Episode #294
Paul Hawken: Can Chemical Agriculture Feed the World?

Paul Hawken turns one of agriculture’s most familiar questions on its head: can chemical agriculture actually feed the world? Rather than accepting degraded farmland as a reason to concentrate food production and “spare” the remaining land for nature, Hawken argues that restoring damaged soils is itself part of the solution. He traces synthetic fertilizers and pesticides back to a mindset built around killing and control, contrasting it with farming systems that restore biological complexity and add life. From the relationship between soil, water, and heat to consolidation in grocery markets and increasingly fragile global supply chains, Paul makes the case that our future depends on rebuilding the living systems beneath our feet.

Author Paul Hawken’s interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Paul Hawken was interviewed by Dave Chapman in August of 2026:

Dave Chapman 00:00
We’re going to talk about whatever we talk about, but we want to make sure to talk about your book. When’s that book coming out? I will ask you officially, but just so I know.

Paul Hawken 00:11
Not yet.

Dave Chapman 00:12
It’s not at that stage yet. Do you have a working title?

Paul Hawken 00:17
I have titles. Yeah, I do. One title is “Upstream.”

Dave Chapman 00:30
That’s the one I’d heard.

Paul Hawken 00:32
Yeah, which is because the so-called environmental and climate movement is trying to solve things downstream. I am going to explain why it will not work. Almost all of our culture is trying to fix things downstream. Look at the first cause.

Paul Hawken 01:11
T his book starts with this joke that came from Maine, actually, years ago, in 1932, from a radio program, and then became an Irish joke. It is a pretty famous Irish joke about two people driving along on this narrow Irish road. Ireland is noted for its twisty, turny, narrow little roads – it is easy to get lost. They see a farmer there leaning against his stone wall fence. One of them says, “Can you help us get to Dobson? We are lost.”

Paul Hawken 01:52
He nods his head. He looks for a long time to the right, and then he looks for a long time to the left. He looks to the right again, and then he turns to them and says, “If I was you, I would not start from here.” Then there is a second line, which is, “Because you cannot get there from here.” Why is it so funny?

Paul Hawken 02:20
Everybody laughs at the joke. It is funny. I still laugh at it because I think there is a part of us that recognizes a really deep truth in that joke on a higher level, which is what we are doing, whether it is ag, energy, social justice, or housing. All the things we are addressing are being remarkably – I say remarkably in the other sense of the word – remarkably trashed, destroyed, and degraded. We are approaching them from the wrong direction.

Paul Hawken 03:05
I am not in any way denigrating people’s efforts, organizations, or initiatives. I am not saying that at all. I really have deep gratitude and appreciation for what individuals and NGOs are doing. But I am just saying, if you step back and look at the language, the language objectifies and separates us from the very thing that we want to accomplish.

Paul Hawken 03:37
Carbon neutral is one of those terms. I am like, “Really? Tell me about it.” But so is decarbonization. Again, I am like, “What are you talking about? Decarbonizing something?” How about nature-positive? Now we are nature-negative? What is nature-negative, for that matter? Or carbon removal, another classic term of complete nonsense. You are going to remove the carbon, and where are you going to put it? Is it a thing? Really?

Paul Hawken 04:19
People do not understand that carbon is a flow. It is not a thing. Yes, on a molecular level, it is an atom, of course. But net zero is another favorite. I have a top 10 list of things that are so insanely stupid, and yet they are the parlance of the movement. These people speak about these terms in shorthand as if they meant something. They are code words. Sustainability is one of them. I am just like, “Please, no, do not help me.”

Paul Hawken 04:54
Direct air capture, and here is one that really surprises people: renewable energy. It does not exist. It does not exist in the universe. Energy is never renewable. It only goes in one direction. We all know that. The climate crisis – I am looking out my window. “Where is the crisis?” Climate can have a crisis?

Paul Hawken 05:29
Anyway, I can mention many more terms, but what I am saying is that this language has infused our lexicon and the way we see the world and speak to each other, and it is downstream. It is actually worse than downstream. It is literally nonsense.

Dave Chapman 05:56
This reminds me of something that I believe Donella Meadows said, which is that when we are looking at these things, which do feel like crises for us, and maybe are crises for us, these are not the root; these are the symptoms of a problem.

Paul Hawken 06:19
Right. We have a crisis. I agree about that crisis. We are the crisis. The Earth is not the crisis; we are the crisis. Somebody sent me a quote. Oh gosh, I cannot even remember the quote right now because it is something I do not remember very well. It quoted me saying this is nonsense. Did I say that? I said, “Yeah.” I should go find the quote. It actually quoted me accurately because I think it is a little different than that.

