In an op-ed for The Boston Globe‘s weekend magazine, Alan Weisman shares a half dozen projects from around the world that give him hope for humanity’s capacity to confront and survive climate change. Alan has spent the last six years seeking out “ingenious, inspiring, visionary people—engineers, scientists, farmers, architects, Indigenous elders, Gen Z futurists, even the military—determined to find us a viable future.”
He reports on what he found in his latest book, Hope Dies Last, which was published on April 22 by Dutton. The examples he cites in his op-ed include a wide-ranging national sustainability plan in the Netherlands, solar WiFi micro-networks in Bangladesh, fusion-powered power plants in Massachusetts, and promising efforts to restore vital marshlands in what is thought to be the original Garden of Eden.
In an opinion piece in The Guardian, Homelands co-founder and University of Southern California journalism professor Sandy Tolan condemned the crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests by universities and the simultaneous crackdown on universities by the federal government.
Tolan, who has written two books about Palestine, has been the subject of threats for his writings and his public statements. He writes that the war in Gaza has provided the Trump administration with a pretext for its campaign to attack universities and stifle dissent. Read his article here.
Homelands board president Ruxandra (Rux) Guidi has been elected to the board of the influential Association of Independents in Radio (AIR).
Founded in 1988, AIR is a membership organization of more than 1,500 journalists, podcasters, story editors, audio producers, documentarians, engineers, sound designers, and media entrepreneurs around the world.
AIR provides mentorship, training, tools, and peer support, and develops resources for members and the audio industry, including a Guide to Fair Practice, sample contracts, and rates guides that advance fairness and equity across the industry. Its mentorship programs include New Voices, which forges connections and career paths for emerging talent and underrepresented voices in public media and narrative audio, and SoundPath, a digital training platform.
Ruxandra Guidi has been telling stories for more than two decades. In addition to being president of the board of Homelands Productions, she is a columnist for the 54-year-old nonprofit magazine High Country News. She also serves on the board of El Tímpano, a local reporting lab amplifying the voices of Oakland’s Latino and Mayan immigrants. As a former assistant professor of practice and assistant director of the Bilingual Journalism Program at the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism, Rux advised students and taught audio storytelling, feature writing and freelancing for years.
Currently, she is an independent editor and contributor to various podcasts and magazines, and she is working on her first novel. In 2018, she was awarded the Susan Tifft Fellowship for women in documentary and journalism by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and in 2023, she won a Soros Equality Fellowship to produce the anthology podcast, Happy Forgetting, about racial justice in America. Rux is a native of Caracas, Venezuela, currently based in Tucson, Arizona.
With books like the bestselling The World Without Us, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and translated into thirty-four languages, and Countdown, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, environmental journalist and Homelands co-founder Alan Weisman established himself among the most prophetic voices on humanity’s relationship to the Earth. For his latest, HOPE DIES LAST: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future (Dutton,April 22, 2025), he returns with a book ten years in the making: a study of what it means to be a human on the front lines of our planet’s existential crisis.
To write this book, Weisman traveled the US and the globe, witnessing climate upheaval and other devastations. From the flooding Marshall Islands to revived wetlands in Iraq; from the Netherlands to Mexico, Bangladesh, and the Korean DMZ; to cities and coastlines in the Americas and beyond, he has encountered the best of humanity battling heat, hunger, rising tides, and imperiled wildlife.
In HOPE DIES LAST, Weisman profiles stubborn, clear-eyed, brave visionaries around the world, determined to find how we can stop burning the past to preserve our chance at a future; stop extinguishing species on which our own depends; power civilization without broiling it; and, without sacrificing more nature, grow as much food by 2050 as in all human history to avoid calamitous famines and torrents of refugees.
Their idea of hope is an action verb—they don’t wait for miracles: they set out to make them. At this unprecedented point in history, as our collective exploits on this planet may lead to our own undoing, they refuse to quit.
“Hope Dies Last is a book of heroism, courage, and selfless love. Every story is a way forward. This is one of the most exciting books I’ve ever read, full of innovation. Alan Weisman has written the exact book we need to fight for our place on Earth.”
—Louise Erdrich, author of The Mighty Red
Engineers, scientists, conservationists, architects, agronomists, artists, indigenous elders, medics, eco-warriors, Gen Z future strategists, the military, and even a three-star Michelin chef: all with wildly creative, imaginative responses to the challenges we face as a species. In HOPE DIES LAST, among many others, readers will meet:
Iraqis who defied international experts by resuscitating the Middle East’s biggest wetland, civilization’s cradle and the presumed site of the Garden of Eden, a decade after Saddam Hussein drained their beloved Mesopotamian marshes to flush out Shi’ite rebels.
