Hope dies last Visionary people across the world, fighting to find us a future

Review by Booklist Review

Even the least news savvy among us know that our present world is facing a host of monumental challenges: environmental, economic, social, and more. And the more we learn about these challenges, the more hopeless it seems. Weisman (Countdown, 2013) has written a book examining those issues as well as profiling a number of people around the world who are refusing to give up hope and are tackling potentially apocalyptic problems. For example, there is environmentalist Azzam Alwah, who is taking what he learned reviving the desiccated Iraqi marshes to revive the ecologies of a rapidly desertifying globe. Molly Jahn is devising new methods of food production that won't result in environmental collapse. Botanist Ron Colman is trying to reverse the rapid extinction afflicting the planet's flora. Weisman's detailed examination of their and others' work shows that there are paths to solving the world's largest problems. The reader will come away with a renewed belief that hope for the future need not be lost.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. Agent: Stuart Krichevsky, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (Apr.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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