Dissolving Certainties

March 22, 2025 7:04 AM

To better understand "the riddles and luminosity of life," Paul Hawken chose to look at the flow of life through the lens of carbon, and the result is a a beautiful, hopeful, and inspiring merger of varying forms of knowledge that provides a welcome bit of relief from "the labyrinth of anxiety, ignorance, and fear the world bequeaths."

"Merging observational Indigenous wisdom and Western science into a different understanding of our place on Earth," he writes, "certainties are dissolving. They are being replaced by unfathomable complexity."

posted by criticalyeast (2 comments total)

You are one-fifth carbon.

And carbon doesn't grown on trees, you know. A lot of time and work is required to produce carbon. And it has to be imported from very far away.
posted by Lemkin at 7:27 AM on March 22 [1 favorite]

The International Monetary Fund calculated the value of a blue whale at $2 million—a so-called nature-based solution, a term that implies we can fix the natural world the same way we are attempting to repair the atmosphere. What could the monetization of a whale possibly mean?

[imf:] conservative estimates put the value of the average great whale, based on its various activities, at more than $2 million, and easily over $1 trillion for the current stock

🐳

previously
posted by HearHere at 8:52 AM on March 22