A plasma physicist who challenges his MIT students to design a commercial-scale, mass-producible, clean fusion reactor to harness inexhaustible starlight on Earth—and, to his astonishment, they do.
A world-famous crop breeder who decides that the future of agriculture is no longer plowing forests into farmland, but pulling food from thin air.
A Dutch activist who sues her government for endangering its citizens by ignoring international climate agreements it signed—and, when she improbably wins, shows her nation and the world just how to proceed.
Corn growers and microbiologists, teaming up to break global agriculture’s toxic addiction to synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.
An alliance of scientists and attorneys battling a major extinction event by saving one species at a time—with startling success.
A new class of farmers in Spain, Alaska, New England, and New Zealand, raising vegetables and even grains in the ocean.
Solar wizards discovering how to power nearly all Bangladesh with EV rickshaws.
A French Polynesian engineer, a Zimbabwean executive, and a Danish architectural firm, building cities that will rise with seas rather than be engulfed by them.
A Korean artist determined to succeed where politicians have failed by literally bridging the chasm that divides her homeland.
Disaster relief specialists preparing young Pacific islanders to lead their people into the diaspora.
A president who dares to wean his oil-and-coal-rich country, Colombia, from fossil fuel and challenges the world to follow.
Profoundly human and moving, this rejoinder to climate anxiety asks: Having reached a point of no return in our climate confrontation, how do we feel, behave, act, plan, and dream as we approach a future decidedly different from what we had expected? It shows how people with bold concepts can envision and create a new relationship with the Earth. A literary evocation of our current predicament, HOPE DIES LAST is an uplifting portrait of the core resolve of our species, courageously responding to the most precarious odds we have ever faced.
CLICK FOR PUBLICATION & CONTACT INFORMATION
HOPE DIES LAST: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future
By Alan Weisman
Dutton | April 22, 2025 | $31.00, Hardcover | ISBN 9781524746698
E-Book ISBN 9781524746711| Audiobook ISBN 9798217011995
Alan Weisman has reported from all seven continents and in more than sixty countries. His books include the New York Times bestseller The World WithoutUs, translated into thirty-four languages and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of China’s Wenjin Book Prize; and Countdown, winner of the LosAngeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The AtlanticMonthly, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Orion,Mother Jones, Discover, and Salon, among others, and on NPR. A cofounder of the journalism collective Homelands Productions, he has also been a laureate professor of international journalism at the University of Arizona. He and his wife, sculptor Beckie Kravetz, live in western Massachusetts.
About Dutton
Dutton is an imprint of the internationally renowned Penguin Random House, the world’s largest trade book publisher. Dutton is home to many bestselling and award-winning fiction and nonfiction authors such as Sean Carroll, Robyn Crawford, Abi Daré, Fiona Davis, Eric Jerome Dickey, Joseph Finder, Lisa Gardner, Steven M. Gillon, Hank Green, Tami Hoag, Andre Iguodala, Jonathan Karl, Alex Kershaw, Denise Kiernan, Bernice McFadden, Jason Mott, Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman, Mark Owen, Riley Sager, Adriana Trigiani, Jonathan Tropper, Jeff Tweedy, Craig Unger, and Carl Zimmer, among others. Penguin Random House is dedicated to its mission of nourishing a universal passion for reading by connecting authors and their writing with readers everywhere.
A conversation with Alan Weisman
Q: Climate Change and existential crises are challenging topics. How did you decide to focus on hope and defiance for HOPE DIES LAST?
A: Years of discussion with my editor over what should be my next book invariably ended with the question: “Do you think there’s any hope left?” Eventually, we realized that was the question in everyone’s mind, so I set out to look for our best realistic hopes for making it through this make-or-break century.
Q: You traveled around the world for HOPE DIES LAST. Can you share some of the personal experiences you had in reporting for the book?
A: Among the most memorable were traveling with a scientist through the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest and biggest tiger habitat, on the Bangladesh-India border; being held in solitary confinement in a northern Minnesota county jail after being arrested while witnessing protesters chain themselves to pumps, while Ojibwe women lay in front of an oil pipeline being rammed through their wild rice harvesting region; Dutch engineers who showed me the ingenious ways their country avoids drowning, but who wonder how long that can last, even as the world turns to them to stop rising waters everywhere; finding a revolutionary energy solution in a Rohingya refugee camp; and following the Mesoamerican Reef, the world’s second longest, from Honduras to the Yucatán, where coastal engineers took me to Chicxulub: epicenter of the asteroid strike that ended the Age of Reptiles, giving us mammals our chance—unless, of course, we blow it.
Q: What can readers take away from HOPE DIES LAST and implement in their own lives in our quest to prevent the worst outcome?
