspection, like a rudimentary life form, and yet the complexity of the communication and the functionality of this is mind boggling. Like, how is that even happening?
- [55:44]
Paul Hawken
Well, and the importance of it, because we have basically engaged in an agricultural system that effectively destroys the fungi in the soil.
- [55:55]
Rich 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.
- [56:05]
Paul 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, in other words, for the food itself to be the most nutritious as possible. And so what we're doing is by putting an 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. We have to put herbicides because weeds then colonize sick soil. And we have glyphosate. And so now we have pesticide glyphosate. We have sick plants and so forth that are not, not nutrient dense. Right. And all because we really destroyed the source of life, which is soil. And so in the book I talk about, you know, dark earth for sure. 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. Earth is a soil and it's alive and it makes sounds and you can hear it if you stick microphones on there and listen to it. And that life is what creates life. All Life comes from the soil, no place else. And so that's why every single culture on earth that we know of has called the Earth Mother Madre 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 Habe, the German chemist, invented away to bypass all that. And that's the agriculture that we have today, which is polluting rivers in the ocean that is killing the soil 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 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. Spraying, yeah, spraying and so. But these are all things that we can change 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. 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, too little. 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 impacts it's going to have on water, rivers, streams, deserts, fields, crops, oceans, et cetera.
- [60:21]
Rich Roll
You 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, 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, you know, benefits and incentives. Like we're set up to be extractive. All of the incentives of our system basically you know, emphasize that. And unless we blow up the system and create a new one, like, how are we going to get out of this, you know, kind of ouroboros, where we're just. We're eating our tail, right? Like, we're never going to transcend this unless we reach some kind of, you know, tipping point. No, you know, threshold where we can't step back from where we're actually grokking. The fact that, you know, we're not going to be able to grow food anymore and kind of like a interstellar situation, you know, I don't know. Like, it's hard for me to hold on to that level of hopefulness that you seem to inhabit.
- [61:46]
Paul Hawken
Two things there. One, I was talking to Indonesia 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? Good question. Because the rhetoric around what's going on is as if everybody thought, did, assumed, knew what we're talking about and. Or was causative. That was the cause or was. 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. And so, okay, we can be aware of that and so forth, but we really want to talk about it in a different way. And you talked about earlier about language. And the language we have inherited is English as students and 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 that 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 the that. And okay, great science. But. But the indigenous languages, and I point to them because, you know, their cultures go back, now that I say 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, they're languages that are about verbs. They're 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. And so I think what you're seeing right now is a coming together of that intelligence and that wisdom with Western science and. 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.
- [64:48]
Rich Roll
What would be an example of that?
- [64:49]
Paul Hawken
I gave you some about roots, about plants, about, you know, butterflies, about. I can give you more, you know, just like what's going on there. Well, 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.
- [65:08]
Rich Roll
That creates the openness that's empirical science. 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.
- [65:22]
Paul 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.
- [65:41]
Rich Roll
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- [67:23]
Paul Hawken
Go.
- [67:28]
Rich Roll
If you're a longtime viewer of this show, then you already know that I've spent plenty of episodes diving super deep into the evidence based science behind many health benefits of fasting, from disease prevention all the way to healthspan extension. At the same time there is this elephant in the room which is acknowledging that forgoing all food for extended periods of time. Well, it's kind of a big ask and intimidating enough to dissuade many who would otherwise benefit from this practice. But what if you could tap into those benefits without committing to a full on fast? That is the question my three time guest, Dr. Valter Longo, one of the world's top longevity researchers, set out to answer. And after decades spent looking into this, at USC's Longevity Institute, he developed the Fasting Mimicking Diet, which is a protocol now accessible to everyone through Prolon. Prolon's got this five day program that gives you the benefits of fasting, supporting healthy blood sugar and boosting energy and even enhancing skin without going full on fast mode. Everything you need comes in one box. You open it up, it's all laid out in easy to read instructions. All five meals are packaged right in here for ease and convenience. And you've got soups, you got snacks, you got beverages all dialed in for each day and the science backs it up. Three consecutive cycles can transfer drop your biological age by 2.5 years and trim 1 1/2 inches off your waist. Amazing. To help you kickstart a health plan that truly works, Prolon is offering all of you, my audience, 15% off site wide plus $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their five day nutrition program, just visit prolonlife.com richroll that's P R O L-O-N L I F E.com richroll roll to claim your 15% discount and your bonus gift. Prolonlife.com richroll 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 probably more than anybody I know. And you walk past the redwoods without really paying too much attention. These people are taking it to a whole other level.
