On Friday, October 10, the Green Gettysburg Book Club met again on Zoom to discuss the last three chapters of Carbon by Paul Hawken and to begin to think about what to read next. More on that at the end of this report.
Chapter 13, “Dark Earth,” explores the life of soil. Hawken begins with an epigraph by Jill Clapperton: “When you are standing on the ground, you are standing on the roof of another world” (155). And this other world seems to run by a different set of rules than the one we are familiar with above ground. “How could a teaspoon of soil contain six miles of mycelia,” Hawken asks (155). How do you “study a system where there are no individuals,” no organisms that can be fully understood in isolation, apart from a set of complicated connections with other life forms (155). Hawken goes on to argue that although human beings can add fertilizers and pesticides to soil they cannot create it. “Only the inhabitants of soil create soil” he says (156). And when scientists insert the right kinds of microphones into soil, they can record a series of chips, trills, rasps and other sounds that indicate there is quite a lot going on down there (166).
“Untranslated World,” chapter 14, examines several locations where re-wilding has taken place including the Knepp Estate in Sussex, England, and the Southern Carpathian Mountains in Romania. At the Knepp Estate in 1999, the owners Charlie Burrell and Isabell Tree, both naturalists, decided to let the 3500 acre farm, that was not productive because of its dense clay soil, return to a natural state. “They brought in animals closely related to species that once populated the UK and Europe…. [including] fallow deer, Old English longhorns, Exmoor ponies, and Tamwoth sows with piglets” (171). In Romania, the European wood bison, known as winset, was reintroduced in the Tarcu Mountains. In both cases, the surprising takeaway is how quickly biodiverse and stable ecosystems were reestablished, according to Hawken. Animals, he argues, are critically important to natural systems that flourish and are fully sustainable over time (178-180).
Chapter 15, “Conscious,” begins with a fitting epigraph from the thirteenth century Sufi poet Rumi: “Sit, be still and listen, for you are drunk, and we are at the edge of the roof” (184). One of the main points of the chapter (and the book, really) is that “The natural world is an antidote to the disarray and madness that infest the communications that surround us” (185). “What does it mean to be a human being at a time when the fabric of life is being shredded?,” Hawken asks. “Can communities of action that are compassionate [and] effective emerge in the growing chaos?” (190). “The cascade of troubling information about the future is staggering and dispiriting,” he says. “Most of us turn down the dial to function.” But, he continues while quoting Barry Lopez, “‘We feel ourselves on the verge of something vague but extraordinary. Something big is in the wind and we feel it’” ((192).
The damage already done is quite real and enormous, but those who are most bereft, Hawken goes on to say, are those who don’t allow themselves to feel grief at the staggering losses, “for grief is a measure of one’s love” (190). And, quoting the poet Mary Oliver, he reminds us that “a life without love [is] not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied” (190).
“The living world,” he concludes, “is your best friend. Where you are is where you are most effective. The power to act does not lie elsewhere…. The movement to restore life on Earth is not a repair job….” It will require “an entirely new experience of self…. Our intention and reward are the same: to experience and express [our] irrevocable connection to all beings. It is our only way forward” (190).