Paul Hawken 07:15
Because something needs to be saved, for sure, and that is the way that we see the world and act in the world. That is the crisis, no question about it. Then what it does to the living world, of course, is horrific. But the living world is not having a crisis. The crisis is one species called Homo sapiens. That is the crisis.

Paul Hawken 07:32
If we keep going around saying, “We have to do this and be a good human being and get sustainable aircraft fuel so we can fly through the air once a year,” and all that sort of stuff, we are just totally missing the true cause, the first cause. If we do not get to the first cause and go upstream, we will not actually solve the problem. We may not like what it means if we look at the first cause because it is about us.

Dave Chapman 08:15
In your mind, Paul, what is the first cause? What is upstream? When we look upstream…

Paul Hawken 08:22
Am I. The way we see the people, the way we see the world, the way we see ourselves, the way we interact with each other first, and therefore all other species second. I do not say they are secondary; I am just saying it comes from how we interact. Our language, what we have been taught, how we accept the parlance of the day, which is just thrown at us every day, whether it is in messaging, or whether it is in the newspapers, or whether it is on YouTube, or whether it is in Substack. It does not matter.

Paul Hawken 08:35
It is an assault, in most cases, on the inherent nature of a human being, and so it is a crisis. We deal with it every day, we being people, human beings, in the best ways we can, for sure. But I just want to say, in terms of agriculture, farming, soil and water, and all the living beings that are under our feet that produce the food that we eat and the plants that we cherish, those are a direct effect of our minds.

Paul Hawken 09:09
Not their existence; I am talking about where they are right now: why they are living, why they are dying, why they are suffering, why they are degraded, why soil keeps changing. There is a really interesting book that is just coming out by Frank Ashwood, and he is a soil scientist, but a different type of soil scientist. He focuses on the literal life in the soil: the springtails and mites, etc. He tells a very interesting story about the eastern forests of Canada.

Paul Hawken 09:09
He quotes scientists saying, “They’re going to die within 300, 400 years. They’ll be all gone. There will be no forest.” He said, “Come on, they’ve been there for even through the last ice age.” I see that what happened is that we have carved more roads into the wild areas of Eastern Canada, for jeeps.

Paul Hawken 09:09
Fishermen love to go find lakes that have never been fished before, or rarely, or if ever. They bring earthworms and use earthworms and do quite well. Then when they are done, end of the day, they throw the earthworms into the forest, which is a very humane thing to do.

Paul Hawken 09:09
Earthworms are not native to this continent. They are not native to North America. We do not know where they came from. From Europe, for sure, or maybe with a Mayflower, for God’s sakes. We do not know, little pots of something that they carried from Cornwall.

Paul Hawken 09:09
But what happens is those are broadleaf forests, and the broadleaf forests drop their leaves and they create litter. If you are walking through this litter, and that litter is devoured by creatures that live in the soil, and their poop then becomes fertilizer for the trees, there is a beautiful cycle of feeding, and nursing. What the earthworms do is eat the litter, and so the soil creatures are starving and die off, and the trees are getting weaker and weaker.

Paul Hawken 09:09
It is ugly. Not that we want those trees to go. We are dumb. What is beautiful about that story is the intricate complexity of the systems that we inherited. In order, I think, to be effective, we have to honor that complexity. Honoring that complexity means we do not know, as opposed to we do know.

Paul Hawken 09:09
Even the complexity about a warming Earth, of course, we know the first cause. No question about that. We know since 1851, from John Tyndall and others. We know the cause, but what we do not know is how to respond to it. People say, “Renewable energy.” First of all, there is no such thing. What they are really saying is current solar income. That is a little different.

Paul Hawken 09:09
In other words, use the energy from the sun as it comes in, capture it, of course, in a solar panel, which converts it to electrons, and use those electrons, of course, as energy. That is what fossil fuels are. They are capturing ancient solar income. Same way into plants, and then they became coal, gas, and oil in the case of marine organisms, and so we are using that.

Paul Hawken 09:09
But the fact is, if you look at the footprint of a solar panel, it is staggering. I have a list. I will send it to you. In terms of the chemicals, the compounds it uses, there are 92 copper mines in the world providing copper alone for the electrical system, and there are 60 other compounds that are being mined that go into the renewable energy system.

Paul Hawken 09:25
I am not saying stop using solar; that is not what I am saying. I am just saying that we have this sort of pristine sense of, “Oh, well, they are made in China, and they are still clean and white and beautiful and have glass. You just plug them in and put a battery down there, and you are good to go,” and in that sense you are, as long as you see it this way. But once you look at really the footprint of solar energy, then you have to look at this idea that somehow I cannot swap out my natural gas or wherever I did get my electricity from, even if it is from dams, and just swap it out for solar. No, you have to look at consumption. You have to look at how much you are taking. You see these homes in North Carolina, “Oh, I got this 14-kilowatt solar panel across my roof. I do not have an electrical bill anymore.” No, but boy, does the Earth have a bill. If we do not get to the core issue of consumption, what we are taking, we cannot just say, “Well, I am taking it from solar instead of natural gas or whatever. I am cool. I am good to go.” You are not good to go because you have not really looked at the intricate complexity, which is what I spoke about earlier, which is how this whole Earth works. It is so extraordinary. It is so beautiful. It is so innately regenerative, by the way. Then the question is, “Well, how do I, or how do we, but how do I actually become a part of that now?” I cannot become a part of that unless I understand it and honor it. If I do not understand it, then I am just doing the same thing that has happened before in a different way.

Paul Hawken 15:02
But once you look at really the footprint of solar energy, then you have to look at this idea that somehow I cannot swap out my natural gas or wherever I did get my electricity from, even if it is from dams, and just swap it out for solar. No, you have to look at consumption. You have to look at how much you are taking.

Paul Hawken 15:33
You see these homes in North Carolina, “Oh, I got this 14-kilowatt solar panel across my roof. I do not have an electrical bill anymore.” No, but boy, does the Earth have a bill. If we do not get to the core issue of consumption, what we are taking, we cannot just say, “Well, I am taking it from solar instead of natural gas or whatever. I am cool. I am good to go.”

Paul Hawken 16:08
You are not good to go because you have not really looked at the intricate complexity, which is what I spoke about earlier, which is how this whole Earth works. It is so extraordinary. It is so beautiful. It is so innately regenerative, by the way. Then the question is, “Well, how do I, or how do we, but how do I actually become a part of that now?”

Paul Hawken 16:40
I cannot become a part of that unless I understand it and honor it. If I do not understand it, then I am just doing the same thing that has happened before in a different way.

Dave Chapman 16:58
That might involve becoming wiser than I can just about imagine being. Let me say what I hear, and let’s see if I’ve got it anywhere close to right. To deal with the fact that… I was just listening to that old Barry McGuire song, “Eve of Destruction,” because somebody yesterday said they listened to it and it almost made them cry because they thought we’re right there again.

Dave Chapman 17:32
You don’t even need to change the words. It’s an old song from the Vietnam era about things being pretty, pretty hairy. John Fullerton talks about it as the polycrisis, and I think that’s a pretty good term. You listed all these things where we’re failing.

Dave Chapman 17:57
You suggested that to be able to deal with this as responsible citizens of the planet – I know citizens is a little bit of a city term for you, but we’ll use it for a minute – we need to look upstream. We need to look at first causes instead of constantly chasing the latest manifestation of something else. Unless we address the first causes, we’re simply going to be ineffective.

Dave Chapman 18:25
I’ve been tracking Donella Meadows’ work lately. I think she would have identified the first cause as being that growth is the value that drives our economic systems. Always, it has to be more, or it fails. It’s not enough to have the wealth that we have. We need a bit more, and if we don’t, then the system is collapsing because of the way we’ve designed our system. Would you agree with that?

Paul Hawken 19:06
I do. I’ve been asked, “What’s the one thing you would change in the world or get rid of?” And I said, “Capitalism. No question.” The idea that capital in the form of money has to grow. There’s the heart of it, which is, instead of saying it’s enough, it’s never enough.

Dave Chapman 19:35
You said something that was very interesting to me. I was listening to you being interviewed by a couple of nice Irish guys. You said, “Let’s separate commerce from capitalism.” Honestly, I hadn’t heard that before. I thought that was very interesting.

Dave Chapman 19:53
Do you want to just speak about that for a minute because I’m negotiating ideas of capitalism – is this really a core problem? But you said, “Capitalism might be, but commerce is something that we can embrace.”

Paul Hawken 20:11
Commerce is actually ancient to our species, and so it’s something we’ve done for as long as we have some idea that we were here. I’ll leave that to archaeologists and others to tell us. Lewis and Clark, when they finally got to the Pacific Coast – and I forget which Native American tribes that they encountered. I should just write it down again.

Paul Hawken 20:53
They noticed something, or something was noted that later came out, that they had seashells in their possession. I don’t know if wampum was their Native American word for the necklaces or ours. I don’t know. Actually, it was so-called wampum. There was some . How did it get there?

Paul Hawken 21:21
It got there by trading from the Pacific coast of South America all the way to North America because it was a form of currency, but the value of it was just made up by each succeeding transaction. It must have just kept going up for who knows how long it took. It may take 100 years. It may take 500 years. I don’t know. No one knows. That’s commerce.

Paul Hawken 21:59
To me, it’s ancient and it’s sacred. It’s like, “I’ve got extra corn this year. I’ve husked it. Do you want to trade? Yeah. I’ve made some olive oil, or I’ve done this and that and so forth.” It’s just exchange. Trying to create mutual value for people, for their needs, their bodily needs, their physical needs, their housing needs, and so forth. It’s not primitive.

Paul Hawken 22:34
It was used in so-called primitive times. I say so-called because I’m not saying they’re as primitive as we thought they were, but they’re just as applicable today as they ever were. A little bit more difficulty because of the complexity of people’s, say, homes and nutritional wants and desires. So it is more complicated.

Paul Hawken 23:01
Commerce is sacred. Capitalism is a very late-stage overlay that came out of Europe, and the Age of Enlightenment, so-called, and the Scientific Revolution. Out of that came great invention, and surpluses that started. You could compound surpluses, and you compound the surplus, and then you have much more, and then you get a dislocation in terms of stature and relationship.

Paul Hawken 23:38
That’s where we are today. I think what worries me today is I think we’re on an asymptotic money creation period where money has been created out of thin air. The $1.75 trillion that Elon Musk has right now technically is just money that is being created. It doesn’t exist. Would it exist as demand from people who would buy the stock at a certain price and sell it at another? Okay.

Paul Hawken 24:13
Where do they get their money? They get it because the money is being managed, or they have it from some other company that grew, and the stock doubled, it tripled, quadrupled, and now they have more money than they need, but they want to have more money, so they’re going to take some of that money, invest it into a company that’s going to grow even more. You have this piling-on effect.

Paul Hawken 24:40
That’s what we have today. I don’t know what’s going to happen. That money is going to disappear, most of it. It always has in history because it’s fake. It’s not real. It depends on a select few having great amounts of money, then having the upper middle class or whatever people saying, “I’m going to get rich, and I’m going to do what those people do: buy this stock or buy this stock.”

Paul Hawken 25:08
I have friends I hear who bought Apple stock many years ago, and they live off it. Good on them – they’re artists and farmers and things like that. Who wouldn’t want to be that person? Not to have to worry about money. But the system itself will self-destruct. Always has. That’s the nature of currency which is generated by a capitalist system.

Dave Chapman 25:37
You think being in that system of growth sows the seeds of its own destruction. I’ve been kind of fascinated as I’ve studied “The Limits to Growth,” which I never read back in the day. I knew Donella, but I didn’t know about the book. I just knew her as the nice lady who cut up cheese with me at the co-op.

Dave Chapman 26:00
But what an amazing book, and I guess it’s sold over 30 million copies. Although, as Donella said, I’m not sure how many people actually read it. But it’s very well written, and it’s very important. It’s an important book.

Paul Hawken 26:19
Great scholarship.

Dave Chapman 26:21
Great scholarship and great thinking, and just like I never thought of it that way, but that makes all the sense in the world. I’m struck by Donella’s actual life. She was an associate professor or whatever at, or an adjunct professor at, Dartmouth, teaching great courses in “The Limits to Growth” and sustainability, but she decided to start an organic farm in a co-housing project.

Dave Chapman 26:55
She wasn’t a farmer, and she wasn’t a land developer, but she thought that these were important aspects of walking the talk of living a life that was really dedicated to Tikkun Olam – that term from Judaism. It means repairing the world, and that it’s the responsibility of all of us that we work on repairing the world.

Dave Chapman 27:31
I loved that there was a phrase about it that said, “It is not required that you complete the work, but it is absolutely necessary that you attempt the work.” I think that’s right. For all of us, that’s the meaning in our lives: that we attempt to repair the world. It’s a very old idea, not a new idea.

Dave Chapman 28:00
How do we do that? Genuinely, Paul, I just know so many people who are confused. They want to do good things to try and repair the world, and they don’t know what to do. They’re confused. Do you have thoughts about that?

Paul Hawken 28:18
The most powerful agent in the world is the individual, and most individuals don’t think that, and only maybe very, very rich ones think that or think they have that kind of power. The transformation and restoration of the world is going to come from human beings recognizing that what they can do, what they need to do, is right in front of them.

