The Rich Roll Podcast - Earth's Hidden Wisdom: Paul Hawken On Reframing Carbon, Consciousness & Why Hope Lies Within Nature's Intelligence

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Paul Hawken is one of the great elder statesmen of environmentalism, a bestselling author, and the mind behind Drawdown and Regeneration.  This conversation explores the biosphere's intrinsic intelligence through the expansive lens of Paul's latest book, Carbon: The Book of Life. We discuss carbon's improbable origins, examine the mycelial networks that function as Earth's connective tissue, and challenge our extractive relationship with nature.  He methodically deconstructs our reductive approaches to climate solutions, highlighting how humility and wonder might be our most powerful tools for planetary stewardship. Paul’s perspective represents not merely a shift in environmental thinking, but a fundamental reimagining of our relationship with the living world. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Eight Sleep: Get $350 off your Pod 5 Ultra w/ code RICHROLL👉eightsleep.com/richrollPique Tea: Get up to 20% OFF plus a FREE rechargeable frother and glass beaker with your first purchase 👉piquelife.com/richrollLMNT: Get a FREE LMNT sample pack for just $5 shipping 👉 drinkLMNT.com/RICHROLLMomentous: 35% OFF your first subscription👉livemomentous.com/richrollOn High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style 👉on.com/richrollGo Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF 👉gobrewing.comProlon/L-Nutra: Get 15% OFF plus a FREE bonus gift 👉 prolonlife.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors   Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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and notice the benefits for yourself. That's drinkag1.com slash Rich Roll. The chances of carbon being created in the solar system in the universe is so incalculably small as it'd be impossible. Life is something that is far more extraordinary than even we could possibly know or possibly understand. And so what do you make of that? How? Paul Hawken is a legend. He's one of the great elder statesmen of environmentalism,

as well as an author, a lecturer, an entrepreneur, who for decades has distinguished himself as one of the truest, leading voices calling for the regeneration of nature and humanity. But Paul isn't just an activist. When it comes to planetary stewardship, he is a precious resource for the many solutions to the existential threat of climate change we currently face.

Paul's latest book and the subject for today's conversation is entitled Carbon. It's been called a spiritual encyclopedia of the earth, and it's his most expansive, humble and hopeful text to date. One which posits that our greatest solutions for planetary healing reside in a deeper appreciation for the complexities of the natural world. I was a teenager and I lived in Nevada City, and you dealt with fire where I lived, up in the Sierras, and where it burned. You look at this wasteland, it's all black, the trees,

everything is just gone. But I do also remember in the spring, the grass is greener than you've ever seen, and you see wildflowers that you've never seen before. I use that today as an analogy. It's easy to see the fire. It's harder to see the birds. You mentioned before we started the podcast,

an interesting definition of the word apocalypse that I hadn't heard before. Can you share that? Yeah, it's a Greek word and it's migrated into English, of course, and other languages. But the core root is still from the Greek, which is apocalypse. And it means revealing, a revealing of what is hidden.

That's what an apocalypse is. We're in an apocalypse right now. And a revealing of what is hidden is a necessary step on the path towards rebirth or rebuilding. So there's like a kernel of like hopefulness in that definition. Like the idea apocalypse, it's a disaster, end of days, all of that. Like this is a reframe on that to say,

like if you wanna be reborn, first all must be revealed as a necessary, you know, step in that process. Yeah, you have to see it. What you do with it is different for every person. The one thing I try to emphasize to people is that you're most effective where you are and that we look to top down solutions

like the Conference of the Parties on climate. There's a Conference of the Parties 16 on nature. There's a Conference of the Parties on land use. Okay, there's three of them every year. And they've been ardently attended to by people, but you have to say the comments of the parties on climate has been a total failure. You know, it's actually getting worse, much worse.

And the problem with those is that those are top-down solutions. And nature and life is not top-down. And I'm not saying it's bottom-up either, but it's certainly not top-down. And so you have these governments, institutions, you're trying to solve something that can't be solved from the top.

I'm not saying what people are doing or their sincerity or their care. I'm certainly not. I'm just saying, yeah, but it doesn't work. And it's obvious that it doesn't work. On some level, in order to solve this problem, we need regulatory shifts. We need our laws to change. We need our entire system of capitalism

to be kind of reformed in order to, you know, find a more sustainable regenerative way of living on this planet and, you know, sharing this one home that we have. But essentially what you're saying is that's also a recipe for us as individuals to kind of abdicate our own personal responsibility because we're looking to the top to solve it for us

as opposed to shouldering, maybe burden is the wrong word, but the responsibility of like, what can we all do now from a bottom up perspective? And when I look at your work, kind of the arc of the last couple of books, drawdown, regeneration. Drawdown is like, okay, how are we gonna,

like get into the nuts and bolts of like, drawing down carbon regeneration, more of a rebirth. How can we restore this planet? And this latest work, carbon, is your most expansive perspective. It's almost like it's a more enlightened call to action to say in a very kind of poetic and encouraging and hopeful tone to say like the solutions cannot all be

extracted from new technology or from these processes about like how to, you know, kind of sequester carbon. The real answer lies in reframing our relationship to all living things such that it can be symbiotic. And you approach this from a perspective that feels somewhat analogous or familiar to the way you've all know a Harari looks at culture or societies

or civilization or history, but you're just doing it with respect to like all life, all life forms, going all the way back to like, what is carbon and where does it come from? And how does it, you know, how did it originally arrive on planet earth? And what does it mean? Like, it's just, you know, to say it's a 10,000 foot view

is to understate, like you're, you know, to say it's a 10,000 foot view is to understate like you're, you know, you're outside the solar system looking in on, you know, this shiny blue dot and trying to make sense of it altogether, is that accurate? It's very accurate. And it arose from two different directions or sources. The first one really is the climate movement narrative. There was, there's a narrative.

It's been around for decades and it's based on fear, threat, reduction, less, blaming. You know, and, and when it hasn't worked then it's just been amped up, you know, you know, and when it hasn't worked, then it's just been amped up, you know, you know, extinction rebellion, you know, for example, as a name of an NGO that's gone to schools in the UK and told children it's game over. I mean, that's some narrative. And I would say that narrative has completely failed. If we hired an ad agency decades ago and said,

we need everybody in the world to understand this is a threat to civilization and to our future and to your children's children's future. And we need to get together and come together and figure out what to do about it because we know the cause. Well, they said, got it. And what we're gonna do is scare the shit out of people.

And you'd fire that agency. Said, that's not selling the product. That is not bringing people in. That, now I'm not, again, saying like, people have become involved, they are involved, they're doing great work, but less than 1% of the world's population, a fraction of 1% does anything every day about climate.

So how could that be? And so that's one source about, we're using carbon as an object, as a thing, like a bad boy, a culprit, we've got to do this question, stop emitting it and carbon neutrality, those kinds of terms, net zero and net zero what? And well, in the implication is net zero carbon emissions, right?

And so by doing that, we've objectified it, right? This is a thing over there. It's a very male, left brain oriented, we're gonna solve this problem, we're gonna fix it, here's the problem, this is what we're gonna do, which can be done. But that thinking of objectification of any aspect of the world, whether it's people or

plants or creatures or places, is the mentality that's caused the problem. We've objectified the living world and we've been selling off the living world to the highest bidder for 500 years. And we wonder why biodiversity is plummeting. That's why. So to me, what is the narrative that makes sense? The narrative that makes sense to me isn't one where everybody gets it in the same way. Oh, I got the story.

