Hope Dies Last
Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
One of Heatmap's 18 Climate Books to Read in 2025
The award-winning environmental journalist’s extraordinary, long-awaited portrait of hope and resilience as we face a fractured and uncertain future
In this profoundly human and moving narrative, the bestselling author of The World Without Us returns with a book ten years in the making: a study of what it means to be a human on the front lines of our planet’s existential crisis. His new book, Hope Dies Last, is a literary evocation of our current predicament and the core resolve of our species against the most precarious odds we have ever faced.
To write this book, Weisman traveled the globe, witnessing climate upheaval and other devastations, and meeting the people striving to mitigate and undo our past transgressions. From the flooding Marshall Islands to revived wetlands in Iraq, from the Netherlands and Bangladesh to the Korean DMZ and to cities and coastlines in the U.S. and around the world, he has encountered the best of humanity battling heat, hunger, rising tides, and imperiled nature. He profiles the innovations of big thinkers—engineers, scientists, conservationists, economists, architects, and artists—as they conjure wildly creative, imaginative responses to an uncertain, ominous future. At this unprecedented point in history, as our collective exploits on this planet may lead to our own undoing and we could be among the species marching toward extinction, they refuse to accept defeat.
Hope Dies Last fills a crucial gap in the global conversation: Having reached a point of no return in our climate confrontation, how do we feel, behave, act, plan, and dream as we approach a future decidedly different from what we had expected?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this upbeat report, journalist Weisman (Countdown) profiles individuals working to make the world a better place, most of whom focus on environmental issues. For instance, Weisman describes the efforts of Marc Collins Chen, French Polynesia's minister of tourism, to cope with rising sea levels by developing "modular floating neighborhoods that could be linked together into villages," and how Spanish chef Ángel León's quest for more sustainable food sources led him to develop tuna-head osso buco, crisped moray eel skin, and other dishes that make use of fish parts that are usually discarded. Weisman displays a novelist's flair for characterization, as when he writes of Molly Jahn, a biologist working to create microbe-based food as a backup for crop failures: "A huge mirthful cackle... unexpectedly bursts from this slender woman with loose blond hair, dark blue eyes aflutter behind big glasses." The vibrant portraits serve as a rousing testimony to human ingenuity and perseverance, perhaps best exemplified by the standout story of civil engineer Azzam Alwash. After unsuccessfully pleading with conservation groups and government agencies to resuscitate marshlands drained by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Alwash resorted to using shovels and an excavator to break through Hussein's dams and restore that ecosystem. This inspires.
