Episode #230
Paul Hawken: Reversing Ecological Collapse

Author and climate strategist Paul Hawken returns to share his vision for how farming is one of the most powerful climate solutions available to us today, as laid out in his new book Carbon: The Book of Life. In this conversation, Hawken speaks to the urgent need to transition away from extractive agriculture and toward real organic systems that work with nature, not against it. He explains how soil health, carbon cycles, and food system resilience are interconnected—and why organic farmers play a crucial role in healing our planet. This is a hopeful, deeply informed conversation about transformation from the ground up.

Our Paul Hawken interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviews Paul Hawken in California, May, 2025:

Paul Hawken 0:00
Anyway, 1791 is when Vermont was the first state after the colonies declared statehood.

Dave Chapman 0:07
To?

Paul Hawken 0:08
Declare statehood to join the Union in 1791. That was 14 years after they banned slavery. They banned it before Earth Day. It’s sad. People ask, “What does it mean?” I didn’t know what it meant. I just know where I got the hat. I was going to like it, and then I looked it up. My people come from Vermont – Ethan Allen, that class – criminal clan.

Dave Chapman 0:48
Our people. Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. We’re just talking about those “criminals” who founded Vermont? I’ve been feeling pretty good about Vermont lately.

Paul Hawken 1:09
You have to. It’s like a European country.

Dave Chapman 1:12
Yeah. We read all the time about the amazing things they do in Denmark. You once said to me, “Dave, you can’t compare us to Denmark.” I thought, “Why can’t we compare Vermont to Denmark?” I’m sure we can’t do exactly what they do, but we have the ability – and so does California, frankly. Although it’s obviously a whole different universe, California has a kind of autonomy and an economy the size of which… California is probably bigger than Denmark in terms of…

Paul Hawken 1:51
It’s the fifth biggest economic country in the world.

Dave Chapman 1:54
California is, yeah. It’s pretty amazing. On this trip, I’ve been looking at California as a very different place from Vermont, but it’s a place of such extremes. As I drove here, my heart was singing because it’s so beautiful. It’s just so beautiful – just to drive out of San Francisco, across the bridge. It’s just lovely. Vermont is beautiful too, but this is a different place.

Paul Hawken 2:36
Yeah, no difference. Just you have black flies, we don’t.

Dave Chapman 2:41
Humidity and a few other things. But we don’t have any big ag, which is interesting, and it makes for a very different place, because there are literally no power players in Vermont politics to represent big agriculture. It’s a very different political scene because real organic is celebrated.

Paul Hawken 3:11
How about small agriculture? Is it well-represented there?

Dave Chapman 3:15
In Vermont, yes. Agriculture is not so intense, but what is there is small. In Vermont, I think 13% of our farmland is certified organic. California is 9%, so it’s probably second in the country only to Vermont – but it’s much bigger.

Paul Hawken 3:37
Well, yeah, but some of the farms that are being certified organic here are questionable in terms of… I won’t name the farm, but the biggest organic carrot farm in the world is in California. It’s 30,000 acres.

Dave Chapman 3:50
That’s right. It’s also the second biggest. So, those two represent 80% of the carrot market.

Paul Hawken 3:57
Yes. When you go to the natural food stores here and there are organic carrots, and you look at the outer tops, they have splits. You look and they’re not complete carrots. There are splits. You’re like, “Well, how’d that happen?” They’re overfertilized; they’re grown so quickly that they sort of grow out of the skin, so to speak. They burst out of their skin.

Dave Chapman 4:27
I think carrots and berries are the two most powerful examples of industrial organic, and in both cases, it’s California. But some of the best small strawberry growers in the world are also in California. So, California has these extremes.

Dave Chapman 4:55
I’m going to be meeting with about 30 California farmers tomorrow night at Full Belly. We’re going to have a conversation. These will be smaller farmers – not not small; some of them are mid-sized farmers – but all real organic. We’re just going to have a conversation about what it means – this uneasy pairing, this shotgun wedding between industrial organic and real organic – and how do we work it out? What does a family reunion look like?

Paul Hawken 5:34
In a big family there’s always a few outliers. They’re blood relatives.

Dave Chapman 5:41
Or the in-laws. So-and-so got married to that guy, but still there is an actual family connection. How do we work it out? It doesn’t mean that we’re friends. I don’t know where it goes. This is the conversation that I think we’re having.

Paul Hawken 5:59
I think, given the extremes of conventional agriculture – and it’s getting more extreme, not less – it’s not like, “Oh, yeah. We shouldn’t do that. It’s going the other way.” The acceptance, recognition, and, in a sense, the familial relationship – it is the you word you used – is really important.

Paul Hawken 6:27
Because there still is a very clear dividing line, even if the real, true, or “organic” or whatever adjectives you want to use is not respected – or not done – by the other so-called organic farms and production facilities. It is best to link up, because we really do need to address soil, and we need to address water and nutrients. Soil is the most important factor. In our survival as a species – it is our relationship to the soil.

Paul Hawken 7:23
Number one, it’s where life begins. Every culture in the world calls it Mother Earth, and for a good reason – because it is the mother. It’s the source of our life. Everything you see in this room – everything that people drive around in, everything that people think they can’t do without, whatever it is on the internet or at the Lululemon store – whatever it is, it comes from the Earth – not directly, but indirectly – or directly. It comes from soil. It does.

Dave Chapman 7:57
I find myself in conversations sometimes with people who don’t believe that, who are in the organic tent. I’m part of a group that is trying to see if we can readdress this in the law and say, “Organic must be grown in the soil.”

Paul Hawken 8:17
That’s a different question. I’m talking about the Earth as a whole and as a mantle of life. That mantle of life creates all other life, including our little gadgets and things that we want to have. I’m just saying, if you pull the string of the flour bag, it all goes back to the soil. Besides the sea, by the way – I want to make a distinction between the sea and land. But it all goes back to the mantle of life on Earth.

Paul Hawken 8:50
Whether the Achuar people had iPhones or not, they still knew the Earth was madre. And they still know it’s madre – it’s still mama. It’s still the mother. It’s the source of life. Men don’t have babies; women do. The Earth creates life. It’s the biosphere that regulates the atmosphere. Period. End of subject. We’re the only species of the 8.4 million – approximately estimated – species that dysregulates the climate. Only one out of 8.4 million.

Dave Chapman 8:57
It’s interesting. When I said that, I didn’t mean to get lost in a small side thing. My point is, the thinking that you’re talking about is a way of seeing the world. How do you see the world? Because I think everything follows from that. If you don’t see the world as coming from the soil, I swear to God, Paul, people roll their eyes if you were to say that in a conversation about organic.

Dave Chapman 9:56
Some people, who are hydroponic champions, would go, “Well, what we’re doing is organic because we’re using approved organic inputs.” But they’re missing the point. That’s why they’re not understanding what we’re trying to get at in the first place with organic.

Paul Hawken 10:18
You can take somebody who has been damaged, or injured, or ill, and use all sorts of technologies to keep them alive – walking, eating, and digesting. But that’s not where life comes from. The idea that life comes from the 13,000 drugs we have to treat – what? – the 13,000 diseases… Actually, there’s more than that. But the 13,000 named diseases – where are they coming from?

Paul Hawken 10:54
You can say some is aging – yes, of course. We come, we stay, and we go. This is a body. But the pathology that has swept through our populations is extraordinary in terms of its differentiation, effects, and impacts. Where does that come from? It just happened? No. It’s biological. It comes from life – how we live, how we don’t live, how we grow food, how we don’t grow food, what’s in the food, what’s not in the food, what we drink, what we don’t drink, what we breathe, and what we inhale. It all comes into us.

Paul Hawken 11:45
Seventy-three percent of Americans are obese or overweight. If it was only that, you’d say, “Well, that’s your choice.” But in fact, so many second- and third-order effects arise from being overweight and obese – and not to blame the people. I feel like, in most cases, they’re victims for not being educated and not having access to proper food – whether it’s in the school or whether it’s in their city, supermarket, etc.

Paul Hawken 11:45
I think the organic food movement is a much bigger movement, and that’s about nourishment. Sometimes it gets lost in the conversation or the argument. They try to make distinctions: it is, it isn’t. We have to talk about nourishment. Nourishment is about compassion, serving, and connecting – both the person to the soil and to nutrients and where life comes from.

Paul Hawken 12:55
That’s the movement the real organic is about. That’s the movement that all of humanity will go to – what’s left of it, if we’re not careful – but will go to because the only way we persisted. We didn’t persist, engage, and create extraordinary cultures that have come before us by eating junk food. The denatured food didn’t exist at that time.

Paul Hawken 13:27
The organic movement, to me, I think, it does itself a disservice by focusing on the ins and outs and this and that, and “This is,” “This isn’t.” Not that they aren’t worthy discussions – they are – but for what the percentage of human beings, Americans, or whomever, it’s a conversation that’s lost on them. They’re busy, and many can’t even afford the food they are buying.

Paul Hawken 14:02
So, there are deeper issues here that I think we have to address – issues that are more encompassing, embracing, compassionate, and connecting. I feel like the organic movement sometimes disconnects itself because it’s right and makes other food wrong. I wouldn’t disagree with that perspective, but it doesn’t really bring people in. There are people dealing with access, cost, and price – all over. The food movement is amazing, and so again, I’m not wagging my finger at anybody – I don’t do that.

Paul Hawken 14:42
But I’m just saying that if you look at the overall conversation about food, organic got marginalized quite a long time ago. Remember the Stanford study that says there’s no difference in nutrient density – or nutrients at all – and all sorts of things. Just bogus studies in terms of scientific method. But they made the headlines.

Dave Chapman 15:13
Yes, because we also know who pays for the headlines. It wasn’t an accident that it made the headline. This is exactly one of the things I wanted to talk about. The last time that I visited you – a couple of years ago – after the interview we were talking, and you said, “David, real organic needs to think bigger.” I’ve been thinking about that for two years. And what did that mean?

Dave Chapman 15:46
It’s funny because as I was driving down to San Francisco from here, I got a call from Hugh Kent of King Grove Organic Farm. He said, “Dave, I’ve been thinking; we need to think bigger.” I thought, “Okay. I’m getting a message.” It’s fine. It can be a co-op, but let’s go a little further. And you are going a little further. What does it mean to think bigger?

Dave Chapman 16:13
I thought about your own life. The first time, I think that I encountered you, Paul, I was reading “Growing a Business,” which – thank you – was a great help to me as I grew a business. I literally started doing certain specific things – I started what we call the “weekly printout.” On that weekly printout, I see exactly where we’re at financially, which is a very important thing if you’re going to run a small business.

Dave Chapman 16:46
Since then, I’ve watched your arc, and I think that it could be described by the fact that you have been thinking bigger. You’re taking a lot of the same issues that you were dealing with back at Erewhon and then at Smith & Hawken, and they are the same issues, but you’re trying to think of them on a bigger scale.

Dave Chapman 17:07
By the way, Woody Tasch said, “No, no, no. We need to think smaller.” That was an interesting response. But when you think about thinking bigger, what does that mean for you?

Paul Hawken 17:17
I agree with Woody. Actually, a bigger scale is details. They’re both true and correct. It’s governments and big corporations that think only in big-scale terms, and then they just override signals that are coming back from people, the living world, children, and everything else. I don’t disagree with you at all.

Paul Hawken 17:46
But “Bigger,” to me, means the embracing of where we live and who we are. It sounds so simple, but I feel like we don’t know what a human being is and where we live. When I say we don’t know we live, there’s that Jill Clapperton quote, “When you stand on the ground, you’re standing on the roof of another world.” Well, you are, but we’re just now starting to unveil, reveal, and discover what is going on. I want to say down there, but it’s in the soil.

Paul Hawken 18:34
There’s just a coming together of, I think, wisdom that many farmers and indigenous people have had for decades, if not centuries. And science. So, observational science. All the great farmers I know were using observational science. They weren’t having people from the extension service come in, test everything, and tell them what to do. They were walking in their fields, they looked, and they saw the color of grass. They could tell different soil types just from looking and so forth.

Paul Hawken 19:10
That’s observational science. All indigenous science is observational science. Observational science is the science of connection and integration. Whereas empirical science, which came out of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, is the opposite. It’s about making distinctions. This is a this and not a that, and that’s a that, and this is not a that, and so forth.

Paul Hawken 19:38
That’s done by naming. You can’t study it unless you separate it out from everything else that it isn’t. That’s empirical science. It’s extraordinary. But what I think we’re saying now is that the best of empirical and observational science are meeting and talking in science. It’s people – more women than men, interestingly, just observationally true.

Paul Hawken 20:04
But when I think of Jill Clapperton, Zoë Schlanger, Toby Kiers with fungi, and Robin Wall Kimmerer – you start to look at this science, which is really revealing what we don’t know, which is so much more interesting than thinking you do know. I think “bigger,” to me, means like, “Oh, my gosh…”

Paul Hawken 20:35
To say it’s all connected sounds like a cliché, but the inseparability of our breath, a blade of grass, and a hummingbird hovering in the morning is something that’s starting to emerge in people’s awareness. Now, that awareness was here on earth for thousands and thousands of years because people lived in one place, and they got to know that place if they were going to survive. They understood it in ways that we didn’t understand. I say “we” in the Western cultures.

Paul Hawken 21:22
When I say we don’t know where we live… I think it’s heavy hitting, a scientist, wanted to measure the number of roots in a single kernel of rye planted. Most grass is ryegrass. Not all. With an electron microscope, he did, and it was 14 million roots. Four million were hair roots, so you can set those aside. There are only 10 million left. But those 10 million roots are connected to hyphae and mycelia.

Paul Hawken 21:58
What we know now because of the work of Toby Kiers and Andrew Adamatzky published on Royal Society Open Science, is that the mycelia are talking or communicating – whatever you want to call it – using clicking sounds the same way that the San people in Botswana communicate, and also sperm whales. Not only that, Adamatzky says, “Well, there’s packets of clicks – the sounds. They’re like Morse code, in terms of spatial arrangement and the clicks, and you can make…

Paul Hawken 22:08
Can I just interrupt you? The fungi are clicking?

Dave Chapman 22:36
The mycelia.

Dave Chapman 22:37
The mycelia is clicking to the root?

Paul Hawken 22:41
No. It’s not clicking to itself. It’s clicking.

Dave Chapman 22:42
Just to itself. It’s talking to its community.

Paul Hawken 22:45
Yeah. What we know is that there’s negotiation going on here. Because the plant has sugar from photosynthesis, and the mycelia needs that to live and survive. The mycelia down below, in a sense, are like a transaction saying, “What do you want? What do you need?” “I need nitrogen.” That’s a big one – plants like that one. Phosphorus – some can call for zinc or selenium.

Paul Hawken 23:10
You’re looking at what Toby Kiers has done in Amsterdam: is make it visible by injecting dyes. You can see the mycelia transferring stuff, molecules, and sometimes in the same little… I don’t know what you call that. A little vesicle. It’s like four cells thick. They’re going opposite directions at the same time within the same vesicle. This stuff is going on. It’s a marketplace, but it’s so busy. There are 10 million roots communicating, and somehow they all communicate the same thing.

Paul Hawken 23:53
The plant has language. Again, these are things that were just sort of heretical ideas very recently in botany. They have Zoë Schlanger
‘s beautiful book, “The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.” where she spent eight years with botanists. And just like, “What do you know? What do you see? What’s amazing out there?”

Paul Hawken 24:31
At the end, she reports that there’s a group of them who don’t want to go on record because they want to keep their position at whatever university. But she quotes them saying, “The only way we can understand the plant – the only way – given all the attributes and its capacities and abilities, its 20 senses, etc., is that it’s a brain root to tip. It’s a brain.” That’s the only way we can describe what a plant does, knows, and says.

Paul Hawken 24:51
That’s why I say we don’t even know where we live, in a sense. You can go outside, barefoot, whatever, and be grounded, but we don’t know, and that is a wonderful thing to realize. I would say the same thing about the human body, which is, we think we’re individuals. We are not.

Paul Hawken 25:09
Are there barriers? Yes. Cells have barriers. Skin is a barrier. We have barriers for good and practical reasons. But there are 40 trillion microbes inside, outside, going all around our body outside – without which we perish.

Dave Chapman 25:24
Forty trillion microbes that don’t have our DNA but that are part of us? That would be our microbiome, and without it we’re gone?

Paul Hawken 25:38
Yeah. But it’s not just the microbiome in the gut; it’s everywhere. That’s a particular digestive function of the microbiome. We’re at this cusp where we felt like, “What’s a human being?” As they say, “Individuals are in comic books and westerns.” That’s it. There is no such thing as an individual.

Paul Hawken 26:00
The realization that’s occurring when I say, “Go bigger,” is to go, “Oh, my gosh. We’ve objectified – because of our Western education in naming and sorting out, which is great for empirical studies – the living world.” We’ve categorized it. We’ve put it in, “This is a this, and this is not a that,” and so forth. Technically, that’s true, if you look at it that way. But that’s using nouns as a way to understand the world.

Paul Hawken 26:37
If you use verbs – which is what indigenous languages use – a verb is all about relationship, and so there isn’t a separation in a relationship. The whole climate movement, to me, pretty much, is failing because the language they use is to objectify nature – to objectify climate itself. We’re fighting, tackling, and combating climate – climate change as a problem.

Paul Hawken 27:10
The climate crisis is everywhere, and we’re fighting climate change. Climate cannot have a crisis. Get out of here. It’s climate. That’s a projection – that’s an objectification of something that is extraordinary, but it’s not a thing.

Dave Chapman 27:29
Can climate be a crisis for us?

Paul Hawken 27:32
No, we’re the crisis for ourselves.

Dave Chapman 27:33
We’re the crisis.

Paul Hawken 27:34
Yeah. The biosphere creates the atmosphere. So, who’s changing the biosphere?

Dave Chapman 27:41
This is one of the things I did want to talk to you about. There’s a story I like to tell – Bill McKibben’s story- because it resonated for me. Bill, when he started dealing with climate and trying to figure out how to create change, said, “For a long time I thought we were having a debate, and then I realized we had won the debate a long time ago, and we were just having a fight. It was a fight with money and power, as these fights often are.”

Dave Chapman 28:26
I thought, “That’s exactly what I felt – that I was also involved with in the organic world.” At first it seemed to be a debate, and then I realized we’d won the debate a long time ago, and now we had a fight. You said, “No, that’s the wrong way to think about it.” I thought, “Great, let’s talk about that.”

Dave Chapman 28:49
I don’t mean to quote you to yourself, but you said, “What did we ever win by fighting?” I thought, “Well, we ended slavery, we got women to vote, we defeated, the Nazis and freed the Jewish people from the concentration camps.” So, there were things that appeared to be worth fighting for – things that humans did fight for.

Dave Chapman 29:12
I can’t say, “Oh, everything was an unparalleled success. It didn’t mean that oppression ended, or any of those things, but it did mean that something horrible that was happening that people were involved with seemed to get a lot better.”

Dave Chapman 29:25
My question to you, honestly – and I’m saying this with an open mind and heart – when we talk about this, do you feel like, “Well, I’ve got two parts, and one part goes, ‘We have to fight,’ and another part says, ‘Fighting is not going to get us there. We need to think about this totally differently.'” Or is there no part that says we’ve got to fight, and is it just clear to you that the answer is not fighting?

Dave Chapman 29:53
Maybe that would be more of a Martin Luther King Jr. kind of perspective. What’s your thought about this? We both see lots of things that are destroying us, that are unjust, that perhaps are even intolerable. How do we respond to those things?

Paul Hawken 30:09
To the climate movement, I would just say, “How’s that working for you?” That language. Less than 1% of the people in the world do anything on a daily basis – much less than 1% – after 50 years of very clear science. We knew everything we needed to know 50 years ago. Actually, even before then. Even in 1856.

