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.

HOPE DIES LAST book cover

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.


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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

Publicity contact: Sarah Thegaby, 212-366-2665, sthegeby@penguinrandomhouse.com


About the author

Alan Weisman has reported from all seven continents and in more than sixty countries. His books include the New York Times bestseller The World Without Us, 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 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, 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 US administration?

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.”

Read the entire essay here.

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.

Jupau Cultural Center
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;”
  • The Turnaway Project,” which is exploring ways to bring the findings of a groundbreaking 10-year abortion study to a broader audience;
  • 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

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.

Read the press release here.

For the September 2024 issue of High Country News, Homelands producer Bear Guerra photographed a cover story by Tanvi Misra about the US Border Patrol’s Missing Migrant Program. Border Patrol is mostly known for its primary mandate to detain and deport migrants, but it also has a responsibility — for which it receives significant federal funding — to rescue migrants in distress.

Critics see these intertwined missions as a conflict of interest, which often makes the journey for migrants even more perilous, especially across the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Produced in partnership with Type Investigations, this story explores the tension between the agency’s law enforcement and humanitarian roles, and how this plays out in real life in the borderlands.

Bear Guerra is the photo editor for High Country News. All photos below are his.

In an April 25 opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, Homelands co-founder and senior producer Sandy Tolan condemns “the disastrous, unnecessary decisions of [University of Southern California] administrators to call in police to squelch legitimate protest and the free expression of ideas” when breaking up a student demonstration against the war in Gaza.

Tolan is a professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and author of two books about Palestine and Israel, The Lemon Tree and Children of the Stone.

“Universities exist to advance knowledge, independent thinking and an open exchange of ideas,” he writes. “But USC is criminalizing protest and speech with the Orwellian charge of trespassing.” 

Read the full piece here.

Pedro Córdoba was a mechanic at the world’s largest multi-metal smelter in La Oroya, Peru, and suffered a serious lung ailment related to his work there.

In 2007, I traveled to Peru to profile a worker at the La Oroya multi-metal smelting complex for Homelands’ WORKING series. The city of La Oroya was known as one of the most polluted places on Earth, and I wanted to spend time with someone who had made the decision to stay despite the well-documented dangers.

I had passed through La Oroya many times when I lived in Peru in the 1990s and always wondered how hard it must be for workers to weigh the promise of a regular paycheck against the risks of living in one of the unhealthiest environments imaginable. It was a choice that working people around the world were forced to make.

Finding a subject turned out to be much harder than I’d imagined. No one I spoke with (including leaders of the largest labor union) wanted to talk about the downsides of working or living there. People were afraid that if the world really understood how dangerous it was, the government would force the smelter to shut down and everyone would be out of a job.

In my reporting, I learned about the high levels of lead in children’s blood and the way in which toxic clouds would settle on the hills around the city, making residents of the hillside shantytowns more vulnerable than workers in the plant. But everyone seemed to want me to go away.

Finally I found Pedro Córdoba, a 47-year-old mechanic who was suffering from a debilitating lung disease caused by years of inhaling rock dust. He was angry and wanted to vent. I felt a little uncomfortable profiling a person whose views were so different from those of most of his coworkers. But his story was true and I felt a responsibility to highlight the terrible trade-off so many people need to make between meeting their economic needs and maintaining their health.

On March 22 of this year, 17 years after I visited and 18 years after the complaint was first filed, the Inter-American Court found Peru responsible for failing to protect La Oroya’s residents from toxic pollution for more than a century. This is how Earthjustice reports on the findings:

In the judgment, the Court ordered the State of Peru to adopt comprehensive reparation measures for the damage caused to the population of La Oroya, including identifying, prosecuting and, where appropriate, punishing those responsible for the harassment of the victims; determining the state of contamination of the air, water and soil and preparing an environmental remediation plan; providing free medical care to the victims and guaranteeing specialized care to residents with symptoms and illnesses related to contamination from mining and metallurgical activities; ensuring the effectiveness of the city’s warning system and developing a system for monitoring the quality of air, water, and soil; ensuring that the operations of the La Oroya Metallurgical Complex comply with international environmental standards, preventing and mitigating damage to the environment and human health; providing monetary compensation to victims for material and non-material damages.

I hope Pedro Córdoba was alive to hear the verdict.

— Jonathan Miller