Paul Hawken’s Carbon is about a decade in the making. Perhaps the book’s long gestation is why it feels so familiar,
Other recent carbon-centred works include ecologist Dag Olev Hessen’s The Many Lives of Carbon, astrobiologist Robert Hazen’s Symphony in C and a biography of carbon from French philosophers of science, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Sacha Loeve. Not long ago, an “unauthorised biography” of carbon screened on the ABC, starring Australian actor Sarah Snook as the voice of the element herself.
