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Stories
Sometimes the most radical thing we can do is pay attention.
At this month’s Resilience and Possibility gathering—and throughout his latest book, Carbon: The Book of Life—Paul Hawken invites us into a different kind of attention. Not a grasping for solutions, not a rush to interpret, but an invitation to notice. To recognize the intelligence of life itself. To remember that reverence can be rigorous—and that wonder might be the most powerful form of perception we have.
Paul’s talk—and his book—opens a field of possibility. A way of thinking and being that reveals just how alive and communicative the world around us already is. What follows isn’t a recap of his talk, but a handful of insights and questions that remain like mycelial threads: alive, connected, and quietly potent.
Paul writes with the precision of a scientist and the wonder of a poet. Like Mary Oliver or Carl Sagan, he reveals the astonishing intelligence embedded in the natural world—much of which we’ve failed or forgotten how to recognize.
We live surrounded by a vast information network—an ecological superintelligence—humming just beneath the surface of perception. Most of us have simply forgotten how to see it.
Plants, fungi, and ocean life are constantly transmitting and receiving information. Bioluminescence is used by 80% of marine species to communicate. Given that the ocean is the planet’s largest habitat, that means light is the language used by most life on Earth. Beneath a single acre of forestland, thirty million miles of fungal filaments stretch through the soil, forming networks that allow trees to share resources and information in ways scientists now compare to neural networks, what forestry scientist and conservationist Suzanne Simard calls the “Wood Wide Web.”.
Paul reminds us that observation is a gateway to awe—and awe is a pathway to knowledge and respect.
The more we learn, the more we are invited to ask: What else are we missing? What else might we learn to see?
Life is not silent. It sings in frequencies we’ve only just begun to recognize—chemical, acoustic, electric.
Plants, those quiet companions we often overlook, perceive the world in far more nuance than we do: they have twenty senses to our five. Some can detect vibration, moisture, even memory. Cyanobacteria—pond scum, by another name—are ancient architects of our breathable atmosphere. And while we marvel at pollination as a natural wonder, Paul reminds us (you can almost imagine his wry smile) that plants enjoy “remarkably good sex” from a distance, thanks to the wind and their insect allies.
There’s humor in life’s complexity. But also humility. Each revelation draws us to a profound question: what if intelligence isn’t rare but abundant and we’re just beginning to actually recognize it?
One of the questions Paul returns to: what if the Earth is a kind of brain? Not a centralized one, with a control center or ego—but a vast, distributed network of perception and response. Fungi make decisions. Forests coordinate blooming cycles, water use, and immune responses. Coral reefs pulse and synchronize. These are not isolated miracles of complexity—they are signatures of a kind of knowing we’ve barely begun to recognize.
And yet, we continue to look past it. The largest carbon capture facility in Texas—at a cost of over a billion dollars—will remove in a year what fungi can draw down in nineteen minutes.
Paul doesn’t dismiss innovation. But he does invite us to notice what we’ve overlooked. Our desire for control. Our blind trust in technology. He reminds us that Earth has been solving complex problems for billions of years—and that perhaps, it still knows how to heal itself better than we imagine.
Respect, not rescue, may be the path forward.
In Paul’s world, awe isn’t decorative, it’s directional.
It orients us away from dominion and toward devotion. It reminds us that though we are not the center of the story, we are inside something vast, unfinished, and astonishing.
Earth is asking something of us. Not in words, but in the flash of bioluminescent fish, in the arc of winged migration, in the slow unfurling of roots below the forest floor. Paul’s talk and book help us hear that call.
If we become quiet enough, if we remember how to listen and wonder, we might just hear it.
