I bought Alan Weisman’s Hope Dies Last in a bookstore despite knowing nothing about it and based purely on the title. Four hundred pages later, I sat down with the author to talk about the miraculous accomplishments and resilience of the book’s protagonists, many of whom are working to solve humanity’s most intractable ecological problems. On this week’s episode of Mongabay’s podcast, Weisman details the people and places he visited in reporting the book, spanning many nations across the world. The best-selling author of The World Without Us has a global network of contacts, who helped him discover the people that made it into the new book’s pages. “I’ve got a lot of tentacles out there,” he says. The new book’s impetus was an accumulation of despair at the state of the world and how humanity treats it. “I started this book because I was really, really, really depressed about how I saw systems breaking down,” Weisman says. The ecological pressures he refers to — human-driven climate change, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and all of the cascading ripple effects that stem from these — left him hunting for hope. “I was worried that there was no way that we were going to be able to overcome the relentlessness [of] the pressures that we put on the rest of the planet,” he says. But as he uncovered each story, Weisman’s tune changed, he tells me, explaining the ingenuity and bravery of the people and projects he visited that altered his perspective on…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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