David Geselbracht’s Stories of Action in an Age of Global Crisis is an important and inspiring book that shows us why it’s not the time to despair
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Climate Hope: Stories of Action in an Age of Global Crisis
David Geselbracht | Douglas & McIntyre
$24.95 | 248pp.
We are all drowning in bad news these days, from Trumpian tariff threats and imperialist impulsiveness to floods, fires, storms, rising seas, melting glaciers and other climate-change disasters. It is hard not to succumb to the cascade of evil news and the attendant despair and media-induced torpor it creates.
B.C. lawyer and environmental journalist David Geselbracht says that now is not the time to despair. Indeed, his new book, Climate Hope, is an argument for hope and the enthusiastic engagement hope can inspire. The author opens his book with a sorrowful quote from a young climate protester who believes that, “We’ve gone beyond the point of no return,” and the rest of the book is an attempt to refute that hopeless verdict.
Not that Geselbracht is blind to the evidence the young protester might have cited to support his despair. He knows that the chances of success for the Paris Accord target of limiting increases in global average temperature to 1.5 C are vanishingly slim, and that the more likely increase of 2 C will accelerate the degradation of the global climate system, exposing 420 million more people to extreme heat waves, 61 million more to extreme drought and up to 270 million more to worsening water scarcity. (And this dire prediction came before Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Accords, a move that will be celebrated in the board rooms of big coal and petroleum but mourned on the ground for the human misery and climate doom it will cause.)
But even in the face of impending climate disruption, Geselbracht urges us not to surrender. He points to notable, albeit partial success by states like Denmark in reducing their carbon footprints, and to the dedicated scientists like Canada’s too-little-known pioneer of glacier studies Mary Vaux, and to gallant labour leaders like Roz Foyer, general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, who insists that climate change is a life-and-death issue for organized labour.
He celebrates recently launched litigation in which young people are suing to demand that the dangers posed by climate change to their generation be addressed. He points to religious leaders like Victoria’s Matt Humphrey and his Wild Church, informed by the Oxford Declaration on Global warming, witnessing, worshipping and acting to love and steward what they see as divine creation. If they don’t despair, he argues, neither should we.
This is an important and inspiring book. Highly, highly recommended