Paul Hawken 30:42
Not to that I’m a spectator on this, but I would say looking back and looking at it and going, “How is this conversation working? Is it making any difference?” If you take away solar and wind in terms of their efficacy as a technology, they would be being implemented right now regardless of the conversation around climate because they’re cheaper. That’s why they’re being taken up so quickly. If they weren’t cheaper, they would not be.

Paul Hawken 31:12
So, it’s not because of the climate movement and fighting climate change and being like, “Oh, we’ve convinced the world to be renewable,” and put up solar panels everywhere. The conversation that is occurring is about antagonism and about making people and oil companies wrong, and so forth.

Paul Hawken 31:44
Go to an oil company and talk to the workers. They’re us. They’re people. They care. They want to have their cars work, warm homes, cold food, and access to great medical care needed for their children, themselves, and so forth. Do there need to be Carnival cruise ships going around the world? No, of course not. But the energy system that we have right now is pretty amazing.

Paul Hawken 32:22
So, if you want to convince somebody about climate and that we need to do something, you have to come up with a better idea than that was being proffered. Because the idea that’s being proffered is the energy transition. What we’re making in Net Zero 2050 is – with all due respect – the biggest load of crap. There is no energy transition occurring whatsoever right now, and we won’t achieve it by 2050. It’s impossible.

Paul Hawken 32:54
I say that observationally – not to criticize people who are making yeoman’s effort to change the energy system. It is great, but electricity is only 19% of our energy use. Make steel. Make cement. Make roads out of electricity. They talk about doubling EVs by 2050 – there’d be 3 billion EVs. There’d be enough roads then to circle the globe 650 times. What are those roads going to be made of? Rock. How do you get rock? You blow it up. With what? Electricity? No.

Paul Hawken 33:36
How do you truck it? Electrical vehicles? Maybe. With what? Cathode on batteries harvested in tunnels in Congo by children that are 10 years old. We can’t get there from here with our understanding of where we are. I’m not saying I really think we should continue to double-glaze the planet. That’s not what I’m saying. But I’m saying if we’re not looking at it with open, clear, sensible eyes – and understanding and good science, by the way – then we’re just deluding ourselves.

Paul Hawken 34:24
So, the whole Paris mandate is nonsense. Not that 1.5°C shouldn’t be exceeded – that’d be a great idea. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the idea that somehow we can swap out our electrical system with renewables is going to solve the problem, it just won’t.

Paul Hawken 34:44
One example is wood. Look at Vermont. Let’s take the state of Vermont. How much wood did they use in the 17th century? A lot. How about the 18th century? A lot more. 19th century? More. 20th century? More. And now? More. We use more wood today on Earth than we ever have before. What came after that? Coal. It was in China for a thousand years, but it was discovered in the UK and Belgium, particularly, where it was abundant and obvious.

Paul Hawken 35:19
Then we started using coal. It was supposed to displace wood, right? It did not. As soon as we had coal, we used more wood. Then oil was supposed to displace coal. It did not, because liquid fuels can do something far different than solid fuels. If you go back four centuries, we use more of every single thing that we have ever used, and humans move toward the cheapest, concentrated form of energy possible – and always have. Good to know.

Paul Hawken 35:59
Now let’s step back and look at what we’re doing, what’s the cause, and what is the way through. That’s a more complex question and answer than the cartoon beliefs of the climate movement – that we’re in an energy transition. If we just do this and this and this, by 2050, we will be net zero. There’s no such thing is net zero.

Paul Hawken 36:23
There are 1.2 trillion carbon atoms in every cell in your body. And we’re talking about net zero carbon? What does that mean? It has no meaning whatsoever, because carbon is the flow of life. Of course, it is referring to carbon-based fuels. I know, of course, when they say “net zero,” but even that is impossible.

Paul Hawken 36:46
Because, like I say, “How are you going to make steel?” You go, “Oh, well, we’ll use green hydrogen.” Really? Tell me more. “Electrolysis will take water and separate the hydrogen.” Tell me more. Well, what do you need to do that? Energy. Where’s the energy going to come from? How much energy?” “Well, it takes as much energy to create green steel from hydrogen as the United States uses in a single year.” Just to make electrolysis – not the cooking part of steel, but electrolysis.

Paul Hawken 37:24
And direct capture – these sorts of Promethean solutions coming out of technology – billions are being poured into it by oil companies. Actually, even the IRA and the US government. These machines – we need 10 million of them – are going to suck air from atmosphere and separate the CO₂, and then separate the C from the O. That is to say, “We don’t want the O₂, but we’ll liquefy the carbon, and then we’re going to pump it in new pipelines into geological formations,” and so forth. We’re going to… What? How do you do that?

Paul Hawken 38:10
It’s important to look at CO₂ in the atmosphere as entropy. In other words, you burn coal, gas, and oil, and you have entropy: CO₂. It’s like Ash. It’s the ash, which is entropy. That’s the second law of thermodynamics, which is energy only goes in one direction; it doesn’t go backwards. It can’t. If it did, we wouldn’t have a planet, by the way. So, it’s important for life. That’s true.

Paul Hawken 38:43
[inaudible 0:38:47] requires a massive amount of energy to do this. “Well, we’re going to use renewable energy – wind turbines and maybe geology. Maybe we can get energy from…we haven’t got it yet, that kind of energy. But solar.” And this idea that it’s going to be renewables – renewable energy has entropy too. Solar panels last for 25 years at best. They’re full of rare earths, heavy metals, this and that, steel, and glass. Wind turbines are even more elaborate in terms of the materials they use.

Paul Hawken 39:30
What we’re saying is, “Look, we will create entropy to cure entropy.” As a one-time farm boy, I’m just saying that’s like walking onto the pasture of a farm – dairy cows, whatever cattle- and saying, “God, man, you got a lot of cow patties here?” And you say, “Yeah, I got cows.” “I have this idea. We’ll make new cows out of cow patties.” That’s direct capture. It is insane. It’s hilarious. It’s ridiculous.

Paul Hawken 40:06
It’s emblematic of the way we’re seeing the world, and if we don’t see the world as a beautifully extraordinary biological entity – which is the Earth – then there are 3.4 trillion creatures that are Earthmates. They’re here every day. They’re talking to each other. They are communicating. That’s where we live. We’re one of those 3.4 trillion, or actually, maybe we’re 8 billion among the 3.4 trillion. We’re not listening. They’re speaking, and we’re not listening to it. We have our own language.

Paul Hawken 40:54
We have our own ethos, which is to extract as much as we can, as fast as we can, to create more money for a small number of people. The climate movement – the rhetoric – is sort of almost usurped by that. BlackRock just made nature an asset class, which means that if a country borrows money and they have this pristine forest – or maybe not even pristine, but a good forest – that’s their collateral. If they don’t pay their loans back, BlackRock owns the forest.

