Commusings: Elements by Paul Hawken

Dear Commune Community,

My mentor and beloved friend, Paul Hawken, has penned a remarkable new book titled, simply, Carbon. I am thrilled to feature an excerpt from it in today’s newsletter.

While we often vilify this poor element, carbon is the foundation of life. It moves between the Earth and its atmosphere in an elegant cycle—one that has shaped the contours of our planet for billions of years.

For example, phytoplankton floating atop our oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, converting sunlight into chemical energy. When these microscopic organisms die, their remains sink to the seafloor, where they are buried by sediment. Over millions of years, as they approach the earth’s core, these sediments are subjected to intense heat and pressure. This process transforms organic material into hydrocarbons—oil, gas, and coal. In its natural cycle, carbon slowly bubbles back toward the surface, eventually forming reservoirs of energy trapped under impermeable rock.

Humans subsequently mine it and refine it. By extracting and burning these long-buried carbon stores, we are rapidly redistributing carbon from the ground into the air. The result is a sharp increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This greenhouse gas prevents infrared radiation from escaping the atmosphere, disrupting the Earth’s energy balance and causing myriad downstream impacts from sea level rise to desertification.

Carbon itself is not the problem and we don’t have any more of it than we used to. The issue is its misdistribution—an imbalance caused largely by human reliance on fossil fuels. The challenge ahead is not to eliminate carbon but to restore its natural equilibrium.

Paul’s brilliant book doesn’t indignantly look down its nose at carbon. Rather, it is an ode to the element that gives us life. I hope you enjoy this brief glimpse.

In love, include me,
Jeff

P.S.  My new book GOOD STRESS comes out in a mere 9 days. And … the new need friends. If you are inclined to support my work, I would be most grateful. If you pre-order now, you will receive $1,000 worth of bonus goodies including courses from some of my greatest teachers including Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Zach Bush, Gabby Reece, and Schuyler Grant.

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Elements

Excerpted from Carbon: The Book of Life by Paul Hawken

Carbon is the most mysterious element of all. It forms molecular chains that capture energy and retain memory. Only one element in the universe can do that. It provides the structural framework for trees, cells, shells, hormones, organelles, eyelashes, bones, and bat wings. It is the engineer and maker, a molecular agent animating every trace of life. Carbon organizes, assembles, and builds everything everywhere, from reefs to rhinos, plants to planets. The hide, scales, and membranes that enfold and protect life are made of carbon. It enables and informs every aspect of consciousness, a benign sovereign directing the expression of the living world. It can do so because it connects and disconnects, holds fast (coal), releases easily (sugar), is pliant (bamboo), and shimmers in the cornea of a cheetah’s eye.

Carbon is the keystone element of sentience, the caretaker of DNA, and the bard of the mitochondrial battery that releases the sun’s energy, aka starlight, into our bloodstream. Organisms share and swap carbon promiscuously, assembling near-infinite life-forms, one of which is genus Homo, the primate that learned to walk on two legs and master fire. Carbon’s incalculable manifestations make it the currency of abundance, the central bank of evolutionary growth, and the most socially adept entrepreneur in the pantheon of life. It combines with nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen to form amino acids, the starter kit required to assemble a protein. The food for every living being, whether bacteria or elephants, is a carbon compound—fats, fiber, proteins, carbohydrates. When we digest, we break down carbon molecules, rearranging them into blood, genes, hormones, and fuel. Food begins when light meets leaf, transmuting carbon and oxygen into sugars and cellulose.

Those who call carbon a pollutant might want to lay down their word processor. No matter what we believe or betray, carbon-based molecules have the last word. This is a good thing. We are an uncommonly new species on the planet with a rather unusual brain, prone to extraordinary errors of judgment, still getting our feet wet when measured against geological time. Nature, on the other hand, never makes a mistake. It experiments, one of which is us. As long as the sun shines, the flow of carbon on planet Earth moves life toward increasing complexity, abundance, and beauty. Homo sapiens are the only species that blocks, subverts, and breaks the flow of carbon.

