Carbon

The Book of Life

By: Paul Hawken

Narrated by: Peter Coyote

A journey into the world of carbon, the most versatile element on the planet, by the New York Times bestselling author Paul Hawken

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 civilization.

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 endeavor.

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.

©2025 Paul Hawken (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Fascinating. . . . Illuminating. . . . Carbon ends with enchanting details about consciousness and ways forward as our climate changes.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Paul Hawken invites us to see the connections that bind us to everything else on the planet. Carbon is an enormously hopeful book—hopeful about the creatures we live among and about our innate human capacities.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction

“Endlessly endlessly fascinating! Human beings, over the millennia, have come up with a thousand ways to carefully observe the world around us, and Paul Hawken has managed to collect and synthesize these observations—from the sweat lodge to the satellite—in a way that helps us see what now must be done. There's information, and then there's wisdom—and this book is a compendium of the latter.”—Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature

Riveting

I stand with Paul Hawkin! A must read for all humans on earth. He helps us understand the complexity all around us and underneath us.

A book for all humans

I listened to an interview with the author about a week before the book launched, and because of that I preordered the Audible edition, which was delivered the day the book was released, March, 18, 2025. I have listened all the way through twice and to most of the chapters 3 to 5 times. It is so well written, and the narrator is excellent. It is a very insightful and informative as well as a personal exploration of what is life, and how one might expand their connection and experience of it. A perfect mix of science and traditional wisdom. It is not a downer of gloom for the future. Sobering yes, but a comfort too.
I particularly loved the first chapter and the last, but all the chapters in between are also exquisite and are the weft on the warp of the first and last.
I loved it so much that I have ordered a hard copy. There are wonderful quotes throughout the book and particularly good are the ones at the beginning of each chapter. I need to have the book to hold in my hand, but I am sure I will re-listen to the audio version often as well. It is not a text that manipulates or shames, but sheds light and wonder on this existence and encourages one to connect and find balance in the web of life.

Brilliant, sensitive, compassionate!

The exquisite description of the diversity and complexity of the natural world. The ending clarifies the threshold we find ourselves and a way to approach it