Hope Dies Last

Quoted below are excerpts from the concluding chapter of Alan Wiesman's, “Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future” (Dutton Press, 2024). We hope you'll read the whole book!

"We breathe the same air, eat from the same sources, share the same turf, need the same water [as all other living creatures]. Once we humans were just another animal, living off the savannas and shores . . . we still do—and we believe otherwise at our own peril. But—a big but—we’re now so distracted by our planet’s uncorked climate blowing away our rooftops, firebombing our forests, mauling our coasts, and scorching our crops that, too often, we forget that one of the biggest phase shifts in Earth’s history, a global holocaust against life itself, is also underway.

Like two vipers coiled in a deadly double-helix, the unbridled climate and mass extinction are "one indivisible crisis—a global health emergency,” as the world’s 300 top medical journals wrote in masse to the UN in 2023. Meaning:

• A third of humanity’s food supply doomed, should pollinators succumb.
• Protein famines after 2 degrees C, when virtually all corals die along with fish and shellfish who depend on the reefs.
• Tropical plants for our medicines withered.
• Monocultured crops, their genetic stocks extinct except for a few frozen relics in seed banks, defenseless from pandemics.

As all that happens, tempers shorten and violence heightens—any police blotter can correlate heat with mayhem. Wars break out over dwindling water. Refugees flee parched lands, stoking fears of hungry invading hordes, emboldening dictators and vigilantes to stop them. Like thawing glaciers, laws melt.

As pernicious new human pathogens race around a teeming, warming planet, governments like the US and the Dutch print extra money to sustain millions of quarantined citizens, quenching panic but inflating their economies. Even medical miracles that quash viruses can’t cure grocery sticker shock, so angry, anxious people turn to autocrats who promise to revive an affordable, mythical past when no ravenous foreigners threatened to steal their jobs. The easiest way for the autocrats to fuel their reign is to drill more, so temperatures mount even faster. Fires spread, winds roar, rivers surge, coasts shrink, species fade, and panic returns.

Eventually people overthrow self-serving, inept demagogues, but it’s a changed world. Amid the madness, the Center for Biological Diversity’s ecologists and lawyers keep on, submitting new candidates for protection. . . . It’s not just about them. Every weed, snail, or slug they shelter also means saving land and waters where they dwell.

The US still isn’t a signatory to the UN’s 30x30 goal of conserving at least 30 percent of lands and waters by 2030—the biggest conservation plan ever contemplated: more than doubling global protection of terrestrial, inland water, and coastal regions, and quadrupling marine protection. But in 2021, to circumvent entrenched fossil-fueled politics blocking participation, the US simply began its own 30x30 plan, entitled America the Beautiful. . . .  [but then, after publication of this book in 2024, came the Trump 2 administration and recession of practically all of the US environmental protection and land, water, wildlife conservation regulations and programs]. . . . 

The 30 billion tons of CO2 we still emit annually has us on a trajectory for a 4.3 degrees C (temperature) increase by the end of the century, unless business as usual radically changes.

It must. It comes down to two simple things humanity can do to rein in both runaway temperatures and the loss of at least a third of all species—likely more, as each loss cascades into many others.

Stop running modern life on ancient carbon, and let forests return.
. . . The alternative is we lose control of the situation. . . .  (S)o does it really matter that more than two-thirds of all birds now are chickens we raise? Life seems to go on, right?

It’s a question that’s unanswerable until it’s too late, when we find out the hard way. “No jobs on a dead planet,” notes Center for Biological Diversity co-founder Peter Galvin, reminding us that it’s best to err on the side of caution. It’s never smart to see how many foundation bricks you can remove before the building falls on you.

Either way, the biodefenders’ work will have been worth it. If humans aren’t among the species that survive into this planet’s next hotter phase, some percentage of the flora and fauna they’ve managed to load into the ark will replenish the Earth, just as in five previous extinctions—like the birds, who, against all hope, survived Chicxulub.

Or, if we’re lucky enough to be among them, they’ll be our companions. And our food."
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May we thrive together.   NOTE: YOU MAY ALSO WANT TO WATCH THIS PRESENTATION BY AUTHOR Alan Weisman: