Dhru Purohit Show
We’re Not Separate from Nature, We’re Made of It: An Honest Conversation About Soil, Carbon, and the Future of Humanity with Paul Hawken
Wed, 07 May 2025
This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, Pique Life, and BiOptimizers. When we think about carbon, we often associate it with pollution, greenhouse gases, and climate change. But carbon is not the enemy—it's the essential building block of life. From the soil beneath our feet to the air we breathe, carbon plays a central role in the biosphere. The real issue lies not with carbon itself, but with how human systems have disrupted its natural balance. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with environmentalist and author Paul Hawken to unpack the deeper story of carbon—its vital role in life, its misrepresentation in climate discourse, and its power to connect all living systems. Drawing from his new book Carbon: The Book of Life, Paul explains why regeneration, not just sustainability, is key. He also shares how we can restore our relationship with the Earth by embracing Indigenous wisdom, ecological thinking, and a shift from extraction to restoration, reminding us that healing the planet starts with rethinking our values. Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, and bestselling author who advises governments and business leaders on climate and ecological regeneration. He’s written nine books with six national and New York Times bestsellers. He founded both Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration, which created the world’s largest network of solutions to the climate crisis. His newest book is Carbon: The Book of Life. Tune in to this powerful conversation to discover how rethinking carbon could help us heal our planet—and ourselves. In this episode, Dhru and Paul dive into: Carbon as the foundation of life (00:40) The vilification of carbon from an environmental perspective—and the secrets it holds (3:05) Dissolving the human–nature divide and reconnecting with the natural world (11:20) The message behind Claire Davis' food experiment with infants (17:40) How awareness and communication with nature could help shift humanity (25:13) Balancing human wants versus needs (35:43) The idea that Earth has a form of awareness (46:59) Challenging the idea that human existence is a plight on the planet (1:03:23) The limits of technology in healing the Earth—and how it has improved human life (1:10:53) Carbon sequestration through regenerative agriculture (1:15:42) Rethinking the phrase “growth is good” in the context of nature, humans, and technology (1:21:33) The impact of outcome-focused living and raising awareness about health (1:31:03) Reevaluating infant formula and banning pharmaceutical ads—genuine progress or public deception? (1:37:43) The future of agriculture: banning chemicals, pesticides, and harmful toxins in America (1:42:43) There is a solution, a path to change—and we are part of it (1:48:43) The need for community, the power of connection, and our role in making life better (2:02:13) Also mentioned in this episode: Paul’s Book - Carbon: The Book of Life Project Drawdown Restor Eco Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? Abundance For more on Paul, follow him on Instagram and his Website. This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, Pique, and BiOptimizers. Right now, Bon Charge is offering my community 15% off; just go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Right now, Pique Life is offering 20% off the Pu’er fermented black and green teas. Plus, you’ll get a free beaker and frother when you go to piquelife.com/dhru. Go to bioptimizers.com/dhru now and enter promo code DHRU10 to get 10% off any order of Sleep Breakthrough and find out this month’s gift with purchase. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is carbon not the villain in climate change?
Paul Hawken, an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. Carbon is often vilified. It's seen as this culprit of climate change. It's an us versus them mentality, and it's either... You are against carbon or you're for environmentalism, right? You're either with us or against us, as George Bush famously said. But you've described it not as this villain, but as this animating force of life.
why is it so important for us to change this story and this relationship that we have with this molecule that's the foundation to life because it is the foundation for life exactly right and we see carbon as an element and we were taught that in high school science of course and we can measure and look at it that way but what we've done
is basically objectify it and make it a thing, when in fact there's 1.2 trillion molecules in every cell of our body. And so we're looking at it with the same mindset that caused the problem of global warming, which is to objectify the living world.
and to objectify and make other the causes and to create an economy that's all about self and grasping and getting and taking and extraction and concentration and not about community, which is all life arises from community. and not out of respect, not out of compassion, not out of kindness, not out of a sense of connectedness, which is we're inseparably connected.
It's just our minds that have sort of deluded us. And of course, all our media and social media and everything that we are individuals, the only individuals in the world are in comic books and Westerns. There is no such thing as an individual. And yes, we have a distinct mind and we can think things that are very peculiar to us and not anybody else.
And we can connect that and we have extraordinary language to do that with. But that doesn't mean biologically we're individuals or we're separate. And so part of the reason for writing Carbon, the Book of Life is just to see the climate movement, frankly, fail. in its story and its narrative and in its impact.
And when I say fail, 99 point, you put in the integer of the people who live here do nothing about it on a daily basis. And that's been true for 50 years.
It seems like in this world of tribalism, across the board, I'm not just talking about politically, in the environmental movement, For a long time, it was a useful vehicle. When I say useful, I'm not saying helpful, but it was a useful vehicle. to use carbon as the boogeyman to basically degradate the other side. Either you believe in this idea or you don't believe and you're part of the problem.
Where did that come from?
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Chapter 2: How can we reconnect with nature and dissolve the human-nature divide?
