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Carbon : the book of life
Book
2025
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Where is it?
Fiction/Biography Profile
Genre
NonFiction
Science
Nature
Topics
Life
Nature
Climatic changes
Environmentalism
Food
History
Hope
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Trade Reviews
Publishers Weekly Review
"Carbon is a window into the entirety of life, with all its beauty, secrets, and complexity," according to this eloquent if meandering study. Environmentalist Hawken (Regeneration) explains that the element was first created after the big bang as helium atoms fused and collided with unstable beryllium, and that carbon provides the "structural framework" for life by combining with hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen to form amino acids that cells transform into proteins. Highlighting the complex ways carbon moves through ecosystems, he describes, for instance, how mycorrhizal fungi use their filaments to penetrate tree roots so they can exchange nutrients from the soil for carbon-based fats and sugars from the tree. Hawken contends that reducing atmospheric carbon levels will require adopting the outlook of Indigenous communities who "experience trees and animals, even water itself, as living beings." Unfortunately, the in-depth discussions of the sophisticated lexicons Native American language groups have for describing the natural world does little to elucidate how to put such a perspective into practice. Additionally, Hawken's contention that "carbon organizes, assembles, and builds everything everywhere" gives the book an overly broad scope, with anecdotes strung together about cosmic history, the dangers of processed foods, and scientific debates over plant intelligence that fail to cohere into a unified narrative. This get lost in the weeds. Agent: Joseph Spieler, Spieler Agency. (Mar.)
Booklist Review
Hawken (Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, 2017) dramatically describes carbon as the "courier coursing through every particle of our existence" and the "narrator of lives born and lost, futures feared and imagined." Hawken looks closely at the miraculous life force of this perplexing element that has created, on one hand, all that we know and all that we are, and, on the other, caused much social and political consternation in the climate change debate. Hawken begins with a fascinating look at elements, noting that "only one element in the universe" can do what carbon does in animating life on earth. He expands his focus in subsequent chapters, looking at cellular life, plant and animal life, and human life. Throughout, Hawken traces the marvel and wonder of carbon and its forceful influence. Hawken's discussion of language and linguistics is particularly illuminating as he points out the importance of indigenous languages that are closely aligned to Earth in ways that help people perceive and sustain the natural world. Carbon ends with enchanting details about consciousness and ways forward as our climate changes. The "warming atmosphere" Hawken observes, "is a response, an adjustment, a teaching." We must learn and respond before it's too late.
Kirkus Review
An impassioned call for a return to traditional environmental stewardship. It is hard to overestimate how the accelerating collapse of ecosystems and species is related to how modern societies and their increasingly homogenized languages are losing the deep sense of place critical to protecting the land. So argues environmental activist Hawken, who says we ignore the knowledge embedded in Indigenous languages and customs at our peril. These marginalized or endangered cultures whose languages guided traditional guardianship of the land possess the ages-old understanding of how to avoid the calamities of environmental decline in the first place. In a scathing, if familiar, indictment of the denatured Western food industry, industrial farming, chemical companies, and ruinous logging and mining--among other depredations--Hawken marshals indisputable evidence that continuing on our current path is suicidal. He knows full well how entrenched the "overwhelming array of industrial forces lined up against the living world" can be and that most people simply do not understand the planetary and social risks we confront. It is the real subject of a book whose scaffolding is the pervasiveness and functions of the element of carbon in planetary life, as well as the challenges it presents. Hawken's survey of the science involved is as cogent as it is extensive, from the macro to the micro, and it's often a fascinating journey. There's a very fine book of popular science here that sometimes struggles with its own ideological noise. Were it not for this, the book would be in the same class as Zoë Schlanger's recentThe Light Eaters, with which it shares broad similarities. But for all the depressing realities, Hawken sees reasons for hope that we will reverse our heedlessly destructive ways, even in the current political climate. Profound cultural scope deepens Hawken's exceptional science writing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary
Carbon is the only element that animates the entirety of the living world. Though comprising a tiny fraction of Earth's composition, our planet is lifeless without it. Yet it is maligned as the driver of climate change, scorned as an errant element blamed for the possible demise of civilisation. Here, Paul Hawken looks at the flow of life through the lens of carbon. Embracing a panoramic view of carbon's omnipresence, he explores how this ubiquitous and essential element extends into every aperture of existence and shapes the entire fabric of life. Hawken charts a course across our planetary history, guiding us into the realms of plants, animals, insects, fungi, food, and farms to offer a new narrative for embracing carbon's life-giving power and its possibilities for the future of human endeavour. In this stirring, hopeful, and deeply humane book, Hawken illuminates the subtle connections between carbon and our collective human experience and asks us to see nature, carbon, and ourselves as exquisitely intertwined - inseparably connected.
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