Paul Hawken 28:58
In other words, it’s in their city. It’s in their family. It’s in their community. It’s in the land and the land next to the land. It’s in their watercourses. It’s in their schools. I think, for a lot of people, they feel like, “Oh, if I just tend to that, then I’m giving up, or the world’s going to crash.”

Paul Hawken 29:24
By taking on that responsibility for the whole of the Earth and what’s being lost, legitimately, by the way, so the data are right, I think it actually sort of makes people depressed and unhappy, makes you feel inadequate, makes people feel like they haven’t done enough at the end of the day, and it’s really the other way around.

Paul Hawken 29:50
That is your enoughness, and each person is going to be different: their background, place, education, and predilection. Maybe it’s just being a good musician, singing, or teaching children to dance. That’s where it arises. That’s where we know restoration and regeneration arise everywhere in the world, and so forth.

Paul Hawken 30:20
It’s not difficult to be overwhelmed by the New York Times, the Financial Times, or the Guardian, or by going, “I’m just a little nothing,” and feel that way, but it’s the other way around. That’s what I feel and think. I can’t get depressed about the way the world is. I can get depressed if I am selfish or inactive or say something inappropriate or harm something, even by complete accident or thoughtlessness.

Paul Hawken 31:07
I can go make a list of things where I can feel bad about myself, for sure. I think that’s an okay thing to feel, by the way. But in my opinion, we have both, and they’re there for a reason. But what I can’t do is feel bad about myself because the world is destroying itself. I’m just looking at, “Wow, how did that happen?”

Paul Hawken 31:37
To call him a narcissist is really kind. It’s beyond that, but as president of the United States, to have somebody whose extraordinary nervous system has put him on top. He’s almost like, to me, these people in native traditions, too, but also in Jewish traditions, who basically sort of embodied the evil or the bad thoughts of the tribe or the culture or the society and so forth, to reflect that back to people, so they could see it in someone else and then make self-reflection.

Paul Hawken 32:23
It’s hard to see him any other way. I think people will go crazy when I say this and so forth. But maybe he’s a holy man. In certain religious traditions, to incarnate in that way is the greatest suffering you can endure. People think because the way he talks and this and that is so blasé that he’s not suffering. He is suffering. He’s suffering every second of his life to be, say, do what he does. It is intense suffering.

Paul Hawken 33:03
Now, the fact that he can flick it off and all that sort of stuff makes people hate him or dislike him or be angry or appalled or disbelieving. How could that person even exist and get to be elected? But the fact is that what he’s reflecting back to us is the summation of our social contract as it exists today, because all around him, the people, the money, the contributions, all this sort of stuff, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, they’re all showing up.”

Paul Hawken 33:44
But I don’t mean to say that as apathy, or not voting, or not being an activist politically, or not supporting a local candidate. No, I don’t mean that. I just mean that we have to not let him, in any way, stop us or cause us to be depressed, because that just depresses us. We don’t want to be depressed. We want to be expressed. We want to be expressive, and so forth.

Paul Hawken 34:26
It can happen, and you go, “Oh, my God! I can’t believe we just did or said that.” For sure, we’re human. But then what? I guess what I’m trying to say is that that way of seeing the world is connected to the world. It’s not disconnected, but at the same time, it is the expression of our humanity. We are good people. We really are, and we’re not bad people.

Paul Hawken 35:04
Then we see it in our animals, in our cats and dogs, and so forth. Why are they so popular right now? I guess because we can afford it. I guess it’s the cat and dog. I don’t know why, but I mean because we have the perfect relationship, somebody who loves us and never screws up, except maybe pees on the carpet.

Paul Hawken 35:24
It’s such a relief to people who are aware of the world as it stands right now. They’re not pets for function; they’re pets for emotional therapy, really.

Dave Chapman 35:43
That’s right. They don’t just love us; we love them. It’s hugely important to us to be able to love.

Paul Hawken 35:54
Just keep going. Love everything else. Don’t stop. Take that look. My wife, because the cat was doing something extraordinary. A cat we found as big as a tennis ball on the beach, starving, in Baja California, and then got shots and everything, and took her to California.

Paul Hawken 36:15
She’s an extraordinary being, of course. Her thinking is the Earth’s thinking. That’s her mind. She’s the mind of the Earth. It’s such an interesting phrase. But if I look out of my window right now, look at the birds, look at the trees, look at everything, that’s the mind of the Earth, also. Why not be friends?