Paul Hawken 41:33
This is just another extension of the exploitation that arose out of 1492, when the West came to the rest of the world, and with the Doctrine of Discovery from our papal brothers. The Papacy, the Vatican, said to the Spanish that if you discover something, it’s yours. We’re still doing that.

Paul Hawken 42:04
Bioenergy, carbon capture systems – all the ways we’re looking at the world in the climate movement – pretty much, except for soil, by the way. Except for soil in terms of larger categories. It’s self-defeating and scientifically inaccurate.

Dave Chapman 42:24
Okay. Just so that we don’t all create mass at Bucha now, I get it that we have a problem, which is that we’re trying to solve the problem with the same mind that created the problem. What does it look like to think of that differently?

Paul Hawken 42:43
It’s not the same mind; it’s the same education, assumptions, and beliefs. Not the same mind. The mind is beautiful. I want to make a distinction there.

Dave Chapman 42:56
Okay. It’s very hard to get past our beliefs and education. I see it over and over, and I go, “Oh, my God. What am I doing? What have I done?” Because we are so molded by these beliefs, we reinforce them in each other. We have culture, and culture says, “This is good, this is bad.” If you do bad, you are an outcast.” Maybe if you just do a little bit of bad, then we’ll call you a foodie or an organic wacko, but if you go a little further, you will be an outcast; you’ll shunned.

Dave Chapman 43:41
I’m trying to figure out – given that we are programmed not to choose to be shunned because we survive as a community – how do we overcome our education? How do we overcome our training, which, without a doubt, is powerful and very helpful for a certain kind of problem? It’s just as it turns out, our problems are much deeper than that.

Paul Hawken 44:12
You do it by listening, not by talking. You do it by receiving not by knowing. The last thing the world needs is another know-it-all. I know you don’t listen up. When I wrote “Carbon: The Book of Life,” I was trying to avoid that assiduously. Because those books can be popular, they can be correct, maybe from our perspective. I don’t question that, but it don’t work. It doesn’t work.

Dave Chapman 44:36
They don’t work in terms of creating a transformation. That is the hope for transformation.

Paul Hawken 44:55
Absolutely not. If you can give me an example, I’m ready to be educated, for sure. But I don’t see an example of it. I really don’t.

Dave Chapman 45:06
Paul, can I ask you? Can you think of a transformation that is one that you would go, “Now that’s a transformation I like.” Any time in human history that you’d go, “That was a step forward.”

Paul Hawken 45:18
There is the transformation occurring right this second, right now, all over the Earth. We don’t see it because it’s local, small, “marginal,” and it doesn’t make the news; we don’t know about it, and we’re not affected by it that way. So, we are so separate because we’re trained to look for the big things – by The Post, by The New York Times, by The Guardian, by TV, by MSNBC, by Fox News, etc., etc. We’re always on alert, on social media, everywhere, to look for these big signals.

Paul Hawken 45:18
Lots of followers, or lots of readers, big books, bestsellers, all that sort of stuff. We are so attenuated as that being the signal in the sea of noise. But I’m saying that’s upside-down and backwards too. The real noise, if you will, out there is human beings who are restoring life on Earth. The only path through the dilemmas that we’re in is to create more life because anything else is simply some variation of taking and extracting.

Paul Hawken 46:48
The biggest extracted industry in the world is Google – it’s taking everything they have found out about you and selling it to somebody who wants you to buy something else. That’s extraction. Our children are being extracted. They’re extracted by TikTok, everything. We’re extracting each other now.

Paul Hawken 47:10
But it’s the same mindset that is destroying the basis for life on Earth – water, soil, forests, animals, creatures, pollinators, etc., etc. I go back to the soil. I go back to that – whether it’s Real Organic Project, it doesn’t matter what you label is.

Paul Hawken 47:29
Those people and cultures that are actually nurturing life on Earth in community – and life on Earth includes children, women’s health and well-being, education, housing, and safety – all those things are part of regeneration. It’s not just soil. We’re talking about regenerating the relationships we have with each other and with everything that supports us, which is, again, the Earth.

Paul Hawken 48:05
Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. It’s come to me recently. There is a website called “Rstor,” restor.eco by Tom Crowder. Crowther Lab at ETH in Switzerland. Go to it. There are 250,000 sites on earth being restored by people that you never hear about. Go, look, scan, and see.

Paul Hawken 48:38
So, what are you doing in terms of restoration? Are you watching and observing? It doesn’t have to be big – huge. It’s not about being a hero or heroine; it’s about absolutely understanding that all life without exception comes from community. Our cells are a community. We have 32 to 34 trillion cells. It’s a community. Our body is a community. Within our bodies – communities.

Paul Hawken 49:21
Communities are arising everywhere on Earth now. I don’t mean to be Pangloss here and say, “Don’t worry, it’s going to happen.” No, I’m not saying that at all, but that life is happening. The example I give came to me recently because we had big fires here in California. We’re very fire prone – maybe one of the most fire-prone geographies in the world, by the way. So, it’s a very natural thing to have fires here.

Paul Hawken 49:49
Not the fires we’re having, because the 56 tribes that used to live in California practiced fire ecology, and so they didn’t have configurations like the Pacific Palisades, or L.A., or Altadena. Those were impossible because of the way they managed the land.

Paul Hawken 50:11
But when I was young, and I lived in the Sierras, we’d get fires – and usually not big ones, brush fire, or something – and people would get right on it. We didn’t have a lot of professional fire people because you couldn’t afford to have people being occupied to do that when there’s nothing to do. City governments and county governments had enough, but when there was a fire, there was always volunteers.

Paul Hawken 50:41
You were trained, “Don’t fight a fire if it’s upwind,” and things like that. We were volunteers. But time came when the fire was out, so to speak, and then you had to tamp it down. To tamp it down you, had to walk over all the ashes with metal-soled boots because you were looking for hot spots that were covered up by the ash. Particularly, manzanita will just stay red hot for a long time, but it’s covered by ash. You don’t see it. That’s why you’re tamping it down.

Paul Hawken 51:24
Eventually it’s out, and you’re covered in – ironically – carbon. And you’re black. You have goggles. And suddenly you took a shower, go home, and everything.

Paul Hawken 51:35
In the spring, the same place that had burned – because most of the fires, at least when I was young, were in late summer or early fall. Now they’re year-round. But spring would come, the rain had happened in the winter, and you’d see the color of grass you’d never seen before because of the nutrients in the ash. They were just like, “Whoa.”

Paul Hawken 52:01
But you’d see wildflowers that you expected to see – lupine, poppy, and things like that. But if you were a botanist, which I was not at that time (and I’m not now either), but I learned from botanists at the University of California, Berkeley, that those wildflowers would appear, do appear, that have not been seen for 50 to 100 years. You’d go, “What were they doing all that time?”