You increase the number of CO2 molecules in the air, and a certain amount of heat is reflected back. And as you have more molecules, there's more heat. And that's global warming 101. We've known that since 1856. So the rhetoric and the concern is, well, let's stop putting them up there.
And that's what Project Drawdown was about, which I created in 2013, which is, can we just bring it back home, please, and stop putting it up there and get some sort of equilibrium that we had at one time in terms of the climate, the atmosphere, heating, warming, et cetera. And so it makes sense.
I'm not decrying what we did at Project Write-On or that logic, but in the process of doing that, we separated ourselves from cause. We're looking at cure, but we have to go upstream to cause. What's the cause? Why are we putting it up there? And why are we putting it up there in massive ways with a rhetoric and a story? And I say the story now is the climate narrative that is completely BS.
And part of that BS is that we're in an energy transition. And if we get to net zero by 2050, we're going to be good to go, you know? And that's just not true. We're not in an energy transition whatsoever. we're actually using more coal, gas, oil and wood than we did last century and the century before that and the century before that.
And so what I wanted to do is get to step back and look at it as a whole, not to be solutionist and not to say, look at, listen up, I know the way, you know. No, but to actually provide people another way of seeing the world, which is what they're in. So that's about being in a world.
and to see it in a way that gives them a much more expansive, inclusive, and to me, a more compassionate way of understanding how we got here, where we are, and where to go forward from that point, but not in the sense that, you know, like, I know you don't. I'm not interested in that.
You know, a huge part of that is fundamentally starting off with this important molecule that's been so demonized and re-approaching its role in all life, not just human life, but everything around us. You say in the book, carbon is a window into the entirety of life with all its beauty, secrets, and complexity. Tell us about some of those secrets that carbon has.
Well, the secrets are in the 3.4 trillion creatures that we share this planet with. And then in the uncountable number of plants that we also share this planet with. And I often say to people, not in an arrogant way, I hope, that we don't know where we live. We don't know where we live. We literally don't know the earth. And, but furthermore, we don't know who we live with.
Our understanding of invertebrates and vertebrates and creatures and birds, et cetera, is just now sort of opening up to the idea that plants, insects have consciousness, have language, have emotion, these qualities that we have never associated with the living world. And we're on the cusp of a huge breakthrough in science and understanding, you know, not just that whales speak, they do.
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Chapter 3: What can Indigenous wisdom teach us about ecological thinking?
And now we understand that there actually may be very, very profoundly different types of intelligences on this planet. who see and understand it very differently. And it's not like we're the top dog. We are in terms of language, no question about it.
And with all due respect to Homo sapiens and the brain that developed from the use of language, the use of language that developed our brain, I mean, it's extraordinary. But beyond that, So there's a whole world here that we don't know. And we're just, I think, sort of like, you know, somebody coming to a threshold or a mountaintop and looking down and going, oh my gosh, look what I see before me.
You know, I never knew that was there. And that happened, you know, when Lewis and Clark went over the Rockies and different explorers, you know, like there's huge lands there. Well, there's landscapes of biology there. that we are now broaching and going into. And I hope we do it well.
But whatever we do, we are learning that we are part of a extraordinary web of life, far more so than we actually knew.
There's all these different and beautiful stories inside of the book. And one that comes to mind after you sharing what you shared is the story about this food experiment that was done by Clara Davis and the infants. And I believe it was in like 1930, 1928, somewhere around there. Can you talk about that story?
And in particular, the message of the story signifying that maybe there's these deeper forms of intelligence that we're just not hip to yet. And what happened if we were more hip to them? Most of us do not have a ton of extra time for more than a few basics every day.
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Chapter 4: How does modern society's narrative around energy and climate need to change?
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Well, I mean, it's a perfect description. And I would say the Chinese, Xi Jinping, will not decide the future. Nature will decide all of our futures. That's going to be, they're the decision, it's the decision maker of whether we survive or not survive, whether we live well and beautifully and, you know, or don't in warlike conditions. So your question is, well, where do we go to from here?
Actually, if I could just interrupt, and I do want you to expand on that, but it's more in the sense of, you know, we have people, health has become so mainstream here in America in so many different ways, right? I'm talking separate from the political landscape.
But within that context, I think largely a lot of people have felt that they've been on the receiving end of saying their life, their profession, their yearning for, you know,
uh improving their family's economic means has been deemed to be bad in the same way that many people have demonized which you're trying to get people out of they've demonized carbon as being bad and this book is reframing that anytime somebody's told me that i'm bad that i'm wrong from any kind of perspective yeah it really works people shut down yeah right they don't listen right and so
I'm speaking a little bit to this larger idea is that can we see even things like growth within the duality of life, that there's a lot of things that end up happening because if we were in that same position as those individuals, not to stick on China, it could be these emerging economies in India that might be using dirty fuel sources or whatever it might be, right?
we would be doing largely a lot of the similar things. And yes, we need a better way. And can both of those things exist? And partly that takes us down out of this idea of somebody else has to fix it. It has to be a top-down approach. This is somebody else's fault.