You got the story? Yeah, I got it. No, it's not a single story, but it arises from human need, from human delight, from human wonder, from human delight, from human wonder, from human curiosity. And what I'm trying to suggest in the book and so forth is ways to look at plants, at creatures, at butterflies, you know, and mycelia, at other people, other cultures in a way that promotes a sense of wonder, a sense of awe, a sense of respect, a sense of, oh my gosh, who knew?

You know? Yeah, the more you know, the less you know, right? Exactly. Like that's sort of what the book's theme. But I think that when you have that experience, it changes you. When you see the world differently, you are a different person.

There's no separation from that awareness and that consciousness and then what you become aware of in a way you never did, you never understood. And so I do give a few anecdotes in the book about that happened for me, but it's available to everyone regardless of age or tenure or job or culture or nothing. And that is the source of regeneration on earth. Not from people meeting in Paris or Washington DC or Nairobi and having these big meetings and go on for days and days and coming out with something that is a new declaration.

It won't work. So rather than lambasting people for making bad decisions and conferences congregated to create policy, the solution is inspiring awe and wonder in the average everyday person by demonstrating just how magnificent and complex and just astronomically mind blowing this biosphere actually is, right?

It's like a David Attenborough kind of like way in to make us feel like we're not this thing that is existing on the outside of this place that we live, but actually we are integral to it and can be part of the solution by reframing our relationship with it. Yes, I would say,

but let's not do it like David Attenborough, because when you see, and he's a beautiful human being, and his films, the BBC stuff is crazy good, except it's a nature you will never see. Never in your life, no matter what you do. You don't have enough drones and cameras.

And so that actually separates us from the natural world. We can appreciate it. I do, I love to watch it, love to listen to him, And so that actually separates us from the natural world. We can appreciate it. I do, I love to watch it, love to listen to him, but it doesn't, I don't feel closer to nature when I see that I'm in awe, for sure. And that's a good thing. But so we have to think about things that are more, like down to earth, I guess,

and a ways of see the world, was the butterfly or I give an example of the book about a scientist who, for whatever curiosity, whatever reason, wanted to know how many roots were on a seed of rye. One seed was a grass seed, of course. And so I don't know how he did it, probably with electron microscopes and so forth,

but I mean, he counted 14 million roots. He and his students, 14 million roots on one seed that big. Okay, so what? Well, each of those seeds has a hyphae at the end, it's connected to mycelia. And those mycelia and hyphae and the plant are actually in a conversation. They're doing transactions. And sugar is coming from the rye seed,

which is making it from, you know, CO2 and sunlight and make it into glucose. And the mycelia needs that. That's food for it. It's down below. It's got phosphorus, nitrogen, you know, potassium, zinc, selenium. And the plant is saying, I need this. And the mycelia somehow is saying,

phosphorus, it's over there. Those people over there beneath whatever have phosphorus and it comes in and they exchange it. Okay, that's from one seed of grass. So what that teaches me is that we don't know where we live. And I say that respectfully, who could know just that one fact, that one scenario, like what else don't we know? But when you start to go into nature and see things where you are hear things, or you can watch them,

you can read them, you can hear them from somebody you trust, you know, but you start to see nature in a completely different way. And the other example I gave, I live in a Redwood country, have about 20 Redwoods between myself and the carport. And I've been walking back and forth for years. And I love the redwoods. And then I read the work of many botanists,

particularly the Italians. I'll do this amazing analysis of plant perception, plant intelligence. And they pointed out the plants have 20 senses, we have five. And one of the senses plants have is kind of a chars-scuro thing all over on their branches and the bark and leaves

where they can see movement. They can see like if you were moving past, it's just sort of fuzzy black and white, they see that, the tree sees that. So I realized I was writing, reading all this sort of stuff. And then I walked out from my home, the house, and then I'm walking by these trees. And I realized they're noticing me and I realize they're noticing me

and I haven't been noticing them. And I've never gone back. And if anyone was gonna notice them, it would have been you. Exactly. You're the guy. Yeah, yeah, you would think. And now I feel like I feel their presence.

I really do, cause I know they have presence. It's not, this is science. This isn't belief and you know, so again, it's that possibility of us seeing the living world and we are living world too. So I don't want to say, okay, it's nature over there and there's people. See, it allows us to see people in a different way

with a kind of a sense of compassion, that maybe we don't have, we haven't touched upon that ourselves. We've been so busy and so, in a sense, troubled by the world. And so that is the source of the, that's where it starts. It starts with one person and who knows what that one person

does and so forth. But you look at the, like the biographies of like, Gandhi, and you look and say when he was in South Africa as a solicitor and he basically presided over this meeting of people of color to object to the Black Act, which was gonna make them register and carry, dang, they had to register, right? And this meeting got together in the theater

that was owned by a Jewish couple, the only theater that would let them meet in Durban, and said, everybody decided they're gonna get arrested. They're gonna be objectors. They will not do it, okay? And then Gandhi's going home thinking, oh shoot, I'm a little skinny brown solicitor in South Africa and I'll be disbarred if I'm arrested.

You know that, you know that. Well, why did he get arrested? He did. And when he got arrested, he carried in this thing, paper written by Thoreau called, we all know that one. Leaves of grass. No, not leaves of grass. On Walden?

No. Which one? On civil disobedience. Oh, civil disobedience, yeah. I should have known that. But the famous, what we know about that is Thoreau never named it. No one knows where the name came from.

They think maybe his sister, you know, but they're not sure. But that he wrote the essay because he objected to the poll tax, which is 25 cents at that time, was a lot of money. And so it disenfranchised people who couldn't pay it, certainly black people as well. I mean, anybody who didn't have the money,

he objected to it, he was arrested and he went to jail. And his sister, Sophie, took him hot chocolate and he got out the next day, okay. And he wrote that essay. So that's one person not wanting to pay the poll tax or writing an essay. And there is Gandhi in South Africa. And then that's the man who led the salt march

that got rid of the Raj in India. So I'm telling that story because it's possible to understand what one person can do and even they don't understand it in real time. So we tend to minimize the effect of a single individual. Not true, not true. It's the other way around. We look at power lies of the president

and think, okay, that's powerful. That's not powerful, that's weak. Couldn't be weaker. We're all part of this complex super organism. I love this stuff about the trees and the mycelium. I've read about old growth trees and the root systems and how they communicate with each other and how they make basically decisions

about how resources are gonna be allocated amongst the forest and how the mycelium is the connective tissue. It's almost like the nervous system amongst that to keep everything in some version of homeostasis. Like it's so complicated and rich and robust and beautiful. And to your point of like Attenborough versus like what's underneath our feet, right?

Like the magic is here. And the real thesis of the book is like the answers that we're seeking, like in the way that regeneration was very much saying like, we don't need to pioneer all these new technological systems. We actually have all of this stuff right now that could be solving these problems.

We just lack the political capital or whatever it is to like scale them up. You're taking it a further step and saying, actually, yeah, that stuff's great, but maybe we don't need any of that because it's right underneath your feet. And it's about reframing your relationship. I would say the two,

well, I'd say the two are each- I mean, they complement each other. Yeah, I mean, they're a stair step. Drawdown was very much about carbon and sequestration, bring it back home and stop emitting it, okay? And this is the way you do it. And we can talk about that if you want. Regeneration, I knew I was gonna write before carbon.

