Product Description

After the fierce warnings and grim predictions of The Weather Makers and An Inconvenient Truth, acclaimed journalist and national bestselling author Chris Turner finds hope in the search for a sustainable future.

Point of no return: The chilling phrase has become the ubiquitous mantra of ecological doomsayers, a troubling headline above stories of melting permafrost and receding ice caps, visions of catastrophe and fears of a problem with no solution. Daring to step beyond the rhetoric of panic and despair, The Geography of Hope points to the bright light at the end of this very dark tunnel.

With a mix of front-line reporting, analysis and passionate argument, Chris Turner pieces together the glimmers of optimism amid the gloom and the solutions already at work around the world, from Canada’s largest wind farm to Asia’s greenest building and Europe’s most eco-friendly communities. But The Geography of Hope goes far beyond mere technology. Turner seeks out the next generation of political, economic, social and spiritual institutions that could provide the global foundations for a sustainable future–from the green hills of northern Thailand to the parliament houses of Scandinavia, from the villages of southern India, where microcredit finance has remade the social fabric, to America’s most forward-thinking think tanks.

In this compelling first-person exploration, punctuated by the wonder and angst of a writer discovering the world’s beacons of possibility, Chris Turner pieces together a dazzling map of the disparate landmarks in a geography of hope.



While most of the world has been spinning in stagnant circles of recrimination and debate on the subject of climate change, paralyzed by visions of apocalypse both natural (if nothing of our way of life changes) and economic (if too much does), Denmark has simply marched off with steadfast resolve into the sustainable future, reaching the zenith of its pioneering trek on the island of Samsø. And so if there’s an encircled star on this patchwork map indicating hope’s modest capital, then it should be properly placed on this island. Perhaps, for the sake of precision, at the geographic centre of Jørgen Tranberg’s dairy farm.

There are, I’m sure, any number of images called to mind by talk of ecological revolution and renewable energy and sustainable living, but I’m pretty certain they don’t generally include a hearty fiftysomething Dane in rubber boots spotted with mud and cow shit. Which is why Samsø’s transformation is not just revolutionary but inspiring, not just a huge change but a tantalizingly attainable one. And it was a change that seemed at its most workaday–near-effortless, no more remarkable than the cool October wind gusting across the island–down on Tranberg’s farm.
—from The Geography of Hope

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74777 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-05
• Released on: 2007-10-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Review
Praise for Chris Turner and Planet Simpson:

“One of this country’s smartest and most original pop-culture commentators.”
—Hour (Montreal)

“[An] absolutely must-have tome for the many Simpsons freaks, not just an over-sized fan’s guide but an absorbing take on why it matters.”
—Toronto Star

“Turner has written the definitive Simpsons study. He shows both a lightness of touch suitable to his subject and the intellectual rigour to grasp its vast purview.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)

“[A] brilliant critique of western culture from the mid-90s to the present. . . . Turner understands pop culture in a way few others of his generation have been able to articulate thus far.”
—The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)

“Smart and funny, Turner is clearly one of the converted, and he writes with fitting enthusiasm for his subject while working in seemly references to cultural theory and TV-insider politics.”
—The Hollywood Reporter

“One of the more fascinating and entertaining works I’ve read.”
—The Globe and Mail

“A broad-minded analysis that connects the television show to some of the most pressing issues in contemporary life.”
—Alberta Views

About the Author
Chris Turner is the author of the national bestseller Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era and Defined a Generation. His culture and technology reporting for Shift magazine earned him four National Magazine Awards from 1999 to 2003, including the 2001 President’s Medal for General Excellence, the highest honour in Canadian magazine writing. His writing has also appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Independent, the Sunday Times, Time, Canadian Geographic and Utne Reader.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
Two horizons

I don’t have to go very far to find a certain kind of reassurance that I live in a golden age. Out my back door and down the back alley to a ­steep-­sloped residential street, and then it’s just a ­two-­minute upward scramble to the crest of a ridge known as Scotsman’s Hill, which affords one of the city’s best views. Here is Calgary, ­Alberta–­Canada’s ­fourth-­largest and ­fastest-­growing metropolis. Here is a panorama Fritz Lang could only dream of, a marvel of engineering genius and financial might that even today equates in the minds of most of the world’s people with progress, prosperity, hope and ambition, the future: a glittering ­skyline.

In the middle distance, the downtown core stabs at the wide prairie sky with a hundred sleek fingers. At one end are the twin ­knife-­blade towers of the ­Petro-­Canada Centre, on the other a pair of older, squatter office blocks topped with the ­sled-­dog logo of Husky Energy, and in between are anonymous skyscrapers housing the local offices of Chevron and Shell and Halliburton and dozens more companies with less famous names, all of them dedicated to the lucrative business of extracting fossil fuels from the earth. The whole scene is punctuated by the exclamation point of the Calgary Tower, a ­torch-­shaped needle that belches a ­natural-­gas flame from its crown on special occasions. Farther south is the white dome roof of the cavernous fitness centre where my wife and I sometimes go to swim and play ­badminton–­the Talisman Centre, named for the last Canadian company to divest itself of oil investments in Sudan. The foreground is dominated by the city’s temple of hockey, the Pengrowth Saddledome, its last name referring to its whimsically ­bow-­shaped roof and its first name to a lucrative fossil fuel investment ­trust.

This is the vista that’s sometimes used to illustrate the copious news stories that have appeared in recent years to document Calgary’s increasing prominence in the life of the nation and the energy economy of the world. These stories, too, offer a kind of reassurance. The headlines yelp excitedly about the “unprecedented boom,” about an “economic juggernaut,” about “streets paved with black gold” as “the good times roll.” The reports underneath detail the runaway growth of a city lucky to be situated in the middle of a wide prairie pocketed with vast pools of natural gas and blessed to be christened the corporate hub of a colossal mining operation far to the north. This, they say, is a city coming into its own, making its mark. A city entering its golden ­age.

Maybe those stories make passing mention of the catalyst for that mining ­boom–­the skyrocketing price of a dwindling resource in relentlessly increasing demand, a global thirst for oil so inexhaustible that even the marginal, ­low-­quality fossil fuel deposits buried in the “tar sands” of remote northern Alberta must be put to use, even if the operation required to mine and refine the stuff requires feats of engineering on a scale that would’ve given pause to a Kremlin apparatchik. Maybe this is mentioned; rarely is it suggested that it could be anything other than admirable and beneficial and essential; certainly it’s never even hinted that it might be a symptom of a particularly advanced strain of mass ­insanity.

And who could be so impertinent, so ­misguided–­so ­deluded–­that they saw such things from this perspective? Look again from atop Scotsman’s Hill, peer beyond the office towers to the great blooming city stretching off in all directions. See the wide avenues, the meandering suburban boulevards, the ­eight-­lane freeways as broad as the ­Champs-­Elysées. Look at the big ­houses–­mansions, really, in any other age but ­this–­stuffed full of the latest in digital gadgetry; the elegant shops and cavernous warehouse stores overflowing with anything else the heart might desire. Look to the horizon, to the jagged line of ­peaks–­the Rocky Mountains, where championship golf courses and ­world-­class ski resorts await anyone who wants to top up the ­hundred-­litre tank in the ole Cadillac Escalade and rev up that growling 6.2-litre V8 and roar right on out into ­Paradise.

Look further still, use the mind’s eye, extend your vision to Houston and Caracas and Dubai, to cities where the fossil fuel wealth is perhaps less overt but no less ubiquitous, to New York and London and Tokyo and ­even–­especially–­delirious Shanghai. Isn’t all this as impressive a facsimile of perfection as humanity has yet devised? It can be hard to argue otherwise: the ­fossil-­fuelled, ­hyper-­consumerist capitalism that has spread around the globe since the Second World War is quite possibly the most successful social experiment the world has ever seen, and it has birthed by far the wealthiest and healthiest societies in human history. A chicken in every pot and a car in every driveway. The Good Life: democratized, trademarked, mass-­produced, shipped ­worldwide.

What a time to be alive, what good fortune, and what a joy it must be to be a Calgarian right about now. To live in one of those blessed cities on a hill at the end of history. “Put your hands on the wheel / Let the golden age begin.” That’s a Beck lyric, sung in a thin whisper over a country waltz as cold and cutting as a winter prairie wind, as sharp and precise as a glass office tower. A biting breeze of a tune, the vocal almost blown away completely, as if to suggest what the breathless news stories never do: that golden ages aren’t often found where they claim to ­be.

At night, the farmers’ fields north of Calgary look like a candlelight vigil on an Olympian scale: vast, empty prairie dotted at wide intervals with narrow ­multistorey scaffolds, blazing fires atop each one. These are the flares that arise from burning off the “sour gas”–hydrogen ­sulphide–­in the ­natural-­gas wells. Ranchers have long suspected the flares to be the cause of stillbirths and other health problems in downwind livestock; the sour gas itself is potentially fatal to humans at concentrations of more than 500 parts per million. That’s ­500 ppm–­in a curious coincidence, a figure that’s also the most liberal estimate of the maximum permissible level of carbon dioxide concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere before a process often called “catastrophic climate change” (sometimes known, in more anxious circles, simply as apocalypse) will likely become inevitable. Prior to the onset of the ­fossil-­fuelled industrial age, the concentration was 280 ppm; right now, it’s about 380 ppm. If the status quo that’s propelling Calgary’s giddy boom continues unchecked, it’s a scientific certainty that 560 ­ppm–­sufficient, by most estimates, to trigger catastrophic climate ­change–­will be reached by mid-­century.