This is the problem with people in Brazil who are cutting down the rainforest, not the demand that we see in the United States for people wanting grass-fed beef. which partially has led to a lot of that deforestation that's there, right? Is that bad? Is that good?
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Chapter 5: Is the Earth a conscious entity?
I'm just talking about the movement itself, the rhetoric that came out of the Conference of the Parties and corporations and, you know, all that sort of stuff. And finally, you know, I did what I could on that, but that's why Carbon, the Book of Life came out to say, can we just change this conversation? Because I don't think it's working. It's not bringing us together.
One of the thoughts that I had is that some of the people, not that I would ever say somebody needs this book, but let's use that language. I felt that some of the people that could most benefit from this book have been the loudest voices of the environmental movement. When a lot of people see your work and they think, oh, if we could only get the other side, which often means to them,
Republicans, people who voted for Donald Trump, people who work at oil companies. If we could only get the other side to embrace this idea, the world would be a different place. I felt more of there's all these people for years that have been talking about
climate crisis and yet they use the most as you mentioned dualistic language in the world instead of meeting human beings where they're at what do people care about people care about clean water they care about clean food right and you can't talk about some of the themes inside this book in the modern climate crisis without stepping into some aspect of recognizing that we live in a political landscape
And what I've seen over the years, even as somebody who always felt is very pro-supportive of a lot of themes that you talk about inside of your book, Drawdown, and many of the conversations, and so many people on this podcast come on and champion things like regenerative agriculture, which you've been talking about forever.
What I see firsthand is I'm seeing years of largely top-down media, or it could be top-down influence in the form of celebrity, saying how beliefs that I had about food or toxins in my food system or concerns about pharmaceuticals was considered anti in some sort of way.
And it just goes back to this idea that I felt some of the people that could most benefit to actually get us across the finish line as a human species together, because we're all in it together, are the individuals that want to put down the other side for believing in something that they deem to be incorrect, false, or misinformation, which is largely that they may not understand yet
why somebody wouldn't want to eat seed oils in their diet, even if the data is mixed, or might really care about being selective about certain therapeutics, or might really have concerns about microplastics that are out there.
So it's less of a question and it was more of a point that this to me, stepping into a sense of awe and awakening is a book for anybody that's still stuck in the idea of it's me versus you, it's us versus them. Exactly.
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Chapter 6: What role does awe play in understanding our connection to the universe?
Find me a source of life besides the oceans, by the way, but on land. Find me another source. There is no other source. It comes from plants. All animals, insects, everything, eat plants, right? And some, or they suck, you know, the honey or the nectar or this, or they nibble at it and so forth. It all comes to that.
So all 5,000 cultures that have existed here that we can identify have always called the earth Mother Earth. They knew. What's a mother? Source of life. Men can't have babies. Women can. The earth has babies. It's called life, right? And so that's where we get away. We eat the animal. The animal ate the plant. So we can plant the plant, eat the plant. We can eat the animal.
Either way, it's coming from the soil. So regenerative agriculture is just a flip of what we've done for the last 100 years. What we're doing is feeding the plant. NPK, you know, artificial chemical fertilizers. And not only that,
the the end part the nitrogen for sure is now enwrapped or covered with pfas for time release because it breaks down over time well so now the pfas are in our soil and they're systemic and they're going up into the plants and we're eating pfas they're put there so when you top dress the soil with mpk the plants are happy in a certain way They have what they need to get green and get big.
But the problem is that they're weak and don't have all the micronutrients. They don't have the minerals that you absolutely need for viability and for true health. And so insects come in and say, oh, delicious, like a thousand acres, same thing. Wow, let's go breed and eat. And at the same time,
What happens as the soil weakens from chemical fertilizer, lack of roots going down, the roots don't go down now, they go out, go laterally. They get everything they need from the surface. Then the soil is degraded. And as the soil degrades, weeds come up. And it's so interesting about weeds because we think weeds as, quote, quote, weeds, right? Wrong plant, wrong place.
But in fact, if you actually know weeds or these plants, because your plants are not weeds, and you look at the land, you can tell from the weed what's wrong with the soil. They are there to heal the soil. It's nature's way to heal. Like the Canadian Thessalonians will have deep tap roots go down. Why? They're bringing up minerals up to the subsurface into the labral parts of the soil, right?
So regeneration or regenerative agriculture is simply doing what soil does everywhere it always has in terms of making itself richer, renewing, you know, being part of a cycle of life. And so in a forest or in a meadow or a grassland, you know, It's eaten by animals, and the poop goes down, or the plant then withers and dies in the winter, and it goes back into the soil. There's a cycle.
And so regenerative agriculture, you have more life in the soil, you have more carbon. So people talk about, like, okay, it suppresses carbon. Yes, it does, and we should do that. But that's not why we should do it. That's the outcome.
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