I knew it. And so it wasn't like, okay, now what am I gonna do? I knew that because I feel like, and you're a writer and you author books, and one thing is you have to stay in your lane in your book. If you get out of your lane, the book is, you know, toss it like, I didn't give you permission

to go off on the tangent. I'm reading the book because you said, this is what you're gonna write about. And so, but I knew that in a sense, I was creating the book, which is now called Solutionism. The idea that, okay, we're gonna fix it. If you do this, this happens and everything's better. And I go, it's not really true.

And so with regeneration, it was like every aspect of the economy today is as we know, extractive, okay? And we're killing where we live. It's a mortality crisis, really. Death of the oceans, where, you know, it's a mortality crisis, you know, really, death of the oceans, death of big fish, death of forest, death of land, death of insects, death of pollinators, you just check, check, check, check, check, check, okay.

And so what I was saying then is like, commerce, business and governments can see the end of the road that they're on, they're on this road. And now you can see it, that's called degeneration. It was degeneration before they saw it, but I mean, now they can see it. You can't go much further. We cannot go much further.

So what do we do? Well, you pivot. Can't go that way. What's the pivot? It's to regeneration. Now, what do we do? How do we create more life by providing the goods and services that people need in order to live a good life?

And that's a good question. I don't have the answers to all that, but I do have the question. And I think everybody's asking that question more, not everybody, more and more people are asking that question for on behalf of everybody, which is, well, how can we stay here on the earth in a way that actually creates more life

for succeeding generations as opposed to we've done the opposite, which is to take more life away. And so that's drawn on then as regeneration. So, carbon, the book of life is really about, in a sense, how do we connect ourselves to the living world in such a way that actually inspires us and the people around us.

And not because we're trying to inspire people, but because you walk out- It's intrinsic. Past the 20 redwood trees and going, holy, oh my God, I didn't know I lived here. Now I do. And it's a joy. That's, it's not guilt.

It's not something that rests heavily upon your shoulders. We have enough of that already. It's something that actually uplifts you. And it's everywhere. I talk about the owl butterfly in Mexico, you know, and it's a butterfly seven inches big and it comes out of dusk, you know, so it won't be predated. But you look at that owl butterfly or go look it up on Google image and so forth and it's like, what? It has two eye spots and you look exactly, exactly like the eyes of an owl.

I mean, okay, so that is to keep predation away from it. So a bird looking or a bat looking, well, I'm out of here. That's an owl, right? Then how did it get there? You and I, with the best artistic equipment, couldn't draw a picture of an ally as good as the butterfly did. Now, how, where did it come from? And if you read the science, it says,

well, it's genetics, pass on genetics. Okay, great. Where did the image come from? Didn't tell you anything about how a butterfly in Mexico created two wings that look exactly like the eye of an owl to protect itself. So this is also the world we live in, which is like utter mystery of the beauty and the capacity of species. And we're one of them to adapt, to change, to innovate and to create beauty

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That is a soft win we're celebrating. To explore your own soft wins and check out the new Cloud Surfer 2, head to on.com slash richroll. There's a humility that you have to have to appreciate those things. And I think humans, we wanna feel ourselves to be masters of the universe

and we can solve all these problems. And there's a kind of egoistic piece to that, like a hubris that these problems can be solved by applying kind of the scientific methodology that we use to make sense of the universe, but that's by definition reductive. It's sort of like, here's a problem and we can identify the variables, isolate them and solve it.

That applies to decarbonization. It's the same approach with medicine, looking at the human body and saying, well, here's a symptom and we're gonna throw this pharmaceutical at it, it's gonna resolve that symptom and the problem goes away without the humble appreciation for the complexity of the holistic organism.

Like the same principles apply planetarily. And you're saying like, look, we have to appreciate this complexity, the beauty with a level of humility. And we can't continue to have this reductive approach of thinking like, if we solve this problem, we're good, while we're still, you know, pursuing this extractive relationship

with the planet at large. Absolutely. And the pharmaceutical example is really good actually, because if you see an advertisement on TV for a pharmaceutical, by law, they have to tell you all the side effects and dangers. And sometimes it goes on and on and on. I mean, it's comedic at this point.

It is, that's what I mean. I said, you have to start laughing going, you're gonna swallow that? Okay, we don't have to do that with our climate solutions or even our solutions. We have a world that's doing this and doing this. What about the side effects of doing that? We don't talk about it.

It's not known to us, at least when you take a drug, it's known and you know that it may absolutely, it may do something for you, believe this, do that, and you know that it may absolutely, it may do something for you, believe this, do that, whatever, but man, you better watch out because a whole bunch of other things could happen to your body. Well, the same thing about the current system, whether it wants to just create more damage without talking about it or reconciling its actions with the effect, or it's companies that are doing things that they think are good,

in a sense of this is going to help this, like direct air capture. There's a whole world out there of financiers and engineers and big companies that are going to suck air from the atmosphere and take out the carbon, liquefy it and put it in geological formations and say, that's a solution. And you're even seeing now the IPCC,

the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change saying, we can't get there from here unless we do that. And you don't have to be educated past ninth grade science, maybe seventh grade science to know that actually that'll never work ever. It's about physics. It's not about belief. And that is that the gas, the CO2,

what's up in the atmosphere is called entropy. In other words, you burn something and that's kind of its ash as well, which is the gas, CO2. The carbon was in the wood or in the coal or in the oil or in the natural gas, right? And you burned it as combined with oxygen and CO2 and goes up there. We know how CO2 reflects infrared radiation back down when it's in the air and we get a warmer climate. Well, direct air capture is these huge machines gigantic and use amazing

amounts of energy. They say, well, we're going to use renewable energy to do this. Okay. Renewable is we'll talk about that. But I mean, the fact is it takes energy to take this energy out. So you're using entropy to cure entropy. It will never ever work. And so, and yet we're pouring billions of dollars into this. And we talk about hope, that's hopium. That's just ridiculous. And I'm not trying to be a smart ass. I'm just trying to say, do the math, you know,

and stop buffaloing or convincing us that we can just live the way we're going to live far into the future. And we're gonna have these high tech bros out there figuring out how to take the carbon back out of the air that we're emitting as fast as possible. Yeah, maybe a more relatable example of that is just electric vehicles.

Like these are a good thing. We're not putting emissions into the atmosphere in the form of exhaust as we always have, but fundamentally it's still an extractive technology. We have to power these batteries up. The source of that power depends upon where you live, but it's not great. And we still have to create these batteries, which are extractive in terms of how we have to strip mine

for these minerals, et cetera. So it's a step, it's a stop gap, but it's not a solution that is inherently regenerative in any way, right? So that's the real problem that you're getting at. And maybe to kind of like take a step back here, you talk a lot about like language, nounism, verbiage, the way we talk about the problem.

But the book really begins with like how we talk about carbon itself. Like we think we know what it is. Carbon's bad in the atmosphere. We need to remove it, but like it's also the building block of life. And do we really understand what this is, where it comes from, why it's important

and what it represents? Like you start off with just kind of blowing our minds with like the origins of carbon itself and reframe like how we should actually properly think about this. Yeah, I had to do that myself. Like where did it come from? And what does it do?

