
Climate Hope: Stories of Action in an Age of Global Crisis
Review By Kate Darby
February 4, 2025
As I am finishing this review, the Greater Los Angeles urban wildfires continue to burn; news headlines tell us that fire season in southern California now lasts all year and that we have entered a new paradigm of climate-induced fire danger. In the summer of 2023, Canadian communities experienced this new paradigm firsthand as the country saw the largest fire season in history (measured by acres burned). The science connecting these fire events to human action is strong. By repressing natural fire cycles, disallowing cultural burning practiced since time immemorial by First Nations and other indigenous communities, continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at dangerous rates, and increasingly occupying vulnerable areas, humans are exposing themselves to climate disaster. Understanding the scale and severity of global climate crisis is vitally important, but so too is harnessing some intellectual energy to imagine what it will take to address this crisis.
David Geselbracht’s book, Climate Hope: Stories of Action in an Age of Global Crisis, joins recent other works– including Elizabeth Ayana Johnson’s What if We Get it Right? and Katharine Hayhoe’s Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World – to share ideas about how we might collectively address the grand global challenges of climate change.
After an introductory chapter where Geselbracht describes his approach as providing “neither blueprints nor road maps” and instead offering “hope through action”, each chapter in the book presents a stand-alone case study (7). U.S. climate activist Bill McKibbon has famously asserted that the climate crisis requires “silver buckshot” rather than a “silver bullet.” Geselbracht embraces this approach, covering such topics as legal cases calling on the government to regulate fossil fuel emissions, solar energy technologies, and Denmark’s net zero goals.
What sets Geselbracht’s work apart from books with similar themes is his journalistic approach and the way that he centers the stories of individual scientists, activists, and change-makers to document how their work contributes to understanding and addressing climate change. We meet Matt Humphrey, an evangelical Christian committed to creation care and climate action; Mary Vaux, an early 20th century scientist who carefully documented the retreat of the Illecillewaet Glacier; Chief Patrick Michell, head of the Kanaka Bar Indian Band and victim of the Lytton fire; and Dr. Saleemul Huq, Bangladeshi scientist and leader in the Climate Vulnerable Forum – a group created to support the needs of the world’s nations most vulnerable to climate change at the Conference of the Parties (COP) climate summits. Geselbracht also inserts himself in these stories, challenging his own perceptions of nuclear energy during a visit to the Forsmark facility in Sweden, taking a Tesla for a road trip, and skiing down Copenhill – Copenhagen’s garbage-to-energy power plant. In the conclusion, Geselbracht illustrates why these stories matter: “While holding no illusions about the challenges that lie ahead, it’s a hope rooted in people and what we can do together” (223). While Geselbracht uses these personal experiences and individual profiles as effective storytelling techniques, his case studies are also packed with fascinating historical context, climate science, and policy details. For example, in an early chapter he describes how the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) 56 million years ago served as a natural experiment for rapid CO2 emissions and global warming.
Geselbracht’s stories of climate hope have much to offer a variety of audiences: environmental advocates looking for inspiration and motivation, curious nonfiction readers interested in learning more about climate change (with a different framing than the still-dominant gloom and doom genre), and college and university students studying climate change. The book could be particularly useful in introductory college courses, read either as a whole or using individual chapters.
Publication Information
Geselbracht, David. Climate Hope: Stories of Action in an Age of Global Crisis. Madeira Park, BC: Douglas and McIntyre, 2024