Paul Hawken is a brilliant thinker, author, activist, and elder who masterfully distills wisdom about our planetary home.
I remember hearing Paul's 2009 commencement speech called "You Are Brilliant and The Earth is Hiring" where he said "You are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on Earth at a time when every living system is declining and the rate of decline is accelerating."
Paul is the author of nine bestselling books including 'Drawdown', 'Regeneration', and his latest book 'Carbon, The Book of Life'—an incredible book that came out in 2025 and masterfully distills endless planetary wisdom into simple truths we all need to hear. (I included it in 'The Very Best Books I Read in 2025.')
Grab a seat between us and let's talk about how nature cooperates, why fighting climate change is the wrong metaphor, why the climate crisis is a human crisis, how jargon disconnects, and what decades of activism have taught Paul about being human.
This conversation with a sage of sages stuck with me and I think it'll stick with you.
Let's flip the page into Chapter 157 now ...
Chapter 157: Paul Hawken junks jargon to jolt generations
View full transcript here
CONNECT with Paul
Paul’s 3 Books
First book (22:28)
Second book (1:04:20)
Third book (1:20:55)
WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER
Quotes
“I feel like there's so much rhetoric, which is sort of, it doesn't obfuscate, but it's jargonizing the situation. And jargon is a good way to actually occlude understanding as opposed to generate understanding.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“Climate change is a silly term.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“The living word is extraordinarily cooperative. Cooperative actually is kind of a small term for what they're doing because exquisitely interactive and symbiotic is probably the better description of the living world.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“I would never say I am an environmentalist... I understand what why people use that word, you know, but it's also a word of separation.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“Everyone is an environmentalist because they live in the environment.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“We need to go tell it on the mountain because we are listening to the wrong voices..” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“I always saw the outside as sort of sacred, you know, as a sanctuary, and the inside as a danger zone.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“I love to share, but not in sort of a didactic, you know, prose style, you know, where listen up, you know, I got something to tell you.... It's really the opposite, which is, you know, trying to open up areas for the reader that invoke or evoke really a sense of wonder and curiosity.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“You could spend 12 lifetimes and you wouldn’t really understand what is outside.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“The only remarkable thing about me, I believe, is that I am intensely curious.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“The ingredients of a great walk are that you're finding your way.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“All life is flow.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“I think when you're walking, you know, you're entering into a non static relationship. And most of our relationship with nature is static.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“You know, the fact is climate, uh, you can't fight it. You can't combat it. You can't tackle it, you know? And so what you've done, you know, is other climate, you've made a thing that you can do things to fix, you know, it's another male verb, you know? Um, and, uh, and that thinking is the cause of global warming, othering nature, othering people, obviously, othering resources, othering the earth that we live upon, you know? And then, you know, and then it just goes out there to, oh, we're going to fix the climate. We're going to do this to the climate, you know, we're going to combat it, tackle it, you know, there's these sort of heroic imagery of complete nonsense because the biosphere and the climate are absolutely inseparable.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“The climate movement has failed, no question about it.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“We have a crisis. I couldn't agree more. It's not a climate crisis. It's a human crisis. A relationship, understanding, greed, violence, power. You know, there's a whole list there, you know, that's the crisis. Global warming is the symptom.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“And for me, when you read something like that, at least for me, anyway, so far, you know, your brain cells change. In other words, your capacity to understand to speak to parse to discern changes, because it's coming right at you and going into your, you know, your neurons.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“And I just suggest that there's another way of looking at time and our passage, and that can be imbued with grace and kindness and patience and understanding as to what other people are experiencing.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“So if we're here for our short time, it's a very short time that we are in our body. Uh, who do we want to be during that time?” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“I have no advice on being a parent... My kids are really amazing and I don’t take any credit for that.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“We're creating ultra-processed children. Because they have to be smarter and better and they have to get ahead of thinking in junior high school, junior high school about what universities and colleges they're going to apply to.) I mean, getting ready and studying those universities and who gets in, who doesn't, and all that sort of stuff. I mean, there goes childhood.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
“We have too much. There's too much money and that it's kind of like stepping on a fork, you know, a rake really just hits us. We have the money and now we pay and pay and pay not in monetary terms, but in so many other ways in terms of our life and our relationships to whether it's our parents or children or others. And it's very difficult to be wealthy in this culture at this time. And that sounds like a ridiculous term because everybody's trying to be more wealthy. But I think that actually it works against us.” — Paul Hawken | 3 Books Podcast
Show Notes
‘Carbon: The Book of Life’ by Paul Hawken
‘The Next Economy’ by Paul Hawken
‘Regeneration’ by Paul Hawken
‘Infinite Jest’ by David Foster Wallace
‘Why craft matters now more than ever’ TED Talk by Jonathan Fields