And we know there's no other element like it in chains. It has memory and stores energy. Okay. So carbon does that, salt doesn't do that, foster doesn't do that, helium doesn't do that. Okay. But what we know is that its ubiquity is astonishing. And the best way to think of carbon is a flow,

like water, like a river, or the wind actually is a flow. It's the only way to understand it in terms of its presence and what it does and where it is. Every cell and you have 32, 34, 36 trillion cells, in your body, every single cell has 1.2 trillion atoms of carbon. Okay, well- what's it? It's too many.

Our brains can't process that. No, you can't handle it. It's 44 octillion. That's the number, by the way. But it's- I don't know what that means. Yes, no one else says either, including me. But the point being is what is the carbon doing in that cell?

And well, it's chemistry. The same that you see outside of the cell. And so it's chemistry, the same that you see outside the cell. And so it's basically a chemistry experiment called the cell, you know, and eukaryotic cell. And so without carbon, there's no such thing. But everywhere we look in the world, both, you know, living and actually just, you know, geologic carbon's there. And in terms of the earth itself,

the flow of carbon is astonishing and beautiful. And, but it's abstract, that's an abstraction. But what I'm trying to do is take it away from its objectification as it's a thing, and we just figured's a thing, and we just figured out this thing, we're gonna fix it. But actually that way of thinking has caused, as I said, caused the problem.

We're gonna fix things, no, we're not. We're gonna live with things in a way that is supportive. You have this beautiful line in the book speaking to the poetry of all of this. Carbon is presented as the narrator of life, the courier of existence, and the lattice that permeates cultures and organisms. I've never thought about carbon in that way.

Right, yeah. And the origins of carbon itself, can you talk a little bit about that? Well, sure, yeah, because it was commonly thought, I think until the 40s or 50s, that all the elements on earth came from the Big Bang, which is 13.8 billion years ago. And Fred Hoyle, who is an astronomer in the UK,

coined the term Big Bang, because he thought it was just BS. He said the idea that everything that we have all the elements and so forth, were created in a millisecond from an explosion, 13.8 billion years ago, he said that was ridiculous. And he was proven right. And so most of the elements,

we didn't know where they came from. They did not come from the Big Bang, only hydrogen and helium did. But nobody knew where carbon came from. And just to get into chemistry, I mean, there's, you know, in hydrogen, you know, there's, hydrogen makes helium, that's fusion. That's the sun, okay?

And there's an extra neutron. That neutron creates an extraordinary amount of energy, you know, when they come together. And that's why we have sunlight and heat and warmth. But what Hoyle wanted to know is, okay, but yeah, great. But then where did carbon come from? Because you would think if you count the protons and neutrons and electrons, you would think, well, three times helium is carbon, three times four, which is 12.

And so carbon is 666 and helium is 222 and in terms of particles. And that was accepted, except what physicists discovered is that two helium can't make a carbon because of what's called resonance or vibration or the gradients. They just can't mix into the other. They can't form, they can't fuse into carbon.

So that was accepted, but no one knew where carbon came from. And they looked into space because you have these beautiful spectrometers, they can look out into space and then deduce what they're seeing by color, by the vibration of what's out there. And nobody could find carbon that way either,

is in our bodies, is in your cells, you know. And so Hoyle came up with the theory and it was basically when the stars are dying, they become giant red stars. And in that moment, beryllium, which is two helium molecules can capture another helium molecule. And that becomes C12, that becomes carbon, right? But the thing is it's a trillionth of a trillionth

of a second that happens every 2,500 times beryllium is made. So you do the math on that one. It's like, you give me a kidding. And yet carbon is ubiquitous. It's in 99% of everything on one. It's like, you're kidding me. And yet carbon is ubiquitous. It's in 99% of everything on earth. It's in every living. Well, the math didn't make sense. You know, like how could, and yet,

Hoyle insisted that was true. And he went to Caltech and he gave a talk about it. And he was almost divided on stage. People, the physicists were going, who invited him? What's he saying? This is, you know, and one scientist said, this is the most outrageous prediction

ever made by a scientist. It means it's the worst. And, but they, he convinced people to test it. And so they got a spectrometer to bomb nitrogen with protons and strip away and see if they could form the C12 that's everywhere in the world. And they did.

Basically recreating, you know, what would happen out in, you know, the outer stellar galaxy to see if you could create the formation of carbon. It's astonishing that, you know, the universe conspired to create carbon in of carbon. It's astonishing that the universe conspired to create carbon in the first place. It's this unlikely event that can only occur under very specific circumstances.

Yes, and to this day, really world renowned physicists in Cambridge and Oxford and other universities say, like the chances of carbon being created in the solar system, in any system, in the universe, is so incalculably small as it'd be impossible. And yet it's robust here on planet earth. Yeah. And so what do you make of that?

Like, what do you infer from that? Ah, like, you know, in other words, the scientists can go all the way to that point, you know, of creation and describe it. And they know the resonances and the gradients and all the things that would have to be just right in order for that one single atom to be created. Okay, got that.

But they can't explain the ubiquity and how much of it is in the universe or that it exists at all. And they accept it, they know that, but they can't really explain how all the things came together. It's just the number, you know, 44 artillion is beyond that number.

So how, who, where, what, you know, the very fact that we don't know should give us some actually pleasure that life is something that is far more extraordinary than even we could possibly know or possibly understand. And yet there are trillions upon trillions of stars out there, numbers we can't fathom. I would have to imagine there are other planets

that have the capacity to host carbon-based life. Absolutely. And it's hard for us to scope the universe, how big it is, but talking about giant red stars, that's what our sun's gonna do. As it dies, it gets bigger and bigger and then it explodes into a supernova. 86,000 suns explode into supernovae every single day in the universe.

So now we can see the universe as actually kind of a garden or maybe that's not the right word, but you know, it's a- A generative force. It's generative, yeah. And it's not just there like frozen, you know, in the Hubble telescope, you know, it's like, it's active when you look at it

from that point of view, and it's generating these super, you know, the supernovae and then these clouds are huge and they float around for a hundred million years and inside they're protected from cosmic rays and they're creating elements inside these clouds. I mean, it's hard to look at it from that point of view and not say, is this alive?

You could say, describe it physically. It's all physical, but part of you has to say, really, it's like, is that all it is? It's just physics? So that's what Hoyle said. You can't explain it with physics enough sufficiently. Well, what is true for the macro is true for the micro. And the same example that we were discussing about,

how medicine treats the physical body and how we sort of diagnose the planet, the similarities with that. The idea that the galaxy would operate as this massive super organism that is generative is true. And yet at the very kind of micro organism level at the cellular level, these same things are happening at the, you know, all the way from the subatomic

all the way to the galactic, universal or whatever. And this book is sort of like, okay, here's carbon, head explodes. Now let's talk about plants, let's talk about animals, insects, fungi, food, farms, you kind of canvas all of these things. But the fungi to me feels like the most interesting,

you kind of call it the dark, it's sort of the dark energy of, you know, planetary life because we know so little about it. And you have these crazy numbers about like, I mean, we only, I think we only have identified like 10% of the fungal species that actually exists. Like we're just at the beginning of understanding what it even is, let alone the crucial role that it's playing

with respect to our biosphere. It's interesting when I wrote that chapter, I called it the Queendom. There's five kingdoms and one of them is fungi. And the reason I called it the Queendom is because without that Queendom or whatever you wanna call it, there wouldn't be the other four kingdoms, okay?

That's the mother, okay? And so when Merlin Sheldrake, who wrote the Tang of Life, a beautiful, beautiful book about fungi. Is it fungi? I always say fungi. It's fungi, it doesn't matter. Fungi, fungal. Keep going, sorry.

