17-04-2025
Trump Has Millions of Americans Despairing. One Surprise Just Gave Me Hope.
I was a cynic about the protests. Hadn't we spent four years protesting, only to see things get immeasurably worse? And now, months into the new administration, they were trying to get us out into the streets again? Attendance would be low, I feared, for the 'