My take

Although the chapter is titled Carbon, I can only interpret the name of the chapter as simply introducing the book of the same name, because it’s more about world views around climate change, and the global economies, industry, and entrepreneurs apparently accepting the current reality, but proposing fixes that don’t go anywhere near solving the real issue at hand.

Carbon flows through the four realms – biosphere, oceans, land and atmosphere

Paul suggests that the flow of carbon, like Ariadne’s thread, may help us escape the labyrinth of anxiety, ignorance and fear. I’m likely over-analyzing this metaphor, but given how complex the flow of carbon is, and the unfathomable complexity of life, the idea of retracing the flow of carbon backward makes my brain hurt.

Squirrel!
Ariadne’s thread – a ball of thread that Ariadne gave Theseus so he could retrace his steps out of the maze after he killed the Minotaur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariadne

Classic western reductionistic thinking

• Shallow certainties…Stubborn beliefs, petty details and irrelevant media
• Decarbonizing the $110 trillion global economy
• …the changing climate is seen as an engineering problem, not a crisis of behavior, consumption, or disconnection.
• The International Monetary Fund calculated the value of a blue whale at $2 million.

“We need a change of worldview from the fiction of human exceptionalism to the reality of our kinship and reciprocity with the living world”

Citizen Potawatomi biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer

“We are trying to design life on our own terms even while we are killing life on its terms.” “The trouble is that we don’t know the right way to behave towards life … in part because we can’t decide how other life-forms matter or even if they do.”

Bioethicist Melanie Challenger

“the dance of carbon, the constant regeneration inherent to life.”

Journalist Eric Roston

Technologies are needed that pass an essential threshold: Does a solution, stratagem, or proposal create more life or less?
What does more look like? Pure water, clean food, wildness, ancient forests, rich soil, abundant fisheries, vibrant cultures, honored people, human health, equity, education, quiet green cities, living wages, and dignified work.
(I reordered Paul’s list to put the natural world first, and all the human-related items at the end)

Cooperation and collaboration are far more effective than competition when the environment is changing and resources are scarce

Evolutionary biologist Peter Kropotkin

…each living creature a “little universe, formed of host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and numerous as the stars of heaven.”

Charles Darwin

New companions I encountered

• Corncrakes – A secretive and rare bird that lives in wet grassland, meadows and hayfields
• Smelt – small silvery, marine, freshwater or anadromous fish
• Calendula – genus of flowering plants in the daisy family

Age of “Enlightenment” (quotes added): Plants were things, forests were cellulose, fungi were food, soil was dirt, animals had no feelings, and nature was there to be extracted, commodified and sold.
A profound failure of imagination and perception.

Original inhabitants … see nature differently. The living world is a family, and as with all relations, a life that never repeats itself.

“May we be visited so thoroughly and met in wild places so overwhelmingly that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible.”

Philosopher and Yoruba poet Báyò Akómoláfé