- [69:59]
Paul Hawken
Right, they did.
- [70:00]
Rich Roll
But are we gonna do that? If Paul Hawken walks past his redwoods on the way to the carport and has to remind himself to pay attention, where's the hope for the rest of us?
- [70:16]
Paul Hawken
Well, the native Canadians were referred to as a Micmac. 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, right?
- [70:35]
Rich Roll
But the tree rustling when the wind blows. What? The brand?
- [70:38]
Paul 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, well, that's rich. 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, was good, doing good. In other words, they could tell the condition of the tree from the sound. And they didn't write it down. They remembered the name of the sound. We, 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? 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 exploding, it's probably the wrong word, but just is burgeoning all over the world from the interaction between, 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 imagine such a thing because it's true that there is a world emerging, you know, despite the best efforts of, you know, greed, hate and delusion, corporations and profit making and extractive economies. I think that'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, right? Yeah.
- [73:08]
Rich Roll
Beauty persists with a resilience that is remarkable. And to your point, around awareness, it proves the adage that on some level, all the answers reside in our capacity to develop our awareness, to be present, whether it's the nature of our own minds, 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? 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. These sort of more existential questions of 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.
- [74:18]
Paul Hawken
I have this experience. I've only been invited once to talk to writers as a writer at conference. They have writers conferences. And I described something there which I hadn't ever said out loud before. But sometimes when I'm writing, I'll write a couple paragraphs, and fiction writers often write thousand words or something, then go look the next day and see if it, 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.
- [74:53]
Rich Roll
I kind of do that, too. Yeah, it's not. It's not a recommended approach.
- [74:56]
Paul 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 and going, I don't know. I didn't write that. I have no recollection of writing that or having those thoughts. So 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 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. Not a deductive on, you know, deliberate and process. It's something different.
- [75:55]
Rich Roll
Yeah. It's a download from the unified field of consciousness.
- [75:58]
Paul Hawken
Paul, thank you. Now I know.
- [76:02]
Rich Roll
And yet, you know, you could take credit for having sat there. 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.
- [76:25]
Paul Hawken
Yeah, it. Because that's where I. That's where I wanted to go. I mean, I wanted to go into the mystery and. 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 just to open that up. I may do it on a website. Just say, look at this one, look at this one, look at this one. And I'm not the origin, but I am storytelling. And what's emerging, again, I'll say this from observational science, is just heartwarming and beautiful and breathtaking. Anthony James was a person in South Africa, and he had a reserve and 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 going to shoot them all. He said, you can have them if you want. He said, I'll take them. 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 electrified and this and that, and he just tore the shit out of it. And they were 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 put the Land Rover and they could see it and they'd watch and okay, at first they started to come near it like it was a threat. But then eventually he realized it wasn't a threat. 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 all of. 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. But they got used to that. And then one time he was in Durban and. And 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 elephant 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 18 elephants by way the. Then they surrounded the house and stood there all day. A year later, on the exact day, they came back, stood around the house, right? For the whole day. And so it went. So what we were talking about was, what do we know? How do they know? How do we know what they know? We don't. 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 at all. I'm ignorant. But I care about discovering where we live or where I live and discovering what I don't know. 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. 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, some entomologists will go, ah, you know, that's crazy. No, we do know that from Lars Chicka 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. 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 the 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. 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. 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 them in my house. I don't want to be bit by one. Okay, I know that one, but I don't kill it. 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 confess, if it's keeping me awake, but I can't kill anything else.
- [83:39]
Rich Roll
I'm not surprised to hear that. But. You ready for this?
- [83:43]
Paul Hawken
Yeah.
- [83:43]
Rich Roll
The story that you just told of the elephants actually came up on the podcast yesterday. Auntie He James, 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 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, spends time with non speaking, neurodivergent autistic people. And it's this exploration of the possibility of extra perceptual abilities. But in the context of this, take what you will from that, but just to ask, the question is also to expand your horizon of appreciation for the complexity of other living creatures. And, and she talks about Rupert Sheldrake and like his experiments with animal consciousness, et cetera, and that story of the Elephants 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 and never collide with each other, or, you know, the migratory patterns of whales and. 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.
- [85:45]
Paul Hawken
Not so simple, though. Yeah, yeah. 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 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.
- [86:21]
Rich Roll
Also reductionist in what we consider to be intelligence.
- [86:26]
Paul Hawken
Yes.
