HOPE DIES LAST

A wide-ranging look at visionaries who are working on ways to lessen the worst effects of climate change.

Having explored what the world would look like without humans, Weisman pays homage to the scientists, engineers, activists, and others who through efforts local and global are trying to undo harms our species has wrought. Weisman opens with an Iraqi engineer who, convinced that “impossible often masks a lack of imagination,” has helped rebuild the critically important marshes at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates river system, possibly the biblical Garden of Eden. That vision of paradise may seem odd in a place now among the hottest on earth, owing to a warming regional climate, but the engineer broke through an embankment built under Saddam Hussein and did the job on his own hook. Soon, Weisman writes, “the rehydrated marshes were bright green,” alive with long-absent birds. It’s just one of many success stories chronicled in this impeccably written and thoroughly inspiring narrative. Oddly, some of those stories have hidden traps: The development of chemical fertilizers and of the Green Revolution kept billions of people from starving but added billions more to the planet, leading Weisman to note, “Too much of a good thing is simply that: too much.” Some forces for good are perhaps unexpected—the U.S. Department of Defense, for one, which, as one researcher notes, is “willing to invest in very strange new ideas.” One strange idea: “growing food from thin air and microbes.” Another: tackling rising sea levels by enlisting cartoonists to simplify scenarios for policymakers. Yet another: drilling deep beneath the earth with a laserlike tool to tap into geothermal energy. It’s mad-science stuff on its face but, Weisman assures, it all offers hope, and “hope is a prerequisite for…courage.”

Lively portraits of champions staving off the end of the world—or so we hope.