I walked toward the house carrying my third armload of books. Matt held the door open for me and asked, “How did you even get all these out of the library?”
Frankly, it’s not easy, but I have a system. I stack them in order by size, with the biggest on the bottom. I stretch my arms towards my knees to grasp my fingers around the bottom one, and I stretch my neck upwards to put my chin on the top. Then I walk as swiftly and steadily as possible towards the elevator.
I needed a lot of books. I was on a mission: I was looking for hope.
I’m worried about the climate. I need to know—Is there still time for us to make a difference? What do we have to do? Are we as a species up to the task? I’m scared.
To be fair, I didn’t bring home ALL the books the Seattle Public Library had on climate change. I didn’t need the terrifying ones that speculate on exactly how the world will end. I didn’t need the ones that summarize the science of climate change. I didn’t need the hand-wringing ones about how all this is our fault.
Once I got them home, I spread the books out on the floor of the guest room. I opened them, I scanned, I read. I categorized them into piles with yellow stickies naming the category: “Doom,” “Oil & Gas,” “Underlying Societal Issues,” “Solutions—Individual,” “Solutions—Societal,” “Nature,” “Climate Art.”
Philip joined me, wandering through my piles, commenting on my category names: “Any book that is about doom and not solutions is a waste of a book.”
Well, sure, but what if all there is is doom? I would want to know. I would want to make my choices with the time I have remaining on this earth knowing whether there is any point to working for a more sustainable world or if we’re just biding our time until an already-inevitable apocalypse.
Philip continued messing with my piles. He picked up We’re All Climate Hypocrites Now and started to ooze sarcasm, “That’s what I want to read about—how much I suck.” OK, yeah, how did that make it into my gigantic stack of books? That’s not exactly what I was looking for either.
I surveyed my piles. This isn’t a scientific review of the literature or anything—you heard about my “methods” after all, plus I was limited in the number of books I could bring home by the length of my arms—but I couldn’t help noting how large the solutions pile was. And, the “Solutions—collective” pile was much bigger than the “Solutions—individual” pile. Interesting. I picked up a book from the solutions pile and started reading.
Philip picked up Challenge Everything, written for youth, by Blue Sandford, with a focus on solutions. He moved himself to the guestroom bed and started to read, sarcasm silenced for a while.

You know what I learned? There are solutions to this wicked climate problem. There are people writing books about those solutions. There are people and governments doing those solutions. We have more solutions open to us when we act collectively than when we act as individuals. And it’s definitely not too late.
It’s not too late, but now is the time to act. This might be the only time.
Now my worrying that we’ll never get it together as a species to save this planet feels like a waste of time. It’s just one more thing that keeps me from finding my place in the climate justice movement.
I start to wonder: In this post-COVID, post-social media, isolated, divided, contentious world, how do we move ourselves from climate despair to hope? The kind of hope that helps us seek and find the places where our unique skills and interests can do the most good? The kind of hope that leads us to work together to make the changes that not only save the planet but create a better, kinder, fairer world in the process.
That’s the book I want to write. I think there are a lot of us worrying that we’re leaving our children a dying world and not knowing whether there is something we can do to help, or if there is even any point in trying.
So, I’ve started writing. You can follow along with that process here. I’ll post bits and pieces from the book writing, and I would love to hear what you think. Please comment on these posts! Have I written something that makes you think, “well, yeah, but, what about…” Tell me about it! Do I use a particularly persuasive or not persuasive argument? Tell me before the bad stuff ends up in my book!
Oh, yeah. I understand titles change in the publishing process, but, for now, I’m calling it A Climate Pessimist Finds Hope.
Much more to come, but for now, I’ll leave you with a thought from the guest room floor, surrounded by books, with a dog and a boy: When you start to look, the solutions are there.
Looking forward to reading more!!
We're back in the 70s sorry to say....my generation thought we would be able to "fix" everything.... you are bringing hope back to us :)