Carbon: The Book of Life by Paul Hawken; Viking, 256 pp., $28
Carbon has gotten a bad name for a good reason: we spew way too much of it into the air. But Paul Hawken reminds us that this problematic molecule is the basis of life itself. Carbon, his very readable synthesis of life on our heating-up, beaten-up planet, begins with the molecule. “Though carbon comprises a tiny fraction of the Earth,” writes Hawken, “a planet without it is a dead rock in space, like a sky without stars, a symphony without sound.” Carbon as chemistry: the element has six protons, plus neutrons and electrons, four of which are available for sharing. There’s a lot of sharing going on. Of the molecules in interstellar clouds, 90 percent contain carbon, and of the 33 million substances on Earth, 99 percent contain carbon. Think diamonds, where carbon bonds to carbon. Think sugars, where carbon bonds to oxygen and hydrogen. Think food. All food, for every living being, is a carbon compound. Think ourselves. We have 1.2 trillion carbon atoms in every one of our 28 trillion to 36 trillion cells.
Carbon’s core message is that we inhabitants of habitat Earth could do worse than adopt the attitudes of Indigenous peoples toward the living world: we are members of a family that includes all forms of life, and the way to live is with “reciprocity, mutualism, and reconciliation with the natural world.” This—along with science—will save us. Hawken does not have kind words for corporate solutions to feeding the world with junk food. Consider this from his chapter on food:
The average Mexican drinks 487 cans of Coca-Cola a year, a number that has doubled in the past ten years. One in six Mexicans [has] diabetes, the country’s number-one cause of death. The sixty-second president of Mexico was the president of Coca-Cola Mexico. Diverse foods and localized varieties created the intricate culture of Mexico. Stripped of its native foods, the country was flooded with industrially farmed, low-cost, sterile corn, due to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Two million traditional corn farmers went bankrupt.
Here in the United States, 42 percent of adults are obese. Seventy-five percent of people between the ages of 18 and 24 are unfit for military duty. In Mississippi, life expectancy is lower than in Bangladesh. Besides which, “industrial agriculture and Big Food are degrading farmland, polluting wells, contaminating rivers, exterminating pollinators, clearing ancient forests, draining wetlands, poisoning farmworkers, and causing irreparable harm to children’s futures.” Is there a better way? Yes. Take a look at a quintessential study, not mentioned by Hawken. Agriculture at a Crossroads, the result of an effort initiated by the World Bank and the United Nations, was researched and written by more than 400 scientists and other participants over a period of four years. In 2008, its recommendations were signed by 58 countries. The United States, Canada, and Australia participated in creating the report but declined to sign it, citing its “critical assessment of genetic engineering and industrial agriculture as compared to small-scale farming.” The report advocates extensive support of small-scale farming, diversity of crops versus huge monocrops, and attention to local ecologies and cultures, among other sustainable practices.
Hawken gives us chapters on carbon itself, food, forests, fungi, insects, and human language along with communication among other forms of life, such as the meaning-making rumbles of elephants and the chemical interchanges going on among plants. He gives us all kinds of neat scientific facts in passages on dung beetles, ants, nematodes, earthworms, beavers, butterflies, and fungi. To wit: a giant puffball bursting open can emit seven trillion spores.
For each fusillade of facts and statistics, I have attempted to check Hawken’s sources, all of them secondary. They are solid, if scant for such an enormous synthesis. And why he would throw in the notion that kale is bad for you because it tends to take up heavy metals is beyond me. (Full disclosure: I eat a lot of kale.) Kale does take up heavy metals, as do broccoli, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts, depending on the amount of heavy metals in the soil. I would not eat vegetables I knew to have been harvested from a toxic waste dump. And though I am nitpicking, a passage on coal asserts that “source vegetation, heat, and age determine whether coal is soft brown lignite or lustrous black anthracite.” What about bituminous coal, the main type mined in the United States? And more than a nit: the chapter on soil contains no mention of David R. Montgomery’s essential work on regenerating topsoil. Further, what happened to the important topic of worldwide plastics pollution?
Yet Hawken’s book contains much excellent natural history, including the good news that when we treat Earth right, it regenerates itself, even rather quickly. Many people around the world are putting in their best effort. Take a money-losing, clay-sogged farm in Sussex, England, whose owners, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, threw in the towel and decided to make of their 3,500-acre place a nature preserve. They got rid of machinery, unfenced the interior and fenced the exterior, brought in a few original native animals, such as Old English longhorns and Exmoor ponies, gave a little help to native plants, and watched the old life return mostly on its own—redpolls and ravens, bats, moths, butterflies, and predators like stoats (ermines), weasels, and polecats. This in a place surrounded by chemical agriculture. In other good news, some farmers are creating strips of tallgrass in their fields, where beneficial insects get food and cover. Hawken praises a new product, InventWood, a wood with lignin removed, stronger and cheaper than steel, that could transform the construction industry into a more environmentally sustainable one.
Much information in this valuable book is discouraging. And we who are not in denial about the warming Earth, species extinction, and plastics pollution can be forgiven for feeling discouraged. Still, the road to restoration begins with a fairly accurate assessment of reality, no matter how complex. Carbon gives us that. It also gives us reasons to hope.