You can’t see those ­sour-­gas flares from Scotsman’s Hill, not even on the clearest night. You can see only the sparkling city, a gilt cubist sculpture of triumph against a blackening sky. This is the blaze of colour on one horizon, and maybe it’s up to the beholder whether that brilliant light portends dusk or dawn. I can see only sunset ­myself.
My ­daughter–­two months old as I stand on Scotsman’s Hill on a warm spring day in May 2005, wondering at the darkening ­horizon–­will be ­fifty-­one years old in 2056, at which point our current trajectory would reach 560 ppm with a bullet. And who knows whether by then she’ll have a house worth keeping here, a life worth living, a world here or anywhere else sturdy enough to sustain her? I can’t say for certain, and it makes me positively ache in places I didn’t know I had until she was born that I can’t make her any ­promises.

And so I don’t take her to Scotsman’s Hill to see the ­Petro-­Canada towers or the Talisman Centre’s rippled roof or the Calgary Tower’s ­natural-­gas blowtorch. Instead, on a holiday Monday later that ­May–­Victoria Day, Canada’s vestigial tribute to the world’s first fossil fuel empire, the one built on coal that led to my country’s ­founding–­my wife and I take her on a field trip south to another ridge, another horizon, a place that to me represents the dawn of a new ­hope.

Traffic on Highway 2 is thin on this holiday Monday, and before too long, Calgary’s lolling southern suburbs give grudging way to empty prairie, and we are on our way. To our right, the jagged peaks of the eastern wall of the Rockies are our constant companions, ancient and certain and still dappled with last winter’s snow. We zoom south through rolling ranchland, past barns clad in chipped red paint, through quiet towns where the local tack shop is the main merchant. We stop at a gas station where a handmade poster outside the bathroom advertises a ­year-­old gelding for sale, “keep the coyotes out of your correl”–and, whaddaya know, there’s a coyote loping casually along in the roadside ditch a few kilometres further on.

Fifteen klicks north of Fort Macleod, an unforgiving crosswind sets our small car to weaving, and a bit beyond that there appears on the horizon a long, low ridge crowned with a row of thin sticks, like a faint pencil sketch of some grandiose reimagining of ...

Customer Reviews

The Book We Need
I'll let the Globe & Mail review say it all:

Published in the Books section, October 6, 2007

THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOPE
A Tour of the World We Need
By Chris Turner
Random House Canada, 480 pages

A year of living optimistically
Review by EVAN OSENTON

Bad news might sell books and turn science authors into global celebrities, but it isn't particularly good at changing minds, motivating people or inspiring hope. It certainly isn't convincing our species to give up our game of ecological Russian roulette.

Chris Turner would know: In the mid-1990s, he took a summer job for Greenpeace as a door-to-door canvasser in Kingston, Ont. His specialty - indeed, he notes, most environmental groups' specialties then and now - was bad news. Doom. Gloom. Lurid descriptions of bleached coral and starving polar bears, cracked hardpan and skyrocketing asthma rates, rivers of glowing Chinese factory effluent and mutilated seal pups. On one doorstep, Turner recalls a seven-year-old girl "so consumed with worry over the planet's health, [her parents] told me, that sometimes it made her stomach ache too much to eat." Mostly, Turner remembers people's weary indifference to his spiel.

Fast-forward a decade. Chris Turner is a writer of national renown, fresh off his bestselling, lushly enthusiastic Planet Simpson (quite possibly the most comprehensive book published on the most important pop-cultural phenomenon of the past 20 years). Turner never quite stopped believing the bad news, but, like so many of us, he'd become overwhelmed and moved on.

And then his wife gave birth to a baby girl. In a moment of awful clarity (fittingly, while on a hill overlooking the oil-company spires of downtown Calgary), the bad news came back, ringing truer and more urgently than ever. "It makes me positively ache in places I didn't know I had until [my daughter] was born that I can't make her any promises," Turner writes. "I can't even tell her with any confidence that there is a future with sufficient durability to serve as a drawing board for her lifelong dreams. There's a legitimate possibility that she'll face calamity on a scale I can't imagine, on a scale beyond anything humanity's ever seen. This is a prospect that makes it hard to think, makes my vision cross with angry, impotent tears. It terrifies me."

Turner realized he couldn't return to doom and gloom; he owed his daughter far better. And so of his terror and ache and love was born The Geography of Hope. For one year, Turner and family criss-crossed the globe in search of people living sustainably; people living or building, in the words of Small is Beautiful author E. F. Schumacher, "a lifestyle designed for permanence." Turner decided he needed to find eco-pioneers and assess their ideas, however strange, unexpected or heretical to the modern economic order. He needed reassurance that his little girl had a future, that she needn't endure Armageddon or de-evolve.