Dave Chapman 52:30
Waiting for a good fire?

Paul Hawken 52:32
No, it’s called fire-triggered succession. It took a lot of heat and fire for them to bloom. We think of those as being simultaneous now. The earth, politics, corruption, and the concentration of wealth are on fire. The way we treat our children is horrific, in my opinion. We’re on fire. But that fire-triggered succession is happening at the same time. That’s how I look at it.

Paul Hawken 53:15
It is real. Real organic is real. But it’s not just real organic. I’m just saying there are hundreds of thousands of these things happening on Earth right now. We don’t see them. Is it enough to counter the momentum – fascism, proto-fascism, and all the other things we know about that are destroying life on Earth? I don’t know. But I do know that the nature of this Earth is to regenerate. It always will be.

Paul Hawken 53:50
Whether we do it successfully or sufficiently to counter the perfidy, selfishness, and all the worst qualities of what it means to be a civilization right now, I don’t know. I have no idea. No one knows.

Paul Hawken 54:09
But I do know one thing: that I’m going that direction. And I can’t do it based on the fact, “Well, somebody will follow, or is there enough? Or do I think it will work?” We know it works, which is to create more life. We do know that. Every single aspect of what we touch, eat, take, and make interrelates with that’s what compassion, kindness, and generosity are about.

Paul Hawken 54:42
These are human qualities that are innate in human beings. Are they being covered up? Are they being suppressed? Yeah, but they’re still there.

Dave Chapman 54:51
You just mentioned two qualities that I had just written down: kindness and generosity. Because when you were talking about what it would take for regeneration, community, kindness, and generosity were the three words that I came up with.

Dave Chapman 55:13
People don’t know what to do. Everybody feels confused and lost, in my opinion, and I do too. In a pinch, kindness and generosity are a good place to start. As you’re saying, these things that are happening can push us into becoming scared, angry, and dangerous.

Dave Chapman 55:38
But they also can push us to become kind and generous, which is what you’re suggesting. These thousands of small movements are doing. These are just people, as you say; they’re not… Nobody is paying attention. They’re just doing it.

Paul Hawken 55:54
I find it fascinating that you said you don’t know what to do. You most certainly do know what to do. Come on. Look at what you’ve been doing prior to real organic as a grower with the Real Organic Project. You and Linley know exactly what to do.

Paul Hawken 55:54
When we take it on, like, “But yeah, we’re doing this. But over here, they’re trashing the place, or they’re fighting, lying, cheating, and stealing” – for sure. It’s not hard to see that. But the idea that we think that all that burden rests on our shoulders… No. The burden that rests on our shoulders is not a burden; it’s a delight, a gift, and it’s made of qualities that are innate in us.

Paul Hawken 56:50
If we are feeling the grief from seeing that, I hope so. Grief is your ally. Grief comes from love. It is the love of someone, someplace, a bird, a family, a forest, or your family. That’s love. Love is there. Love comes from one place. It comes from the heart. It’s the organ that tells us the truth. The world is asking us to listen to ourselves and tell the truth.

Paul Hawken 57:27
You don’t know that you’re going to succeed because you don’t want to use metrics like that – because that will make you fail. If you’re using the state of the world, state of US politics, and state of corruption as a measure of whether you’re failing or succeeding, you’re hurting yourself. Don’t hurt yourself that way.

Paul Hawken 57:50
It doesn’t mean you’re naive. It doesn’t mean you don’t see it, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t know what to do. You know exactly what to do.

Dave Chapman 58:04
All right. Thank you, Paul. Before we go, do you have anything you’d like to say? I want to take one moment before we end. I just want to say I have read “Carbon: The Book of Life.” As this conversation is, it’s a multi-layered, brilliant exploration of our world from the very, very little to the human to the intergalactic. It’s like riding a rocket ship up and down.

Dave Chapman 58:53
All those different levels, I say, are given their due importance. It’s not that the intergalactic is important and the microscopic is unimportant, or vice versa. It’s so beautiful that you can just see the world in such different ways, and they’re all connected and united.

Dave Chapman 59:14
I want to encourage people to get the book and read it. As I told you, it took me a long time to read it because every page I was googling and researching. It talks about a lot of things that I’m not an expert in, which is wonderful. I will say that you say it beautifully. You have a beautiful way with language. So, I encourage people to check it out.

Paul Hawken 59:43
Thank you. It’s not a technical book, though. I don’t want people to think it’s technical. That’s a different book. I’ve done those books – “Natural Capitalism” is one of them. This is meant to be about awe, wonder, curiosity, and discovery. It’s meant to be what I call, “Who knows? Really? Is that true? Is that where I live? Is that how my body lives?”

Paul Hawken 1:00:48
Pulling the string, the veritable flower bag of origins: “This came from this, this is where this started, and this is what we know now about communication.” That mother bats have their own lingo called Motherese – they don’t know what else to call it, the scientists who study bats – and they name and they teach their young that that male bat there is trouble.

Paul Hawken 1:00:50
This is bats talking. The female bats having their own… I think most women can understand. The Motherese are bats. Also, if you take the sound – because it’s ultrasonic, we can’t hear it – but if you slow it down, it is the most beautiful sound you’ve ever heard.

Paul Hawken 1:01:18
We’re the only culture that vilifies bats. They’re sacred everyplace else in the world. When you hear the sound, you’re just like, “Oh, my God.” Then you think of the mother bat as being a great mother, first of all, but what does it mean to be a great mother? To care for your three little battlings, to know where threats are, to know how to get food, and this and that.

Paul Hawken 1:01:54
That’s just a small example of things that are in the book, and it’s meant to just sort of say, “Hey, this is where we live.” It’s extraordinary what we don’t know, and there’s so much more we don’t know that is equally extraordinary. What the book tries to point to and celebrate is that, as I mentioned earlier, we’re discovering what we don’t know, and it’s astonishing. Whatever it is that lights you up, then that’s what the book’s for.

Paul Hawken 1:02:42
Really, if we’re going to restore life on Earth – which is what we’re either going to do or not do – but it’s going to restore itself. We just have to decide whether we want to be alone or not. The earth is going to regenerate no matter what we do, no matter how stupid we are – it’s going to happen.

Paul Hawken 1:03:04
I think when you have a better understanding of where we live and what’s going on – that trees can actually, in a Charlotte Scott kind of way, see somebody walking by the tree. You can see it and go, “What? So, “Oh, it’s aware of my presence. Was I aware of its presence? No, I really wasn’t. Now I am, because I realize it’s a living creature, not a tree.”

Paul Hawken 1:03:12
That’s just a noun. That’s the purpose of “Carbon: The Book of Life,” which is those are the things that can inspire, make us happy, smile, and realize – not, again, the tragedy of our present socioeconomic system, which is very tragic – but to inspire us to say, “Okay, but I’m here now. I’m here for a short time. We come and go. What am I going to do? Who am I going to be?”

Paul Hawken 1:03:36
It’s kind of like kids in a playground. The ones having fun, that’s where you went – not the ones who hit each other. I want to be with that world. I want to be with the magic world. I want to be with mother bats. Not literally, but in spirit. That’s what I’m trying to inculcate.

Paul Hawken 1:00:00
I want to say that I also love the parts. I don’t know what to say. In a sense, it’s all autobiographical, but the parts about your own life and how you found health. You started out with a lot of dis-ease, and then you worked on experimenting with different foods and discovering, “If I eat that, I feel good, and if I eat that, I really don’t feel good.”

Dave Chapman 1:04:35
I think most people have a sensitivity they’re not even aware of, but yours was extreme enough that it pushed you to find out.

Paul Hawken 1:05:07
It did. The only reason it happened is because I read a book that said, “If you’re sick, it’s your fault.” I was really pissed off when I read that because I had asthma from six months old – the youngest recorded case in San Mateo County medical history.

Paul Hawken 1:05:25
But what the book was really saying is, you’re responsible for your health. No one else is going to fix it for you. That’s when I went out of food fast, eating just rice and tea. After eight or nine days, I forget, but for the first time in my life, because I had asthma, until I was 18, and I was overmedicalized. I had three doctors prescribing the same drug because I was taking the maximum amount from each – three times is the maximum. So, I was just a druggie.

Paul Hawken 1:06:00
But the thing is that for the first time, after eight or nine days, I felt air at the bottom of my lungs. Everybody knows what that feels like, virtually. I had never experienced it. This sensation was like, “Wow!” It was so amazing. What I did was like, “Well, this is working, but I don’t want to eat rice and tea every day. That’s not going to work.”

Paul Hawken 1:06:30
I would add a food – and just one food – and I could feel right away, “Oh, this feels good. This does not feel good.” I just kept doing that for a year. We never get the opportunity to isolate the physiological effects of applejuice, Coca-Cola, hamburgers, milkshakes, or french fries and things.

Paul Hawken 1:06:54
Once I did that, my body said, “This, this, this. I don’t want this. I don’t want that.” It wasn’t like I was making a conceptual choice, “I’m going to just kind of diet. I’m going to be a vegan, I’m going to be a vegetarian, and be this.” No, my body told me exactly, and everybody’s body will tell you what it wants. But we have overridden it with the noise of chemical agriculture, of foods that aren’t nourishing.

Paul Hawken 1:07:23
So, it’s there for everybody. We are wise. Our bodies are brilliant. It’s all covered up by industry – and it knows what it’s doing, by the way, to do that.

Dave Chapman 1:07:34
The industry knows what they’re doing.

Paul Hawken 1:07:35
Oh, yeah. It knows exactly how to manipulate.

Dave Chapman 1:07:41
It’s funny that such a simple thing is so elusive. Not many people know what makes them feel good and what makes them not feel good from what they eat.

Dave Chapman 1:07:55
They’re eating all sorts of things. They’re doing it habitually. Fairly, they like this, and don’t like that.

Dave Chapman 1:08:04
It’s not even just that. There’s also added to it this layer of, again, that wanting to be part of a group. Right now, the group is eating very bad food. So, if you leave that group and say, “I’m not going to eat that,” you become other – you become an outcast, and people don’t want to be other.

Paul Hawken 1:08:26
I experienced that at first, for sure. That’s why I started the other one. We were all others. We were food faddists. I remember debating Frederick Storrs, who was head of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard, and we had all these debates then about organic food. He was, of course, on the Sugar Council and the American Campbell Council. In that debate – I think it was at MIT – he was calling me a food faddist and all that sort of stuff.

Paul Hawken 1:09:06
I hadn’t thought of it beforehand, but I said, “I think you’re the faddist, not me, because everything I’m eating people ate it before Jesus was born, and most of everything you’re eating was invented since World War Two. You’re the faddist. I’m going to watch what happens to you because I don’t think that’s going to work for you.” So, that’s the faddist, not me.

Dave Chapman 1:09:40
He was quite a character.

Paul Hawken 1:09:41
He was. He lived a long time too, based on constitution.

Dave Chapman 1:09:49
He had a tremendous amount of influence.

Paul Hawken 1:09:51
Oh, my gosh, yeah. I didn’t have any; I can assure you that.

Dave Chapman 1:09:56
Well, of course you did. It wasn’t evident, but you were part of something that was building an alternative to his vision. His vision was, “You should have a Coca-Cola with dinner. It’s good for you.” He said these crazy things. Now we look at that, and we go, “That’s nuts.”

Paul Hawken 1:10:16
Chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard.

Dave Chapman 1:10:18
He chaired the Department of Nutrition at Harvard for many years, and as such, he had tremendous influence making, people who believed what you believed and who were trying to offer that food into nuts.

Paul Hawken 1:10:32
Oh, not just nuts, but ridicule. That’s science – empirical science and Western science. And, boy, it can go way off with its peer-reviewed studies. Like, “Oh, really?”

Dave Chapman 1:10:53
Of course, real science isn’t the enemy, but science can be manipulated to do bad things. We go, “Oh, look, we’ve proven it.” Well, they haven’t proven it. There was a study that was paid for by somebody, and it came up with a conclusion.

Dave Chapman 1:11:15
We’ve seen what happens if you come up with the wrong conclusion. The great story of Tyrone Hayes and “We will destroy you if you publish that.” They did a pretty good job of destroying him – our friends at Syngenta.

Paul Hawken 1:11:31
Yeah, it’s interesting. When I did a book with Amory Lovins, “Natural Capitalism,” for Drawdown Two, what I would say is. “Look, In God We Trust, and all of us bring data.” In other words, let’s separate what you believe from data. Even “Carbon: The Book of Life,” I think, has 350 notes, and I left a lot out. But it’s always science-based.

Paul Hawken 1:12:04
What I say is that facts do not change the world. They don’t. Stories do. But stories have to have both feet on the ground to be compelling and enduring stories. With “Carbon: The Book of Life,” there are facts underlying and within. But the book is really about stories. Because we remember stories, and we retell stories, and stories change us. They always have. That’s what humans do very, very, very well.

Paul Hawken 1:12:44
Science is to be respected. I’m in awe of science, but I can spot bullshit too. When it’s paid for, “Who paid for this science? Bayer-Monsanto? Yes.

