
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 AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic 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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- How Baking Shaped Our World
- By: David Wright
- Narrated by: David Wright
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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In Breaking Bread, third generation baker, food writer and presenter David Wright examines the universal questions about bread and baking. About the people who make and shape the bread we buy and the difficulties that social and cultural change, food fads and health directives have had, and are having, on the baking industry. After his family bakery sadly closed its doors after seventy-five years, Wright asks if the the closure of the bakery underlines the very idea that bread is a dying foodstuff. Is bread good or bad? And what does the future hold for bread?
By: David Wright
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Into the Clear Blue Sky
- The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere
- By: Rob Jackson
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Climate change is here. From the millions displaced by the floods in Pakistan to California and Canadian towns incinerated by wildfires, we are experiencing the anguish that climate change causes. Fossil fuels are making the planet unlivable, and they are deadly. We know that we must cut emissions if we are going to limit the catastrophes, but is that enough? In Into the Clear Blue Sky, climate scientist and chair of the Global Carbon Project Rob Jackson explains that we need to redefine our goals.
By: Rob Jackson
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Sacred Science
- Understanding Divine Creation
- By: William H. West MD
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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From the moment of creation to the emergence of a planet tailor-made for life, science tells a sacred story: a superintelligent Creator used His mathematical genius to convert lifeless equations into galaxies, planets, and people. His love has been visible throughout the process. Could our journey reflect thousands of random accidents with no divine guidance? Creation delivered impulses that filled the universe with galaxies and stars. Eliminate any one of those blueprints and the universe would have been stillborn.
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White Light
- The Elemental Role of Phosphorus-in Our Cells, in Our Food, and in Our World
- By: Jack Lohmann
- Narrated by: Jack Lohmann
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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A profound and lyrical reflection on the cyclical nature of life, what happens when we break that cycle, and how to repair it—told through the fate of phosphorus.
By: Jack Lohmann
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Adaptable
- How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us
- By: Herman Pontzer PhD
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Adaptable takes us on a tour of the human body. In each chapter, we learn how our bodies navigate an uncertain world: how we grow and mature; how our brains develop and learn; how our hearts, lungs, and digestive systems deliver oxygen and nutrients; how we manage toxins, temperature, and water balance; how we move and reproduce; how our immune system keeps invaders at bay; and how we age and decline. Along the way, we learn how to take care of our remarkable bodies, and that the universe of healthy lifestyles is vast (we don’t need the latest fad diet or cleanse!).
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Surprisingly Engaging
- By user7720393 on 04-11-25
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The Ministry of Truth
- The Biography of George Orwell's 1984
- By: Dorian Lynskey
- Narrated by: Andrew Wincott
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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1984 isn't just a novel; it's a key to understanding the modern world. George Orwell's final work is a treasure chest of ideas and memes - Big Brother, the Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, 2+2=5 - that gain potency with every year. Particularly in 2016, when the election of Donald Trump made it a best seller ("Ministry of Alternative Facts", anyone?).
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words from MY mouth...
- By Amazon Customer on 08-02-19
By: Dorian Lynskey
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Heaven on Earth
- How Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo Discovered the Modern World
- By: L. S. Fauber
- Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
- Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Today, we take for granted that a telescope allows us to see galaxies millions of light years away. But before its invention, people used nothing more than their naked eye to fathom what took place in the visible sky. So how did four men in the 1500s - of different nationality, age, religion, and class - collaborate to discover that the Earth revolved around the Sun? With this radical discovery that went against the Church, they created our contemporary world. Heaven on Earth is an intimate examination of this scientific family.
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Good interweaving of 4 great astronomers
- By Jeffrey L. Smith, PE on 12-09-19
By: L. S. Fauber
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Elemental
- How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain (Nearly) Everything
- By: Tim James
- Narrated by: Roger Davis
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2016, with the addition of four final elements - nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganesson - to make a total of 118 elements, the periodic table was finally complete, rendering any pre-existing books on the subject obsolete. Tim James, the secondary-school science teacher we all wish we'd had, provides an accessible and wonderfully entertaining 'biography of chemistry' that uses stories to explain the positions and patterns of elements in the periodic table.
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hilarious, it kept me wanting more!
- By Trevor lipsey on 06-03-21
By: Tim James
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Is Anyone Listening?
- What Animals Are Saying to Each Other and to Us
- By: Denise L. Herzing
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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If you could pose one question to a dolphin, what would it be? And what might a dolphin ask you? For forty years, researcher and author Denise L. Herzing has investigated these and related questions of marine mammal communication. But the dolphins are not the only ones talking, and in this wide-ranging and accessible book, Herzing explores the astonishing realities of interspecies communication, a skill that humans currently lack.
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Good Soil
- The Education of an Accidental Farmhand
- By: Jeff Chu
- Narrated by: Jeff Chu
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In his late thirties, Jeff Chu left his job as a magazine writer and found himself at Princeton Theological Seminary’s “Farminary”—a twenty-one-acre working farm where students learn to cultivate the earth while examining life’s biggest questions. Now, he unpacks what he learned about creating “good soil,” both literally and figuratively, drawing lessons from the rhythms of growth, decay, and regeneration that define life on the land. In gorgeous, transporting reflections, Chu introduces us to the cast of characters, human and not, who became his teachers.
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Beautiful
- By Ehom on 05-07-25
By: Jeff Chu
I am deeper because of this….
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Riveting
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I particularly loved the first chapter and the last, but all the chapters in between are also exquisite and are the weft on the warp of the first and last.
I loved it so much that I have ordered a hard copy. There are wonderful quotes throughout the book and particularly good are the ones at the beginning of each chapter. I need to have the book to hold in my hand, but I am sure I will re-listen to the audio version often as well. It is not a text that manipulates or shames, but sheds light and wonder on this existence and encourages one to connect and find balance in the web of life.
A book for all humans
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Brilliant, sensitive, compassionate!
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Outstanding!
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beauty
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