Indeed, Turner wasn't interested in promising his daughter "traditional" sustainability, a future of animal skins, foraged roots and yurts. His criterion: "Would this - this place, this machine, this social system or way of life - be capable of continuing on its present course for the foreseeable future without exhausting the planet's ability to sustain human life at something like the current population and quality of life?"

So off Turner went to Samsø, a remarkable Danish island completely free of fossil-fuel dependency, part of a country that could be totally powered by renewables within a generation, and whose ease of transition is truly inspiring. Turner visited Germany, where it turns out sustainable housing comes with no great discomfort or cost, and where investors in solar energy - whether altruistic or seeking riches - are realizing giddy returns.

He saw exponential growth in Indian micro-scale solar, witnessed Muhammad Yunus's micro-credit banking revolution in action, and confronted the argument that India and China will necessarily repeat all of North America's mistakes (and negate all of our hypothetical environmental progress). Off to Southeast Asia, to tank up at a hydrogen "filling station," witness mountains of cassava waste reclaimed as biofuel and help rural Thais and displaced Burmese generate run-of-river hydroelectricity.

Hope abounds, it seems, even in decadent North America: in Seaside, Fla., and suburban Denver's bold expression of New Urbanism; in Taos, N.M.'s revolution in intuitive architecture; in the form of Interface, one of the world's largest carpet manufacturers and the first fully sustainable multinational corporation. Turner even found hope near home, in Alberta's Drake Landing, North America's first solar-powered subdivision, and in the massive wind turbines spreading across southern Alberta's foothills like so many snow-white pinwheels.

The author's visit to energy activist Amory Lovins's Rocky Mountain Institute alone could have inspired a thick volume. Currently working with Wal-Mart to bring massive improvements in efficiency to their truck fleets, and with the U.S. military to integrate lightweight carbon fibre into (now hyper-inefficient) military vehicles, Lovins, co-founder of RMI, is perhaps Turner's best evidence that a hopeful future isn't the exclusive dream (or right) of any one group, and that a sustainable future will only work once we engage literally everyone in solution-making.

Chris Turner does his daughter proud. The Geography of Hope makes an overwhelming case for an abundant, even limitless amount of hope for humanity. The book is a captivating travelogue, the writing marked by piquant observations and raw, emotional engagement with farmers, radicals, business people, activists and indigenous people the world over.

And Turner should find a broad audience; his stories are full of references to his love of driving, cold beer, the Big Lebowski and The Simpsons. The Geography of Hope might stimulate an interest in sustainability among readers who otherwise fear "environmental books." At any rate, Turner has helped push us ever closer to Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point, after which sustainable living should, once again, become second nature to our species.

Without naming names, Turner mentions thick volumes of environmental doom and gloom he read in researching his book in which "the vivid horror, not the dim hope stuck" (we all have a favourite culprit). The Geography of Hope merely aspires to be Turner's "scrapbook from a year spent living optimistically." Doom and gloom's insights, eloquence and terrible truths aside, I know from which set of stories I'd rather my children assembled a vision of their future.

Evan Osenton is the books editor at Alberta Views magazine and a former honour student in the have-I-got-some-terrible-news-for-you school of persuasion.

At last, an environmental book that doesn't make me despair
The trouble with the majority of writing about climate change and other environmental worries is that they make people think, "Oh, hell. It's too late anyway. Why even try to do anything?" The Geography of Hope is an antidote to this kind of thinking. I am now 54 years old, and when I was 20 years old or so, I devoured ecological jeremiads such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The trouble is, back then I actually thought my civilization was doomed to fall apart before the end of the 20th century. This, fortunately, didn't happen and in the meantime I got sidelined by matters too complex to detail here. Now at last I am returning to my environmental roots, but I find I simply no longer have the patience and strength to wade through dour predictions of ecological gloom and doom. Chris Turner's The Geography of Hope is the first book on this topic that I have felt glad to pick up, because it shows that it is really possible to put the brakes to the looming climate train wreck before it occurs and that sustainability is already within our grasp using existing technology, if only we would commit to it. How inspiring!

Visiting All Change Agents
Turner turns his back on his environmental-protest Greenpeace-volunteering past, and goes searching, somewhat frantically, for those who are actually building a sustainable future. For him, it's like turning from "I have a nightmare" to "I have a dream". There follows a whirling tour of the planet, from energy-self-reliant communities in Denmark or Thailand, to urban farms in Cuba, or micro-credit financed solar energy in India. Turner captures the excitement of people who feel their work is turning the world's tide. He wants us excited, and he wants ecological to win because it's cool. And he does cheer me up. He does make you feel far more can be done than our petty individual reductions in consumption. But as for how most of us are gonna fit in all this transition, the book still leaves us with no clear band wagons to jump on. It's still, Turner admits, just us, being a little more alert to how our own place can change.