A: As an engineer in Iraq said me, “How do we know it’s impossible until we try? Because if we don’t, it surely will be.” It was an attitude I heard everywhere I went from valiant people who refuse to quit, and who sometimes pulled off miracles. (“I believe in miracles,“ NASA climatologist Kate Marvel, who never gives up charting us a course through the coming decades, told me. “I live on one.”) So whenever we fear there’s no hope, we must keep on until we create our own.
Q: How do you view your work, and the work of the people you profile in the book, in light of the new USadministration?
A: As a journalist, I deal in facts: facts corroborated and verified through research. But these days, with media shattered into a zillion shards, people can choose news sources that seductively are geared to how they feel or what they wish, not necessarily to facts they need to know. The incoming president himself has admitted that his idea of truth is whatever serves him, not necessarily what actually is. In shaky times when fears abound—deep down, even climate deniers know what’s going on—people are easily attracted to someone who promises to return them to a supposedly “great” past without such existential worries, and without unfamiliar-looking refugees from overheated, overpopulated lands threatening to underbid them for their jobs. During such times, when truth is muddled and journalism challenged—as one of his spokeswomen once put it, by “alternative facts”—or even silenced, as some of his cabinet choices threaten—we need journalists more than ever. So my colleagues and I will keep on, just as the people in this book do so inspiringly, no matter the odds. Ultimately, truth will emerge: the laws of physics and nature aren’t subject to personal whims, even of billionaires. Before long, cracks will riddle this administration’s gilded façade, and with luck people will come to their senses in time to get back to building a realistic, hopeful future. Meanwhile, there are cunning, even stealthy ways to keep doing what’s needed and to keep speaking truth—and we will.
More praise for HOPE DIES LAST
“Hope Dies Last is a deeply reported investigation into what it means to be alive on a rapidly-warming planet. Weisman travels the world to meet with scientists, scholars, activists, and religious leaders who understand that the fate of the world as we know it is at stake and who are driven to do something about it. What Weisman discovers is not just brilliant minds and heroic deeds, but a kind of desperate love for this miraculous planet we live on. Hope Dies Last is one of those rare books that makes you proud to be human.” —Jeff Goodell, author of the New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First
“Consider this a non-fiction companion to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future: Alan Weisman has traveled the world to find the people doing what they can to slow down the greatest tragedy in our history. You’ll be inspired—maybe even to become one of these people yourself.”—Bill McKibben, author of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon
“In Hope Dies Last, Alan Weisman takes us on a global journey to witness both humanity’s impact on our planet and our extraordinary resilience in the face of environmental crisis. Through vivid portraits of flooding islands, revived wetlands, and imperiled coastlines, he introduces us to the engineers, scientists, and visionaries working to imagine creative solutions for an uncertain future. Weisman masterfully captures the human spirit as we confront perhaps our greatest challenge: how to adapt to and persist in a world fundamentally altered by climate change. This profound narrative offers not just a clear-eyed look at our predicament, but a testament to the remarkable human capacity for hope even in extraordinarily challenging times.” —Neil Shubin, author of the national bestseller Your Inner Fish and Ends of the Earth
“What a wonderful, exhilarating, life-affirming book! The people, creatures and ambitions Weisman introduces us to are ingenious, revelatory, and awe-inspiring, and the wider world needs to know about them. Reading this book made me not only glad to be alive, but proud to be human, and deeply grateful for the extraordinarily brilliant and generous souls inhabiting these pages, not least Alan Weisman himself.” —John Vaillant, award winning author of Fire Weather
In an essay in Adi Magazine, Ruxandra Guidi explores the complicated relationship between her, her late father, and Venezuela, the country she left as a teenager. Ruxandra’s parents divorced and her mother fled to the United States after the leftist military officer Hugo Chávez launched a series of coup attempts against the sitting government. Her father remained loyal to Chávez as he took power and, later, as his government became more and more authoritarian. It would be many years before Ruxandra and her father would reconnect. But they never really settled their personal and political differences.
“I can’t blame the revolution for pushing us apart,” Ruxandra writes. “But I can blame it for making it impossible for me to return to my own country to be with my father and hold his hand as he died, even if it meant doing so in silence.”
Homelands producer Ruxandra Guidi has launched a podcast called “Happy Forgetting,” a collection of “personal and opinionated” audio essays and documentaries by audio makers from across the country who remind us that progress isn’t linear.
The series is inspired by the ideas of 20th century French philosopher Paul Ricœur, who said there are certain memories that humankind has a duty not to forget—yet has often had the impulse to obscure or erase.