The prediction that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would warm Earth’s atmosphere was discovered by a pageant of scientists in the nineteenth century. French chemist Joseph Fourier calculated that the Earth was warmer than it should be given the heat hitting the planet. In 1824, he theorized that gases in the atmosphere must trap heat. In 1837, he predicted that overall levels of warming could change depending on human behavior and activity. Eunice Newton Foote followed in 1856, an amateur scientist and women’s rights activist who did the first experiments with sealed carbonic acid in glass bottles placed in the sun. Her conclusion: the results measured in her glass jars could happen to the planet: “An atmosphere of that gas would give our earth a high temperature.” Her work was ignored for nearly a century because scientific gatherings did not allow women to speak.

Three years later, Irish scientist John Tyndall devised precision experiments that showed that water vapor and carbon dioxide trapped heat remarkably effectively, nearly one thousand times greater than plain dry air. Tyndall was “baffled” by the results of his experiments and repeated them over and again. In 1896, Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius got down to business and, using new data, spent a year calculating by hand what would happen if the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide doubled. His answer: the Earth would be five to six degrees warmer, a number that has held up to this day using the most powerful supercomputer models. Arrhenius believed global warming would proceed slowly over centuries and could be a positive transformation for the world, especially for people living in colder climes. He could not have imagined the exponential growth of carbon emissions in the twentieth century.

Unto itself, carbon is simple. The word’s root is the Indo-European term kerh, “to burn,” which later evolved into the Latin word for coal, carbonem. Carbon has atomic symmetry: six protons, neutrons, and electrons. Four of the six electrons are available for sharing, either carbon-to-carbon or to other atoms, making the element available, loyal, and fickle in its versatility. A bond can be inordinately fixed, as with the lattice structure of diamonds where carbon binds to carbon; or easily broken, as in sugars where carbon bonds to oxygen and hydrogen; or somewhere between, as with sticks and skin. Although it makes up an astonishingly small percentage of the universe, barely one in one hundred thousandths, carbon is found in 90 percent of the molecules in interstellar clouds and 99 percent of the thirty-three million substances on Earth. If carbon were an animate being, we would praise its social intelligence, its gregarious, congenial, and flexible nature, and how easily it makes friends.

Carbon has traveled to and from the atmosphere for billions of years, but not at the rate seen in the past century. Humankind created a new geological era by burning ten million years of fossilized carbon in a few centuries. Youth, the more recent arrivals to the planet, are astounded that preceding generations understood the peril of rising levels of greenhouse gases and did nothing. It was not discussed at home, work, school, or in the media. The cone of silence is receding as extreme weather vexes more people. Yet most of us still say little, go to work, clean the yard, till our fields, drive carpool, go to the factory, buy groceries, and watch our screens. It is not a water-cooler subject, even as the viability of civilization is in question.

Is humanity unfazed or uninterested? The media favors celebrities, scandals, peccadilloes, and sports rather than the demise of oceans, forests, lands, and peoples. That is not a surprise. I glance at those useless stories sometimes. I want to be distracted, too. A steady diet of devastating news craters mental well-being. Our minds are not equipped to deal with the descriptions of what may befall us or others. The extraordinary economic system that had worked so well is destroying its creators. How could that be? It seems implausible. There is no vantage point where one can step back and draw a bead on carbon or climate. Both are invisible. We see weather patterns, not climate. We see people but not the mitochondria that power them. We hear frightening news but rarely a credible way forward or a meaningful path for personal action.

The result is that over 99 percent of humanity does little or nothing about the climate crisis. We are numbed by the science, puzzled by jargon, paralyzed by predictions, confused about what actions to take, stressed as we scramble to care for our family, or simply impoverished, overworked, and tired. Whatever the causes—incapacity, ignorance, or apathy—the prospect of an impending hell does not sell well or inspire.

Can the stock and flow of carbon be tipped in our favor? Yes, if we attend to the entirety of flows—microbes to cells, fungi to plants, farms to kitchens, fields to homes, factories to commerce, and governance to culture. To quote Sebastian Junger, “The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.”

We need to address what is down here, up there: the massive rates of resource extraction, wealth concentration, financial hegemony, political corruption, commodification of food, cultural deracination, human exploitation, and the absurd “tragic science” of economics, which excludes the environment. We owe it to the children to speak to all causes of the crisis, areas that most climate scientists avoid or are hesitant to discuss.