New Book

The New York Times bestselling author Paul Hawken takes us into the world of carbon, the most misunderstood yet versatile element on the planet. This stirring, hopeful, and deeply humane book illuminates the infinite connections between carbon and human well-being.

March 18th, 2025

“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, Journalist, Environmentalist

Carbon

The Book of Life

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. 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, a new narrative for embracing carbon’s life-giving power and 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 and inseparably connected.

Praise for Carbon

“Paul Hawken’s Carbon, the Book of Life, has created what might be termed the first spiritual encyclopedia of the Earth highlighting and blue-printing the myriad umbilical connections between all life and non-life, harmonizing to make life on this planet the mysterious wonder that it is. That he manages the tour de force–using extraordinary amounts of empirically verifiable data to reveal how nearly every current proposal of “Planet Salvage” is a masquerade shifting power to the extractive and profit-seeking practices which created these problems in the first place—is nothing less than stunning. He demonstrates again and again, with myriad examples, how the Earth, herself, is begging us to recreate the original balances we’ve destroyed. With that simple practice, the Planet will recover without vast corporate schemes to pump liquid carbon into underground caverns or a “new generation” of nuclear power plants. If you don’t believe he’s pulled this off, poetically, balletically and with intellectual rigor, read this book and try to prove me wrong.”

Peter coyote

Author, Actor, and Priest

“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

Journalist, Pulitzer Prize-winning Author

“Paul Hawken writes beautifully about the situation we face here on our planet. Using CARBON, life’s central element, as a major theme, his eloquence and point of view are insightful, powerful and important.”

Jeff Bridges

Actor

“Hawken takes his readers on an awe-inspiring adventure through forests, galaxies, and the soil microbiome, reminding us that balancing the carbon cycle is not an abstract question of atmospheric chemistry but the intimate everyday matter of healing relationships with our wondrous kin in this living world.”

Lis Carlisle

Author, Healing Ground

“Carbon is the invisible thread that binds all living things. With lyrical prose and deep insight, Hawken reframes our relationship to nature and charts a path toward planetary healing.”

Christiana Figueres

Former UN Climate Chief, Diplomat

“In his latest work, Paul took me out of the everyday scramble and placed me squarely in the middle of what it means to be a living creature in this world. Reflecting on how carbon moves around and through us over time, and on how our everyday actions intersect with the flow of carbon, is a reflective meditation as both a systems investor and human being.”

Lukas Walton

Builder’s Vision

“The life-giving element carbon moves ceaselessly between the biosphere and the atmosphere. It can either unravel civilization or renew it. If one form of carbon, fossil fuel emissions, are not rapidly curtailed, our way of life will collapse. The must-read Book of Life describes how the climate crisis invites us to change our behavior, reject business as usual, and restore the health of our astonishing planet.”

Michael E. Mann

Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth & Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Our Fragile Moment: How lessons from the Earth’s past can help us survive the climate crisis

About

Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken has started ecological businesses, writes about nature and commerce, and consults with governments and CEOs on climatic, economic and ecological regeneration. He has appeared on numerous media including the Today Show, Talk of the Nation, Bill Maher, CBS This Morning and others, and his work has been profiled or featured in hundreds of articles including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, Forbes, and Business Week. He has written nine books including six national and NYT bestsellers: Growing a Business, The Next Economy, The Ecology of Commerce, Blessed Unrest, Drawdown, and Regeneration.

He is published in 30 languages and his books are available in over 50 countries. His latest book, Carbon,The Book of Life, will be published by Viking/Penguin March 18^th, 2025. He is the founder of both Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration and author of Drawdown and Regeneration. Project Regeneration has created the world’s largest, most complete listing and network of solutions to the climate crisis described by agency, what each echelon of society starting with the individual can do to implement the solutions. He lives in coastal California in the Cascade Creek watershed with his wife, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, ravens, red-tail hawks, pileated woodpeckers, and flocks of nuthatches.