“By digging up and re-contextualizing little known stories of racial liberation,” Ruxandra writes on the project website, “we want to encourage listeners to a different narrative, focused on hope and facts: two building blocks our current era of racial reckoning demands.”
Producers are Yohance Lacour, John Biewen, Allison Herrera, Natalie Peart, Salifu Mack, and Adreanna Rodriguez.
You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. Happy Forgetting was made possible by funding from the Soros Equality Fellowship at the Open Society Foundations. For more, visit happyforgetting.com.
The impact campaign of The Territory documentary has helped build the Jupaú Media & Cultural Center in the Brazilian Amazon.
Homelands Productions became a legally recognized nonprofit in 1989 and we soon became known in public broadcasting circles for our multi-part radio series from around the world. Between 1991 and 2013, we filed more than 200 stories from more than 60 countries and won 22 national and international awards.
During that period, Homelands functioned as a sort of super-freelancer. As a tax-exempt organization, we could raise funds from foundations and donors in ways that we couldn’t as individuals. Internally, we operated as a cooperative, sharing decision-making among our producer-members. The core Homelands team has always been small, ranging from three to six (today we are five), but we often hired journalists from outside our group to work on our projects, strengthening our product while providing paying work for dozens of colleagues.
Sometimes, when we had a large project going, we could even pay ourselves for our efforts to maintain the organization – filing our taxes, renewing our business license, fixing our website when it broke. Between projects, we would pare back to the essentials as we laid the groundwork for whatever was next.
Each of us “Homies” has always had other things going – as journalists, professors, authors, editors, citizens, and so forth. But even when our focus has been elsewhere, Homelands has given us a second family, a deeply valued source of personal and professional support.
This is one reason we’ve chosen to keep our collective alive all these years even as our collective output has waned. But there’s another, arguably more compelling reason: maintaining our nonprofit status gives us a way to support extraordinary work conceived and led by others. Over the years, we have extended our 501(c)(3) umbrella to books, films, podcasts, and other projects. Lately, this has become an even bigger part of what we do.
Projects we sponsor may receive grants and tax-deductible donations without having to establish and maintain a legal tax-exempt organization. They may also take advantage of Homelands’ reputation, mentorship, and advice. Fiscal sponsorship is especially useful for exploratory or start-up projects, where the final product or outlet may be uncertain. At this writing, we are pleased to be serving as fiscal sponsor for these projects:
The impact campaign of the Peabody and Emmy Award-winning documentary “The Territory,” which has raised funds for the establishment of a media and cultural center in the homeland of the Indigenous group featured in the film;
“The Search,” a documentary film in progress from the team that produced “The Territory” that offers a cosmic perspective on humanity’s long-term survival, as told through three interwoven storylines in Northern California;
“Bear Season,” a documentary film in progress that takes a bear’s-eye view of the annual polar bear migration in the Canadian Arctic;
“Rough Transition,” which grows out of Gregory Warner’s long-running NPR podcast “Rough Translation;”
“Mort Report,” the electronic newsletter of the legendary international correspondent and author Mort Rosenblum;
“The Border Chronicle,” an independent news bureau on the US-Mexico border led by veteran journalists Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller;
“Refugee Voices,” a project of Story House Ithaca that explores the refugee experience through stories and music;
“The Trump Diaries,” a podcast series exploring the experiences of ordinary people during the first Trump presidency; and
“El Centro,” a documentary film in progress about 2016 police killings in Dallas.
For Homelands, fiscal sponsorship is an effective way to advance our mission “to illuminate complex issues through compelling broadcasts, podcasts, films, articles, books, and educational forums, and to foster freedom of expression and creative risk through the media arts.” If you’d like to propose a project for sponsorship, send us a note at info@homelands.org.
Hugo Balta has been named the recipient of the 2024 Cecilia Vaisman Award from Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.
The Vaisman Award honors an individual working in audio or video journalism who works every day to shed light on the various issues affecting Hispanic and Latine communities inside and outside the United States. It includes a $5,000 cash prize. The award is named for Medill faculty member and Homelands Productions co-founder Cecilia Vaisman, who died in 2015.
Balta is the publisher of Illinois Latino News (ILLN), a multiplatform digital news outlet that focuses on health and democracy. He is the host of Chicago Politics on CAN-TV, a solutions journalism program centered on responses to social challenges and highlighting opportunities facing the marginalized communities of Cook County. Balta also is the director of Solutions Journalism and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with The Fulcrum, a national publication.
We love collaborating with other people, projects, and organizations. We also serve as fiscal sponsor for projects that align with our mission. If you’d like to explore how we might work together, send us a note at info@homelands.org.
Our work would be impossible without the generosity of supporters who share our commitment to high-quality public-interest journalism. Please donate online or visit our support page for more options.