- [86:27]
Rich Roll
You know, 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, that's probably a better life. Most of us are living well.
- [86:53]
Paul Hawken
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 intelligence. 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, you know, molecules re.
- [87:34]
Rich Roll
Radiate.
- [87:37]
Paul Hawken
Heat back to Earth that comes up from infrared. I mean, this is so simple. It's like Climate 101. So we've known that since 1856. Eunice Foote 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, 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. I see both at the same time. And what will emerge? What will finally happen? What 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 in so doing, it just changes my life, you know, and who I meet and what I read and, you know, everything where I live, all that sort of stuff. And it can change everybody's life.
- [89:13]
Rich 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 interest and, you know, deluded us into believing that, like, getting what, you know, what's ours is really what life is about.
- [90:00]
Paul 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. 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. Change what a person could do, what they could make and what we could make and so forth. 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've, we have enough. No one's ever said that. And so if we don't recognize that then we're going to suppose ourselves right out of, 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 gas stations everywhere I drive, you know, I'm in la. Just look at the patterns of retail, the patterns of the consumption, the patterns of at the airport and so forth. You know, I mean and the increase in, 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 along.
- [91:47]
Rich Roll
With our entitlement to that footprint.
- [91:49]
Paul 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 happening historically. If you look back over like last 2000 years you get these, these, 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, relationships between, always about relationships and, and so we're all look at, we have a presence all left brain. It's all about getting, taking, wanting, you know, and, and, 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, 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.
- [93:01]
Rich 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 the acceleration of technological innovation and kind of first principles thinking in terms of problem solving and a more expansive appreciation for the natural world. All of these things are kind of all happening at once and they're all speeding up together. But it is a ticking clock. There is a deadline here. We're sort of quickly approaching this precipice and it's like which version of ourself is going to get there first before it's too late. It's weird how it's like everything feels really sped up though.
- [93:56]
Paul Hawken
Well, the existing system is self terminating, there's no question about that. And it's an accelerating that we're in the self terminating system and period. So I'll give the example I don't about growing up in fighting fires. You know, 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 near 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 brigand fire, couldn't afford it. And they taught you what to do and everything like that. And afterwards you tamp it down with your boots and make sure there's no hot spots, 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 ashes over it 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 burns and then you eventually go home or whatever, you know, and you look at this wasteland, it's all black, the trees, 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. And you see wildflowers that you've never seen before, or I was told it hadn't been seen before because there's certain wildflowers that only break open the carapace 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 the. And that emergence is happening at the same time, not sequentially. And it's easy to see the fire, 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 these extraordinary human beings in communities and jills and villages all over the world who actually see the fire, they're singed by the fire 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 and that live around them, that they have of 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.
- [97:22]
Rich Roll
Well, that example that you just provided illustrates this notion that everything is an opportunity for rebirth and regrowth and hidden within whatever name your crisis, 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 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 listening to this whole, who does find themselves doom scrolling and feeling a lack of agency or struggles to find anything to hold onto, to feel that hope and you know, and identify that wildflower, like how does one go about doing that? Like, what are you really trying to say in this book to the reader?
- [98:27]
Paul 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. You know, talk about if you're going to use the word regeneration, which I have, of course you want to do it with the biggest arms as possible. Because if we're not restoring, renewing the lives of, of the 6 billion people who wake up every single morning on earth 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 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 going to 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 mentioned earlier, you know, you have to do it in such a way that it improves the lives of those 6 billion people, you know, who are not, you know, basically they are 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. It's about whatever you see ever, you know, whatever you care about, whatever causes grief is your pathway. And, 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. And love comes from the heart. And the heart is the organ that infallibly tells the truth, never lied 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 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. And the thing. Churches have 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 churches, you know, forget what happens on Friday night or Saturday or Sunday and, 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 gain, say, 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, people who worship the people, pray five times a day, they actually do things besides that, which is to take care of, of other people and other places. You know, that's us. That's also us. And that's kind of overridden or not looked at, you know, I think that's.
- [102:12]
Rich Roll
A really beautiful place to end it. Like, I. 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.
- [102:50]
Paul Hawken
You thank you. Thank you, Rich. It's lovely being here with you always.
- [103:02]
Rich Roll
That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page@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@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 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 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 richrole.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@richroll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameolo. 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 Shayna Savoy, copywriting by Ben Prior, and of course, our theme music was created all the way back in 2012 by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace.
- [104:41]
Paul Hawken
Namaste.