CARBON

An impassioned call for a return to traditional environmental stewardship.

It is hard to overestimate how the accelerating collapse of ecosystems and species is related to how modern societies and their increasingly homogenized languages are losing the deep sense of place critical to protecting the land. So argues environmental activist Hawken, who says we ignore the knowledge embedded in Indigenous languages and customs at our peril. These marginalized or endangered cultures whose languages guided traditional guardianship of the land possess the ages-old understanding of how to avoid the calamities of environmental decline in the first place. In a scathing, if familiar, indictment of the denatured Western food industry, industrial farming, chemical companies, and ruinous logging and mining—among other depredations—Hawken marshals indisputable evidence that continuing on our current path is suicidal. He knows full well how entrenched the “overwhelming array of industrial forces lined up against the living world” can be and that most people simply do not understand the planetary and social risks we confront. It is the real subject of a book whose scaffolding is the pervasiveness and functions of the element of carbon in planetary life, as well as the challenges it presents. Hawken’s survey of the science involved is as cogent as it is extensive, from the macro to the micro, and it’s often a fascinating journey. There’s a very fine book of popular science here that sometimes struggles with its own ideological noise. Were it not for this, the book would be in the same class as Zoë Schlanger’s recent The Light Eaters, with which it shares broad similarities. But for all the depressing realities, Hawken sees reasons for hope that we will reverse our heedlessly destructive ways, even in the current political climate.

Profound cultural scope deepens Hawken’s exceptional science writing.