Yeah, but anyway, he read the chapter for me and then he said, but I wouldn't call it queendom. I said, well, why not? I kind of love it. And he said, well, there's too much royalty in there already. You can't help but stratify it. Yeah.

Even when you're trying to give it the feminine gender. He's English. And so we agreed on kindom, which is it's the kin, dumb. So talk a little bit more about the role that it plays that we might not. We don't fully know. We just know what I explained earlier about basically connecting to the root systems

of every plant, almost everywhere. Though not quite every plant, but there's some exceptions, but virtually every plant on earth. And then, and Toby Kears who's doing really amazing science in Amsterdam, she's actually from the Bay Area, but they're now able to video the process of mycelium. Notice what's going on in there.

And what you see is two things. You can hear it, there's a clicking sound. It's like making clicking sounds. And then it's transporting nutrients. But when you look at it though, you would think, okay, it's like a highway, it's going along. No, it's going in opposite directions in the same vessel,

the same mycelia. Things are going opposite directions. Why? Well- Like arteries and veins at the same time in one vessel. Yeah, in one vessel, because they must be encoded in some way for this nitrogen to go here and this phosphorus go there

and to that route into this plant. I mean, it's like a stock exchange or a marketplace or I mean, except the dimension of it in terms of numbers is so fantastic and so unbelievable. So yeah, and those clicking sounds, Adam Adamasky at the Royal Society in London has been recording them for years. And what he says is that actually they're making words.

There's patterns, pattern recognition, and they're repeating these things, okay? He went on to say, and some psychologists disagree, so I want to be really clear about that, but he went on to say, yeah, but they're stringing these words together in sentences, what we call sentences, but he said, and those sentences

as complex as Indo-European languages. So let's step back and say he's not right, but he's not wrong. That is to say, there's something going on there. You have to just really think, well, wow, this is one crazy organism in terms of its capabilities and what's going on down there. And the honest answer is we don't know.

We do know molecularly what's being transported in terms of nutrients that are being fed to the plants. And the plants are demanding them, by the way. They're saying, I want this, I want this, I want that. It's not just here, I got nitrogen, that's all you're gonna get. I mean, the mycelia actually are mapping out the territory knowing where the rich in phosphorus or rich in this where I can get selenium, But I mean, the mycelia actually are mapping out the territory, knowing whether it's rich

in phosphorus or rich in this, or where I can get selenium, which is not as so common as a mineral in soils. And then going right to the source or that requester, which is another plant somewhere, and doing the transaction and getting carbohydrates. and carbon hydrates. So we do know that. And we know that these fungal, would you call them, organisms can be gigantic. One can be acres and acres and acres and acres, 50 acres can be one species, one organism. You talk about the Oregon national forest

where I think it's like a four square miles of like fungal beds, I don't know what you call them that have been there for thousands of years. One species. One species. This idea that there's such a, you know, on first inspection, like a rudimentary life form. And yet the complexity of the communication

and the functionality of this is mind boggling. Like, how is that even happening? Well, and the importance of it because we have basically engaged in an agricultural system that effectively destroys the fungi in the soil. I mean, it's just been an afterthought, right? Like we just don't really think about it or consider it as important.

It's just these weird things that sprout up when it rains. Well, yeah, that's the seed, that's the fruit of the fungi. But the mycelia, you know, are destroyed by plowing, they're destroyed by chemical fertilizer, they're destroyed by herbicides. And so, but the roots of a plant depend on this relationship in order to be nutrient dense.

Now it's for the food itself to be the most nutritious as possible. And so what we're doing is by putting an NPK, nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus in a chemical form and top dressing the soil with it, we get tremendous production. The plants are weak, tend to get infested. You keep doing that, the soil dies.

We have to put herbicides because weeds then colonize sick soil. And we have glyphosate. And so when I have pests like glyphosate, we have sick plants and so forth that are not nutrient dense, right? And all because we really destroyed the source of life, which is soil.

And so in the book, I talk about, you know, dark earth for sure. And, but soil is not to be seen as a medium just because we can take a bag or something and pour it into a pot and grow something. We think it's just a medium, but in the ground it's actually an organism. It's one of the most complex.

It's the biggest organism on earth is the soil and it's alive and it makes sounds and you can hear it if you stick microphones down there and listen to it. And that life is what creates life, right? All life comes from the soil, no place else. And so that's why every single culture on earth that we know of has called the earth mother, mother.

Always, no one said father earth, because everyone knew that life came from the earth, from the female. And we're the one who, the male, you know, basically, you know, Fritz Haber, the male, basically, you know, Fritz Haber, the German chemist, invented a way to bypass all that. And that's the agriculture that we have today,

which is, you know, polluting rivers and ocean that is killing the soil, that is producing tremendously greater amounts of food in terms of corn, sorry, but so much so that we take 35% of the corn, we grow and put it into gas tanks as ethanol. And then another, I forget, 70% of what's left goes to animals for CAFOs, confined area feeding operations.

So we're growing all this corn and soy in a very, very damaging way. The second highest rate of cancer in the United States is Iowa, not surprised, you know, because of the chemical use. It's spraying. Yeah, it's spraying. And so, but these are all things that we can change

and are changing and that will produce more food, healthier food, a healthier environment, healthier farmers, more resilient systems, that aren't so subject to disruption from heat and water. The problem with global warming is that water is too much water, too little, too much heat or too much cold. I mean, it starts to whipsaw the jet stream up and down. So you get these strange anomalous things

that were, that are difficult for farmers to deal with. I mean, either flood the fields or kill the crops, whether it's too much water, too little. And so one of the things that has to be done is to look at agriculture because if we don't have food, that's game over. And so how can we create systems that are resilient? Because we all have to be resilient going into these next decades, given the vagaries of a heating planet and the effects and impacts it's going to have on water, rivers, streams, deserts, fields, crops, oceans, et cetera.

You mentioned that things are changing and I wanna press you on that a little bit. It feels to me like, yes, there is progress in certain pockets, but short of overhauling our system such that it's premised upon an appreciation for the long-term incentives of restoring our soil and creating regenerative systems and doing all the things that you're talking about,

we're stuck in a paradigm that prioritizes the short-term benefits and incentives. Like we're set up to be extractive, all of the incentives of our system, basically emphasize that. And unless we blow up the system and create a new one, like how are we gonna get out of this, you know, kind of, or a Boris where we're just,

we're eating our tail, right? Like we're never going to transcend this unless we reach some kind of, you know, tipping point, no, you know, threshold where we can't step back from, where we're actually grokking the fact that, you know, we're not gonna be able to grow food anymore and kind of like a interstellar situation.

I don't know, like it's hard for me to hold on to that level of hopefulness that you seem to inhabit. Two things there, when I was talking to an indigenous person once and saying, we did it, we did it. And he looked at me in the eye and said, who's we? Good question. Because the rhetoric around what's going on is as if everybody thought did assumed knew what we're talking about

and or was causative that is was the cause or was it and so I think we have to talk about the state of the world and the actors who seem to be completely oblivious to where we live and what's going on from their actions, you know, corporate CEOs, companies, the stock market, capitalism, and politicians who enfranchise that and so, okay, we can be aware of that and so forth. But we really want to talk about it in a different way. And you talked about earlier about language and the language we have inherited as English, as students, as in a culture. And English in really all the European languages

are very much about nouns, German very much so, English the most so, because it's a kind of a language that just took words from five or six different languages. But the words that came from the enlightenment, that's about naming things. And we are very good about naming. To name something separates it. It's a this and not a that.

That's what science does. And then let's study this because it's different than the that. And okay, great science. But the indigenous languages and I pointed them because their cultures go back, now that I say in Australia over a hundred thousand years, but certainly 60,000 for sure.

And so how do they manage to stay there for all that time? And if you look at those languages, there are languages that are about verbs, the verbs, because verbs are relational. They're about relation. They're about connection. They're about never losing that in our parlance and how we speak to each other or about the world in a way that separates us or separates you or separates us from each other or from the world that supports us, our mother.

And so I think what you're seeing right now is a coming together of that intelligence and that wisdom with Western science. And there's amazing discoveries and understandings that are emerging from that. And you talk about hope. I mean, one of the things that I love right now is that science is just exploding with observations and tests and understanding of the world is completely different than what we were taught. What would be an example of that?

I gave you some about roots, about plants, about butterflies, about, I'll give you more, just like what's going on there. What we're discovering is what we don't know. That's what's so wonderful about it is that we don't know as opposed to, oh, we know this is true, this is true, this is true. That creates the openness.

That's empirical science. All those discoveries like, holy shit, like we only are touching the surface of this, there's so much more to discover. And therein lies that humility that can put you on a different trajectory in your exploration. Traditional ecological knowledge really always looks at life as a complex system and it is.

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that you talk about, but a culture that would name all of the trees based upon the sound that the branches would make at sunset in October, right? So you're somebody who's keyed in to nature, you know, probably more than anybody I know, and you walk past the redwoods without really paying too much attention, these people are taking it to a whole other level, right?

They did. But like, are we gonna do that? Like if Paul Hawken walks past his redwoods on the way to the carport and has to remind himself to pay attention, where's the hope for the rest of us? The native Canadians were referred to as a Mic-Mac. And what they did was extraordinary,

which they can name the sound the tree was making, not the sound the wind was making. not the sound the wind was making. We have words for that. Right, but the tree rustling when the wind blows that what the branch is making. The tree had a specific sound, like we have a sound, our voices have a specific sound, you know, you can close your eyes, oh, that's rich,

or you know, you have a very distinctive sound. And these trees did too. But the thing about it was they could hear it, but they can name it. They could give it a specific name, right? And remember the name. That was the name of the tree that sound made in October, you know, and every year.

And so they could go back five years later, 10 years later and listen to the sound and know that the tree had suffered or changed or was good was doing good. That was they could tell the condition of the tree from the sound and they didn't write it down. They remembered the name of the sound. With our million words in English,

we have no such word for the sound a tree makes. The tree makes. You can say softening, that's the sound the wind makes. So what do we get from that? Just like this extraordinary understanding of the living world, if the living world is all you have, you don't have anything else. Nothing's being imported.

There is no, nobody's going to rescue you, save you. You become very have anything else. Nothing's being imported. There is no, nobody's gonna rescue you, save you. You become very, very aware. And that awareness, I think is, again, I use the word exploding, it's probably the wrong word, but just is burgeoning all over the world from the interaction between Western scientists and traditional knowledge holders in indigenous cultures around the world.

And it's just marvelous and beautiful traditional knowledge holders in indigenous cultures around the world. And it's just marvelous and beautiful to see that exploration, the understandings that are arising. And again, what is arising is like how much we don't know. And that's a really wonderful thing because, you know, it's discovery, it's delight, it's possibility. And I just think if people can imagine such a thing, because it's true that there is a world emerging,

despite the best efforts of greed, hate and delusion, corporations and profit-making and extractive economies, I think it's important for us to know that, to be aware of what's happening and how ridiculous it is in terms of our stewardship of the earth. But at the same time, something's happening. Right. Yeah. Beauty persists with a resilience that is remarkable.

And to your point around awareness, like it proves the adage that, you know, on some level, like all the answers reside in, you know, our capacity to develop our awareness, to like be present, whether it's the nature of our own minds or what's happening right beneath our feet by slowing down and actually like being present and attuning our focus and our attention

to things we often overlooked. That's where there's all this mystery to be explored. Like in meditation, when a thought pops up, where did that thought come from? I didn't think that thought, it simply arose. And then what happens when it vanishes? Where does it go? And where is all of this happening?

Like, you know, like these, these are, you know, more existential questions of, of, of, of, you know, what it means to be alive and be a conscious being apply in the same way to all of the unseen things that are happening all around us all the time. I have this experience. I've only been invited once to talk to writers as a writer, a conference, you know,

they have writers conferences. And I described something there which I hadn't ever said aloud before, but sometimes when I'm writing, I'll write a couple of paragraphs and fiction writers often write a thousand words or something, then go look the next day and see if it, you know, is any good.

I write a couple of paragraphs and go right back to the top and edit it. I'm going in like this all the way down through. I kind of do that too. It's not a recommended approach. No, it's not, but I do it. But there's times when I go back to the top and I start to read it and going,

I don't know, I didn't write that. I have no recollection of writing that or having those thoughts. So, it doesn't make me special. In fact, it's the other way around. It just makes me observant or aware that when you're writing, it's not just disgorging what you think and what you believe or what you've read or what you have learned. There's something else going on or it's possible.

Certainly that's true for poets, we know that. But great literature, I don't know, I don't talk to that many writers about the process, but it's definitely not a deductive, you know, deliberate process, it's something different. I deductive on deliberate and process. It's something different. Yeah, it's a download from the unified field of consciousness Paul.

Thank you. Now I know. And yet, you know, you could take credit for having- Sat there. Yeah, sat there and given expression to it. But it is interesting. Like this is a very different book. Like the last two books were these big books

that were almost as much manuals as they were books. But this is like a book book. This is a literary poetic kind of adventure that you take the reader on. Yeah, cause that's where I wanted to go. I mean, I wanted to go into the mystery and I went to, you know, Ed Young and Carl Zimmer and Merlin and Elizabeth Colbert.

I mean, other writers, really beautiful writers, you know, and just absorbed. I almost want to put on the back of the book, these are all the books I read, you know, just to open that up. I may do it on a website, just say, look at this one, look at this one, look at this one, and I'm not the origin, but I am storytelling.

And what's emerging, again, I'll say this, I mean, from observational science is just heartwarming and beautiful and breathtaking. Anthony James was a person in South Africa and he had a reserve and a wildlife reserve in an area in Northern South Africa where elephants had been extirpated a long time ago,

there was no elephants around. And somebody called him and said, I have enough from another reserve in the South. I have eight elephants that are just acting so badly that we're gonna shoot them all. He said, you can have them if you want. They said, I'll take them. Well, he got them there somehow in trucks

and he made a special place for them to kind of season them into the property. He was, you know, they couldn't get out, it was electrified and this and that. And he just tore the shit out of it. And they're everywhere on the property. And then he tore down the electric fences, you know, and they had to go capture them again.

And just, it was just hell. But he got them back and he spent years and he had a Land Rover, of course, and he'd go park nearby and just put the Land Rover. And they could see it and they'd watch and then, okay. The first they started to come near it, like it was a threat, but then eventually he realized it wasn't a threat.

And then he would get out and stand there, just next to the Land Rover. And then as time went on, he would actually move out further from the Land Rover and then closer. And they began to trust him as a person, as a human being. Obviously they had been treated really, really badly

by human beings, you know, become that destructive as an elephant for no reason. And eventually they started to come up to his house and all of them, all eight of them, and his wife is a French chef and they would take everything in the garden because they didn't know it was a garden, you know? They just ate it.

But they got used to that. And then one time he was on Durban and the elephants were coming to the house and he called his wife and said, the plane's been canceled. And she noticed right away that the elephants stopped and turned around and went away. Okay, he died someplace else.

He didn't die there on the land. And the next day, they had 18 elephants by then. They surrounded the house and stood there all day. A year later, on the exact day, they came back, stood around the house for the whole day. And so it went. So what we're talking about is what do we know? How do they know?

How do we know what they know? We don't. And so that's the world I'm talking about, which is not the world that I know. Hey, read my book, I can explain everything. I don't explain it at all. I am not, I'm ignorant, but I care about discovering where we live

or where I live and discovering what I don't know. And we know there's 3.4 trillion creatures on land and ocean. And every single day they're communicating, not just once a day, and every single day they're communicating, not just once a day, by the way. They're communicating. They're making sounds. What are they saying?

They're talking. Those elephants were obviously talking to each other, but we have no idea. And so we live on a planet where just suffused with intelligence and sentience from creatures we never thought had any sense at all. We know now that insects are sentient. They have feelings. It's like, oh, come on, you know, people, you know, and some anthropologists will go, ah, you know,

that's crazy. No, we do know that from Lars Jicke work and other people's work. So I just trying to like open the curtain a little bit for the reader and going this, you know, and verify it. There's notes, there's footnotes, there's sources. You know, you can look it up yourself. It's not me, I'm not the source.

And just like what happens to you when you know that's the world that we're losing and that's a world we've never really understood. And that's the world we thought was dumb as a rock. I mean, it may have four legs and a tail, but we never gave it any thought that it had language. Mother bats speak a dialect in their ultrasonic thing and they name their children and they teach their children to avoid certain male bats because they're not

cool. Right? That's, they call that motherese, that language. They don't know what to call it. And if you take that ultrasonic sound, which we can't hear, and you slow it down, so in the audible range, it is so beautiful. It's one of the most beautiful sound you've ever heard. And we are the only culture that demonizes bats. They're sacred everywhere else in the world. And so maybe they're not demons.

It's just that, just that trying to open up, just that way of seeing where we live. I mean, the scorpion came into my house this week. I am so gentle with that scorpion. I do not want them in my house. I don't want to be bit by one, okay? I know that one, but I don't kill it. I take it out to its ecosystem, you know,

which is not my house. And that came from just seeing the insect world in a new way. And like, I just can't kill mosquitoes very easily, but I will kill a mosquito. I mean, I confess, if it's keeping me awake, most of it, but I can't kill anything else. I'm not surprised to hear that, but you ready for this?

The story that you just told of the elephants actually came up on the podcast yesterday. Anthony James? That same story. And it came up in the podcast yesterday. Anthony James. That same story. And it came up in the context of a discussion around a lack of appreciation or a hubris that we have around the sentience and emotional intelligence and interior lives of our fellow creatures.

But it was in the context of a larger conversation about something else altogether different. I was hosting a podcast with the host of this podcast series called Telepathy Tapes, where she spends, I don't know if you've heard of this, she spends time with non-speaking neurodivergent autistic people. And it's this exploration of, you know,

the possibility of extra perceptual abilities. But in the context of this, you know, take what you will from that. But just to ask the question is also to expand your horizon of appreciation for the complexity of, you know, other living creatures. And she talks about Rupert Sheldrake and like his experiments with animal consciousness,

et cetera. And that story of the elephants like comes up as an illustration of that point. Like we think we know, but what do we really know? And when we look up and we see the swarms of birds who all pivot at the exact same time and never collide with each other or the migratory patterns of whales and the way they communicate across vast distances.

Like all of these things would go, yeah, wow, that's crazy. And then we never think about it again, let alone like try to get to the root of like how this is even happening to begin with. That these organisms could be collaborating and communicating with each other in a way that we have a hard time believing is possible because of the simplicity of their brains.

Not so simple though. Yeah, somebody I forget did a calculation on why can bees do the waggle dance and do all this stuff and convey all this information to each other? And the bee brain is very, very small compared to our brain, except at any given moment, it can have a million different connections within that brain.

Okay, so it's not size, size does something too for sure, So it's not size, size does something too for sure, but we have been reductionists in the sense of the smaller brain, the smaller intelligence, and that doesn't play out. Also reductionist in what we consider to be intelligence. Yes. We're intelligent because we can do these certain things, but perhaps it's more intelligent

to not live in an extractive relationship with the world, but more in a symbiotic one of harmony where, I mean, if you're a dolphin cruising around with your family members, having a good old time, like that's probably a better life. Most of us are living. Well, we're the only species that dysregulates the climate.

There's a point, they say four or five, six species, million species, okay, we're the only one. The rest of them don't do that. And so intelligent, I question that. I mean, if we're so intelligent, why would we destroy the atmosphere? We know it. I mean, and we know it since the 19th century

and we know it very well. The science is locked. No argument about the science. And because it's really simple, the science, it's really about how to try atomic, you know, molecules, you know, re-radiate, you know, heat back to earth that comes up from infrared. I mean, this is so simple. It's like climate 101, you know. So we've known that since 1856, Eunice Foote demonstrated that, a woman scientist in the United States, 1856 demonstrably, and she wasn't listened to

because she couldn't go to scientific conferences because she was a woman. Scientists didn't allow women in the conferences. But so, I mean, and yet we still do it. So it's really interesting to see what is intelligence in this context, you know? I mean, are we brilliant? Yes, no question about it.

And I would say also not to be a gainsayer, but I mean, we live in one of the craziest, stupidest times in history in terms of our relationship to each other and to the living world. But I also think we live in the most brilliant time in history. So both are happening at the same time. And there is a brilliance in the world

that's arising and emerging and present today that is so heartwarming and so inspiring and so extraordinary. So I'm not here to, you know, I'm here to be curious and observe. I see both at the same time. And what will emerge? What will finally happen?

What will we survive even? I don't know. But I know that I wanna be here and do whatever I can. And in so doing, it just changes my life and who I meet and what I read and everything where I live, all that sort of stuff. And it can change everybody's life. It feels like part of the problem has something to do

with our proclivity for pursuing self-interest. Like the idea that what's important is like what I wanna do and what I need to get and like how I'm gonna get it as opposed to, you know, what's good for the commons. And I don't think it's a genetic wiring that we have when you look back on indigenous cultures and you talk about this in the book,

like it seems like people were really all about the commons back then. It's systems that have been laid on top of us that have, you know, tweaked and thwarted our better interest and diluted us into believing that like getting what's ours is really what life is about. Yeah, Nate Hagens, who is a podcaster, talks about the carbon pulse that really,

when we discovered coal, gas and oil, it was a huge change in human civilization because of what it gave us in terms of fossil fuel slaves, you know. I mean, it used to be we'd have to have a person do work for us and each person could only do the amount of work they could consume in terms of calories, you know, and that was it. And then wood helped and that was kind of a breakthrough, but it didn't really change what a person could do.

Fossil fuels, oil, coal change what a person could do, what they could make and what we could make and so forth. And so the carbon pulse is this increase in the use of carbon-based fuels, you know, to this day, to this minute, you know, we have increased, it doesn't level off, it doesn't, oh, we have enough. No one's ever said that. And so if we don't recognize that,

then we're gonna just to pulse ourselves right out of our civilization. And we have these fossil fuel slaves and we're taking for granted, we grew up in it, we have our cars, we have these fossil fuel slaves and we're taking for granted, we grew up in it, we have our cars, we have our gas stations, everywhere I drive, you know, I'm in LA, just look at the patterns of retail, the patterns of the consumption,

the patterns of at the airport and so forth, you know. I mean, and the increase in convenience and speed and quickness and facility and convenience, that impels a culture, all those increasing footprint that we're having, and the impact we're having and so forth. Along with our entitlement to that footprint. Of course we grew up that way.

And I'm gonna take care of my family and this and that. So that's all left brain thinking. And what's happened historically, if you look back over like last 2000 years, you get these kind of shifts in humanity to the left brain, which is a problem solving brain. But the right brain, which is a problem solving brain, but the right brain is,

synthesis is really different, quite different, and looks at connections and systems and looks at the whole, we look at systems, the right brain looks at complex interactive systems. Relationships. Always about relationships. And so we're all, look at, we have a presence, all left brain and it's all about getting, taking, wanting.

You know, and so we're there. How do we get there? I don't know. I don't know how to matriculate it that way. But I do know that there are some just extraordinary people who are walk amongst us, who are doing fantastic things. And if I was a betting man, I'd put my money on that side, then the one that's in power now.

That's good to hear. Cause it is, I agree with you, it is a situation in which, you know, we're kind of escalating, we're hurling towards, you know, catastrophe on one level. And then kind of on a parallel track, we're the acceleration of technological innovation and like kind of first principles thinking

in terms of problem solving and a more expansive appreciation for the natural world. Like all of these things are kind of all happening at once and they're all speeding up together, but it is a ticking clock. Like there is a deadline here. We're sort of quickly approaching this precipice. And it's like, which version of ourself

is gonna get there first before it's too late. It's weird how it's like, everything feels really sped up though. Well, the existing system is self-terminating. There's no question about that. And it's accelerating that we're in the self-terminating system and period. So I'll give you an example

period. So I'll give an example about growing up and fighting fires. I'm not sure I like the verb, but you dealt with fire where I lived up in the Sierras. And as a teenager and I lived in Nevada city with the family who took me in, I didn't have a home. And you'd marshal everybody who was able-bodied to fight the fire. We didn't have a home. And you'd marshal everybody who was able-bodied to fight the fire. We didn't have a big brig in the farm in there, couldn't afford it. And they taught you what to do and everything like that. And afterwards you tamp it down with your boots

and make sure there's no hotspots. There's nothing, there's no embers in there. And you find them, they're embers, you know, like a manzanita will stay hot for a long time, you know, and the ashes over it so you don't see it. And then you get a wind that night and then blow embers, restart a fire. So you have to walk the fire where it burned

and then you eventually go home or whatever, you know, and you look at this wasteland, it's all black, the trees, you know, everything is just gone, you know. But I do also remember like, the trees, everything is just gone. But I do also remember like in the spring, the grass is greener than you've ever seen because of the ash feeds it, those are nutrients. And you see wildflowers that you've never seen before. I was told they hadn't been seen before

because there's certain wildflowers you've never seen before, or I was told that hadn't been seen before, because there's certain wildflowers that only break open the carapace under extreme heat. They're not annuals. And so I use that today as an analogy for what's happening, the world's on fire. It's on fire, there's no question about it. But at the same time, the fire and the wildflowers

and the emergence is happening at the same time, not sequentially. And it's easy to see the fire. It's harder to see the birth, the emergence, because it's not centralized. It doesn't have a voice. It wasn't elected. It doesn't make the news cycle.

It doesn't light up the amygdala for click-throughs. It's the best of humanity. And there's a lot of it out there. I feel this extraordinary human beings in communities and angels and villages all over the world who actually see the fire. They're singed by the fire and they're coming together. And I use the word regeneration, but restoration, renewal,

whatever word works for it doesn't matter, but they're creating more life for themselves, their children, their future, their land. And not only more life on a biological level, but also in terms of schooling, education, the welfare of the children, the welfare of all the creatures and animals that live around them that they have, that they now, I guess, value in a way that they never had before,

because they never knew they were, they were never threatened before and now they are. Well, that example of, that you just provided, you know, illustrates this notion that like, everything is an opportunity for rebirth and regrowth and hidden within whatever name your crisis, you know, there's some possibility for something to blossom that couldn't have otherwise.

And you're nothing, if not hopeful, like hope is a, you know, recurring sort of theme or strain in all of your work. And I can't help but think like in this particular moment that we're all experiencing right now where there's so much political division and uncertainty for somebody who's listening to this, who does find themselves doom scrolling

and feeling a lack of agency or struggles to find anything to hold on to, to feel that hope and identify that wildflower. Like how does one go about doing that? Like what are you really trying to say in this book to the reader? It doesn't have to be a wildflower, it can be a child. The suffering around us of children is extraordinary.

The suffering of migrants is extraordinary. You know, talk about, if you're gonna use the word regeneration, which I have, of course, you wanna do it with the biggest arms as possible. Because if we're not restoring, renewing the lives of the 6 billion people who wake up every single morning on earth,

facing existential threat, it could be food, it could be security, it could be school, it could be jobs, it could be money, it could be income. I could be school, it could be jobs, it could be money, it could be income. I mean, just, and this is in United States too. This is not some other country. And that's the bulk of humanity is waking up every morning with that.

And you wonder they're gonna do something about climate or biodiversity. No, they're not. They have to take care of themselves and their family and their children first. So if there is to be a genuine climate biodiversity slash movement, and I think people do understand this, who mentioned earlier, you have to do it in such a way

that improves the lives of those 6 billion people, who are not basically, they're extractive, but that's because they've been forced to, they have no other choice, because they're right there at the margins. So it's not about butterflies, it's about whatever you see, whatever you know, whatever you care about, whatever causes grief is your pathway. And grief is like the gift of the angels because grief can only come from one place

and that comes from love. You can't feel grief if you have no love. And love comes from the heart. And the heart is the organ that unfathomably tells the truth. Never lie to you or anyone else. And so I don't mean to say, oh, it's out there in nature somewhere. I'm just saying that everything that we have taken

for granted in terms of the living world is sent in alive, communicating just as we are, but not destroying its habitat, not destroying its children, not destroying others. And so it's just so much to take it and learn and so forth, but you can do it right in your neighborhood, right where you are. And the thing, churches have kind of got a bad rap,

especially in the last election cycle because of, but let's put that aside, you know, a mosque and synagogues and churches, you know, forget what happens on Friday night or Saturday or Sunday and all that, okay. All the other time, what do churches do? They take care of people. They care, you know? and la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la,

la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, the attendance, people who worship the people pray five times a day, they actually do things besides that, which is to take care of other people and other places. That's us, that's also us. And that's kind of overridden or not looked at. I think that's a really beautiful place to end it.

Like, I feel like I have a lot of other questions for you, but that was such a poetic way to punctuate what is a very poetic book, a deeply soulful book. Like you're a soulful guy, right? You've written all of these amazing books that really get into the brass tacks of the problem and the solution with respect to the environment. But this is your soul song.

And I think what you just said is a really eloquent way of encapsulating the message that you're trying to carry. It's really a beautiful thing that you've created. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Rich. And it's lovely being here with you always. That's it for today.

Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra,

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