Dave Chapman 1:12:59
We were talking earlier about taste. I think it’s a very important thing. You were saying taste will give us the truth. Taste is a story. It’s not a story that we tell; it’s a story that we experience. Can we trust taste? Taste has been hijacked. Doritos taste good to people. Probably at this point, a Dorito wouldn’t taste so good to me. Even if I ate five of them, by the fifth one, I’d be going, “This is pretty good.” How do we make sense of that?

Paul Hawken 1:13:40
Our taste buds were stolen by food companies. Decades ago, I remember at Stanford Research Institute talking with people who were organoleptic scientists, and they were describing then how they’re using the understanding of taste to manipulate foods for people to like them – and also to make them Doritos. So they’re like, “I can’t stop putting them in my mouth.”

Paul Hawken 1:14:21
That was done on purpose. Now it’s so ubiquitous and used. When you look at taste, we have more tastes than any creature on the planet. We can taste a million different things.

Dave Chapman 1:14:42
We humans can taste.

Paul Hawken 1:14:43
We, humans, can taste a million things, and that’s because we can smell a million things. You can’t have taste without smell. We assume that the best smellers are wolves, cats, dogs, bears, and other predator-type animals – and they do. They have a great sense of smell, but they have a very narrow spectrum of what they can smell.

Paul Hawken 1:15:09
When dogs is sniffing poop or pee, you take your dog on your leash, and [sniffs] it’s getting interested in something you can’t even see, maybe, but it’s looking for threat, sex, and food. It’s really focused on those things to survive. It doesn’t need to smell a camellia. You don’t see dogs going and smelling flowers because it’s irrelevant. We think they have the better olfactory sensibilities, than we do. It’s not. We’re the other way around; we have the best.

Paul Hawken 1:15:42
We can smell more things than any creature on earth. That correlates to taste. We get new taste buds every 10 days. It’s not like they’re stuck there forever. Taste is like our teacher; it’s our guide, it’s our ally. But we’re so addicted and so messed up…

Paul Hawken 1:16:22
If you go to Starbucks now, you might as well just inject sugar. That’s not the origin of coffee. Coffee was really almost medicine. It was medicine for the people for whom it originated. We’ve taken things that were important discoveries by human beings as foodstuffs and medicines.

Paul Hawken 1:16:54
Corn, obviously, was one of them. Corn is such a sacred food. Dorito is not a sacred food, not in the way the corn is created and all that sort of stuff. So, taste is our ally, but we have to create the conditions where we can actually taste something.

Paul Hawken 1:17:19
My feeling is that if you do that…if I was doing what’s called a “fat farm,” but a place where people who are obese would lose weight. That’s not fair, “a fat farm.” That’s not kind of them. So forgive me for saying that. But the thing would be to get them to “untaste” – to stop getting things and not try to please their taste buds, to uncover what their body really wants. The body will talk to you and say, “Yes, no. Yes, no.” But you have to create the spaciousness for that to happen. People are not stupid. We’ve made them stupid in terms of diet, food, and desire.

Paul Hawken 1:18:09
To me – and I have said it and Pepsi has never responded to me yet, and so forth – they’re committing a crime against humanity, as surely as the bombing of children in Gaza. It’s just a different type of bombing, which is that they have, Mountain Dew, the soft drink with the highest sugar and caffeine. Totally addictive, erosive, and damaging to children. Now they have more flavors.

Paul Hawken 1:15:41
That’s a crime against humanity because they spend five… I don’t know how many. Maybe not together, but Coke, Pepsi, and Dr Pepper spend about $5 billion a year in the United States getting our children to drink soft drinks. That’s a crime. I don’t want to end on that note, but…

Dave Chapman 1:19:07
That’s important. That’s part of it too. Let’s find a note to end on. What would you like to say that we haven’t said?

Paul Hawken 1:19:24
I think I’ve said everything I wanted to say. I respond to interaction more than… I do have spiels, obviously, but I don’t have a spiel to memorialize myself or my brain or what I’m thinking. I’m just talking about myself now. I am curious, curious, curious.

Paul Hawken 1:19:46
That happened when I was young because it was really unsafe to be inside. My home was a shitshow, and so I went outside. The interesting thing about a child, inside and outside, is that you can figure the inside out really quickly. We didn’t have a TV – we eventually did, but it was off and on. Refrigerator: open and close. You could learn a house in 30 minutes.

Paul Hawken 1:20:17
I spent a lot of time outside. I don’t know what was happening. I had no idea. The sounds, what I was seeing, and the things that were crawling around… My uncle was captured in World War Two by the Japanese in the Philippines, and then escaped and spent three years in the jungle feeding himself. He didn’t know the war was over – he was one of those soldiers.

Paul Hawken 1:20:44
He came back and became a herpetologist because he spent all the time identifying and eating snakes in the Philippines. He taught me how to hold snakes – how to hold a rattler and cobras. I saw them not as threats, in the case of a rattlesnake and so forth, but as a being. That it bit when it was threatened, but it didn’t go out and bite things to kill. It didn’t do that. Maybe little things like mice – but not a human.

Paul Hawken 1:21:20
It was the outdoors and being part of the Sierra Club when I was little. My father was meeting all these great naturalists and conservationists. Some, like David Brower, who are famous to this day. Just developing this affinity – not that I’m an expert. I am not. I’m not a good botanist; I’m not a good geologist. But what’s happening outside – it developed my curiosity.

Paul Hawken 1:21:51
So, my books, the succession of them, are all about wonder, like, “Hmm, I want to know more about this. I want to know more.” I have two more books to go, and that I know of.

Dave Chapman 1:22:07
You’re working on the next one now?

Paul Hawken 1:22:11
Oh, yeah.

Dave Chapman 1:22:13
That’s great. This just barely landed.

Paul Hawken 1:22:18
Yeah, it landed six weeks ago. But I knew about this one before it landed. It’s interesting that somebody pointed it out, and then I looked at it. I don’t recommend reading my oeuvre, but if you read the end of every book I’ve written, it signals the next book. I had no idea I did that.

Paul Hawken 1:22:47
You could say, “Oh, yeah.” The last chapter of every book is where I’m going. It’s the ending of that book, but it’s the beginning of the next one.

Dave Chapman 1:23:07
Well, I’m on my second round, as I said, so when I get to the end, I’ll get a sense of where the next one is going.

Paul Hawken 1:23:13
You can guess it’s all fine. Thank you for reading it. I really appreciate that.

Dave Chapman 1:23:19
It’s a great pleasure.

Paul Hawken 1:23:20
I don’t write for any other reason.

Dave Chapman 1:23:24
Yeah. The first chapter alone is enough to sit with for a long time. It’s quite rich. All right. Paul, thank you.

Paul Hawken 1:23:33
Dave, thank you for everything you do. Don’t forget what I said. You do know what to do. Don’t be so hard on yourself.

Dave Chapman 1:23:43
Okay.