
Carbon
The Book of Life
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Narrated by:
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Peter Coyote
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By:
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Paul Hawken
About this listen
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 AudioCritic 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
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World renowned scientist, Dr. Gerald Pollack, takes us on a fantastic voyage through water, showing us a hidden universe teeming with physical activity - providing simple explanations for everyday phenomena, which you have inevitably seen but not really understood. Have you ever wondered how do clouds made up of dense water droplets manage to float in the sky? Why don't your joints squeak as they rub together? Why do you sink in dry sand, but not in wet sand? Pollack uses a recent and fundamental scientific finding - EZ water - to help explain these and many other head-scratchers.
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A seed for pseudo-science?
- By James S. on 07-27-20
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Stuck
- How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
- By: Yoni Appelbaum
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village.
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land of opportunity
- By Anonymous User on 03-16-25
By: Yoni Appelbaum
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What If We Get It Right?
- Visions of Climate Futures
- By: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
- Narrated by: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Ayisha Siddiqa, Jacqueline Woodson, and others
- Length: 21 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Through clear-eyed essays and vibrant conversations, infused with data and poetry, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson guides us through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice. Visionary farmers and financiers, architects and advocates, help us conjure a flourishing future, one worth the effort it will take—from every one of us, with whatever we have to offer—to create.
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I almost want to categorize this as sci-fi/fantasy
- By Melanie Farley on 12-16-24
What listeners say about Carbon
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 03-21-25
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
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