[.ca] The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need (ISBN 0679314652)

The Book We Need:
I'll let the Globe & Mail review say it all: Published in the Books section, October 6, 2007 THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOPE A Tour of the World We Need By Chris Turner Random House Canada, 480 pages A year of living optimistically Review by EVAN OSENTON Bad news might sell books and turn science authors into global celebrities, but it isn't particularly good at changing minds, motivating people or inspiring hope. It certainly isn't convincing our species to give up our game of ecological Russian roulette. Chris Turner would know: In the mid-1990s, he took a summer job for Greenpeace as a door-to-door canvasser in Kingston, Ont. His specialty - indeed, he notes, most environmental groups' specialties then and now - was bad news. Doom. Gloom. Lurid descriptions of bleached coral and starving polar bears, cracked hardpan and skyrocketing asthma rates, rivers of glowing Chinese factory effluent and mutilated seal pups. On one doorstep, Turner recalls a seven-year-old girl "so consumed with worry over the planet's health, \oher parents\c told me, that sometimes it made her stomach ache too much to eat." Mostly, Turner remembers people's weary indifference to his spiel. Fast-forward a decade. Chris Turner is a writer of national renown, fresh off his bestselling, lushly enthusiastic Planet Simpson (quite possibly the most comprehensive book published on the most important pop-cultural phenomenon of the past 20 years). Turner never quite stopped believing the bad news, but, like so many of us, he'd become overwhelmed and moved on. And then his wife gave birth to a baby girl. In a moment of awful clarity (fittingly, while on a hill overlooking the oil-company spires of downtown Calgary), the bad news came back, ringing truer and more urgently than ever. "It makes me positively ache in places I didn't know I had until \omy daughter\c was born that I can't make her any promises," Turner writes. "I can't even tell her with any confidence that there is a future with sufficient durability to serve as a drawing board for her lifelong dreams. There's a legitimate possibility that she'll face calamity on a scale I can't imagine, on a scale beyond anything humanity's ever seen. This is a prospect that makes it hard to think, makes my vision cross with angry, impotent tears. It terrifies me." Turner realized he couldn't return to doom and gloom; he owed his daughter far better. And so of his terror and ache and love was born The Geography of Hope. For one year, Turner and family criss-crossed the globe in search of people living sustainably; people living or building, in the words of Small is Beautiful author E. F. Schumacher, "a lifestyle designed for permanence." Turner decided he needed to find eco-pioneers and assess their ideas, however strange, unexpected or heretical to the modern economic order. He needed reassurance that his little girl had a future, that she needn't endure Armageddon or de-evolve. Indeed, Turner wasn't interested in promising his daughter "traditional" sustainability, a future of animal skins, foraged roots and yurts. His criterion: "Would this - this place, this machine, this social system or way of life - be capable of continuing on its present course for the foreseeable future without exhausting the planet's ability to sustain human life at something like the current population and quality of life?" So off Turner went to Samsoe, a remarkable Danish island completely free of fossil-fuel dependency, part of a country that could be totally powered by renewables within a generation, and whose ease of transition is truly inspiring. Turner visited Germany, where it turns out sustainable housing comes with no great discomfort or cost, and where investors in solar energy - whether altruistic or seeking riches - are realizing giddy returns. He saw exponential growth in Indian micro-scale solar, witnessed Muhammad Yunus's micro-credit banking revolution in action, and confronted the argument that India and China will necessarily repeat all of North America's mistakes (and negate all of our hypothetical environmental progress). Off to Southeast Asia, to tank up at a hydrogen "filling station," witness mountains of cassava waste reclaimed as biofuel and help rural Thais and displaced Burmese generate run-of-river hydroelectricity. Hope abounds, it seems, even in decadent North America: in Seaside, Fla., and suburban Denver's bold expression of New Urbanism; in Taos, N.M.'s revolution in intuitive architecture; in the form of Interface, one of the world's largest carpet manufacturers and the first fully sustainable multinational corporation. Turner even found hope near home, in Alberta's Drake Landing, North America's first solar-powered subdivision, and in the massive wind turbines spreading across southern Alberta's foothills like so many snow-white pinwheels. The author's visit to energy activist Amory Lovins's Rocky Mountain Institute alone could have inspired a thick volume. Currently working with Wal-Mart to bring massive improvements in efficiency to their truck fleets, and with the U.S. military to integrate lightweight carbon fibre into (now hyper-inefficient) military vehicles, Lovins, co-founder of RMI, is perhaps Turner's best evidence that a hopeful future isn't the exclusive dream (or right) of any one group, and that a sustainable future will only work once we engage literally everyone in solution-making. Chris Turner does his daughter proud. The Geography of Hope makes an overwhelming case for an abundant, even limitless amount of hope for humanity. The book is a captivating travelogue, the writing marked by piquant observations and raw, emotional engagement with farmers, radicals, business people, activists and indigenous people the world over. And Turner should find a broad audience; his stories are full of references to his love of driving, cold beer, the Big Lebowski and The Simpsons. The Geography of Hope might stimulate an interest in sustainability among readers who otherwise fear "environmental books." At any rate, Turner has helped push us ever closer to Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point, after which sustainable living should, once again, become second nature to our species. Without naming names, Turner mentions thick volumes of environmental doom and gloom he read in researching his book in which "the vivid horror, not the dim hope stuck" (we all have a favourite culprit). The Geography of Hope merely aspires to be Turner's "scrapbook from a year spent living optimistically." Doom and gloom's insights, eloquence and terrible truths aside, I know from which set of stories I'd rather my children assembled a vision of their future. Evan Osenton is the books editor at Alberta Views magazine and a former honour student in the have-I-got-some-terrible-news-for-you school of persuasion.

What would Homer do:
I have no background in environmentalism or connection to the author. As a general reader I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it informative, inspiring and entertaining in equal parts. An unequivocal five stars! The author is a journalist and disillusioned environmental activist. He is also a new father, and, concerned for his daughter's future, decided to do a global survey of existing, practical methods of achieving environmental sustainability. His perspective is what makes this book so refreshing: tired of the mainstream environmental movement's two main weapons of guilt and apocalyptic predictions, he searches for not just the means but the inspiration to change the way the world's resources are used. I found this practical, hopeful approach much more compelling than the doom-and-gloom, armchair analyst approach of, say, George Monbiot's Heat. Potential readers should keep in mind that the author's previous opus was Planet Simpson, an exploration of the cultural significance of an animated cartoon series. This is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it informs his writing with a pop-culture sensibility that makes for entertaining asides and a contemporary grasp of how cultural fashions evolve. On the other hand, the one time I felt we may be getting a little too much information was in the final chapter. There he describes how the epiphany of embracing environmental sustainability occurred to him at a Seattle Lebowski Fest, a cult-like celebration of a movie that he admits to "only begin to understand after the fifth viewing". Presumably fatherhood changed his priorities, and rather than strain his credibility, I found this geeky anecdote disarming. A Greenpeace diatribe this is not.

Smart, stylish and inspiring:
Chris Turner is one of the best non-fiction writers in the country, as anyone whos read his entertaining first book, Planet Simpson, or his work in various magazine and newspapers knows. His latest book, The Geography of Hope, came out last fall, and its a stunner. Along with the stylish writing weve come to expect from him, the research is truly impressive, but what really blew me away was how smart it is. Turner travelled the world to see examples of sustainable living: housing, buildings, communities, transportation systems and so on. Toward the end, he has a great and, bizarrely, relevant riff on The Big Lebowski, the brilliant Coen Brothers classic. Best of all, though, is the optimism that fills the book. The Geography of Hope is an inspiring look at the world as it could be. Yes we can, indeed.

At last, an environmental book that doesn't make me despair:
The trouble with the majority of writing about climate change and other environmental worries is that they make people think, "Oh, hell. It's too late anyway. Why even try to do anything?" The Geography of Hope is an antidote to this kind of thinking. I am now 54 years old, and when I was 20 years old or so, I devoured ecological jeremiads such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The trouble is, back then I actually thought my civilization was doomed to fall apart before the end of the 20th century. This, fortunately, didn't happen and in the meantime I got sidelined by matters too complex to detail here. Now at last I am returning to my environmental roots, but I find I simply no longer have the patience and strength to wade through dour predictions of ecological gloom and doom. Chris Turner's The Geography of Hope is the first book on this topic that I have felt glad to pick up, because it shows that it is really possible to put the brakes to the looming climate train wreck before it occurs and that sustainability is already within our grasp using existing technology, if only we would commit to it. How inspiring!