A meditation on the beauty of carbon

There’s a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One in which a magazine’s advice columnist ‘the Guru Brahmin’ (in fact ‘two gloomy men and a bright young secretary’) receives yet another letter from a compulsive nail-biter: ‘What did we advise her last time?’ Mr Slump, the chain-smoking drunk, asks. ‘Meditation on the Beautiful.’ ‘Well, tell her to go on meditating.’

The opening of Paul Hawken’s Carbon gives the impression that it was dictated by the gloomy Mr Slump in response to a climate activist asking what he should think about the destruction of the planet. Tell him that ‘to better understand the riddles and luminosity of life’ he must ‘go far upstream, and look at the flow of life through the lens of carbon’. (That is, to understand the world and how it works, look at something almost completely abstract.) Or he must remember that carbon is ‘the narrator of lives born and lost, futures feared and imagined… The flow of carbon is a story that may allow us to escape the labyrinth of anxiety, ignorance and fear the world bequeaths’.

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It is clear then from the beginning that this is not to be the intriguing biography of carbon (‘the most misunderstood yet versatile element on the planet’) that the title suggests, grounded in science and research. In fact, it is not really a book about science at all. It is a series of essentially self-contained essays on the theme of the oneness of life, with all the predictable references to ‘other ways of knowing’ and the ‘ancient teachings’ of ‘Hindu or Buddhist cosmologies’. Carbon is merely a peg, being, as it is, ‘90 per cent of the molecules in interstellar clouds and 99 per cent of the 33 million substances on Earth’.