It's official: Climate expert says climate is not the crisis, ft. Paul Hawken
Why must we reframe the "crisis"?
Hello dear one! Been feeling a bit burnt out and struggling lately with focus and motivation to “produce,” so apologies for the delay in getting this newsletter out to you.
May we use this as a gentle reminder that we are not machines, and may we honor our shifting phases and seasons whenever possible ~
This in no way reflects how excited I was to publish my interview with renowned climate expert Paul Hawken last week. So if my brief introduction below speaks to you, I hope you get to enjoy our full discussion!
It's official. The climate expert Paul Hawken says that the climate is not the crisis.
I know. This statement could easily be pixelated, decontextualized, and blown up as some climate denialist commentary. But it’s not. It’s actually an invitation for us to go deeper.
Here, I like to turn to cortisol in our bodies as an analogy.
When this stress hormone in my body is elevated, the cortisol itself is not the problem. It’s not something for me to fight against. It's a part of my body. It’s a symptom, a language, an expression of my body asking to be listened to.
As Paul emphasizes:
“Climate is the expression of the atmosphere, our relationship to the biosphere. The problem with the term ‘climate crisis’ is that it puts it out there somewhere, as if it’s happening to us.
I'm not saying that people aren’t being affected; people are being affected, of course.
But I'm saying that as a mental construct, we are using the mindset to cause the problem. And the problem is caused by humanity objectifying the living world and selling it to the highest bidder — including people, by the way, not just animals, but forests, minerals, whales, and so forth. Humans, in the Atlantic Passage, for example.
So that is a 500-year history of settler-colonial objectification, and seeing things as “other” that you could take, have, capture, sell, or bring back to Europe, or to the United States or whatever, to make money, amass capital and more.
When we use the word climate crisis, or climate change, we use words like “fight”, “tackle” or “combat” climate. Like, really? It is simply a manifestation of this relationship between the biosphere and the atmosphere.
That's what we have to pay attention to. That requires the understanding of the inseparability between human beings and the living world, as opposed to something that is out there that we can fix.”
The ways that we understand and frame the causes of a problem are crucial, because they influence what we might conceive as remedies.
In the analogy of elevated cortisol levels, the deeper cause is stress. And the deeper cause of that stress… could be many different factors combined.
But for me to be able to meaningfully address the elevated cortisol levels, I cannot fixate on the chemistry of my body as the crisis itself. Any quick-fix pills to manipulate and suppress my stress hormones, leading it to appear more “balanced,” would do nothing to alleviate the underlying stressors themselves. All it would achieve is a sort of numbing, avoidance, or distraction — a refusal to actually listen and respond.
In a similar way, fixating on the chemical imbalance of the “climate crisis” as the problem itself allows for co-optation and “systemic bypassing.” Rather than healing communities and ecosystems, they give way for what's reductively framed as the issue to be capitalized off of, again and again.
“The climate issue has had a technological capitalistic takeover, as if it couldn’t happen unless business fixes things. […]
Direct air capture has attracted billions of dollars of money, and is a technology that's going to suck air and take out the carbon. […] I'm laughing because it's so wildly ridiculous in terms of physics, and this is not my opinion. […]
It takes so much energy to suck the energy down, to separate the carbon from the CO₂ , to liquefy it, and to pump it with huge machines. And they say, ‘We're going to use renewable energy.’ Well, renewable energy isn't renewable in that direct sense. It takes energy to make solar panels and wind turbines. It doesn't come for free. And they wear out.
Lots of solar panels are now in a landfill in California. Nobody knows what to do with them. It costs more money to recycle them than their value.
If you're using a lot of energy to do something, you're creating entropy. So this idea that we're going to use entropy to fix entropy in the past is like saying, ‘We have this great idea. We're going to make cows out of cow patties.’”
When I first learned about Paul’s work a decade ago, his views seemed to represent a part of the mainstream climate discourse of that time.
Paul tells me that his perspectives have changed a lot over the years, and based on our conversation, he seems to now name colonial-capitalist relations as a deeper crisis — rather than feeding into the simplistic quick-fix pushed by liberal establishments to just swap fossil fuels for “renewable” energy while questioning nothing else.
This means that Paul’s views no longer reflect mainstream environmentalism. So I do wonder if he’s met his own toned-down version of what happened to Greta Thunberg — that as soon as she started naming more systemic issues stemming from colonial-capitalism as the problem, many liberal media, corporations and organizations stopped associating with and platforming her.
Personally, after wading deeper, and deeper in climate spaces, I’m now much less interested in what form of energy we should “switch” to next to “fight climate change,” than in why the global energy grid is continuing to grow (i.e., it is not transitioning, but expanding, per “jevon's paradox”) — all the while not actually feeding more calories nor nutrition for most, not improving life quality nor public health for most, and actually exacerbating global injustice and wealth disparities.
I explored some of this in “Beyond energy supply talk.” But I now frame the “climate crisis” as a sort of relational crisis because the more that a place-based community's networks of care are severed and pried open, the more energy-intensive it becomes in order to sustain itself. More on this another time.
For now, I invite you to tune into my full discussion with Paul Hawken (Green Dreamer EP452) here or via Spotify, Apple Podcast, or any podcast app, and be sure to check out his latest book, Carbon: The book of life.
And if you are a supporting subscriber, you can also watch the extended, bonus video version of our interview here.
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“To identify, name, and emphasize nouns is to separate things. Because what you're saying is, it’s not this, it's not this...So then how do they connect?
That isn't the province of science on a larger level. Because if you're trying to get peer review, you're trying to discover something... And discovery means what? But it's not about looking at it as a system.
The difference between (noun-heavy) Western languages and (verb-based) Indigenous languages is the fact that a verb is always about a relationship, so it's about A to B. If language is about relationships, it doesn’t separate people, places, and things. It’s inclusive.” — Paul Hawken, Green Dreamer EP452
Invitations into reflection & action:
Riffing off of my personal waxing and waning, I invite you to take a moment to really tune into your body and to listen to any of its signs and expressions. What do you sense? And how can you honor those needs or feelings just a little more?
As a creative inquiry, I invite you to choose an issue often presented as “the crisis” (such as climate change) and to go deeper with it. What is one known thing that contributed to it? What came before that? What helped cause that thing that came before? How much deeper can you trace these roots, and what do they tell you about the relationship between “cause” and “symptom”?
Dive deeper…
Learn more about ~alchemize~: radical imagination for collective transformation
Ferris Jabr: Re-rooting science in the aliveness of the Earth (Ep442)
John P. Clark: Dreaming of liberation and a world beyond domination (Ep302)
What’s next?
My round-two conversation with Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta is now published in the podcast feed, but I'll be writing about my reflections on it in the next newsletter.
Also, just a heads up: I'm doing my first “Substack live” interview on July 3rd, 2pm Pacific time with Dr. Rupa Marya, who was recently fired by the UCSF hospital for her advocacy against hospitals in Gaza being bombed. Would love for you to join us! x
Look forward to listening. I absolutely loved “Carbon” and his reframing of decarbonisation and recarbonisation and centring biodiversity and carbon cycles.
Crisis is human centric. Climate is Earth relative.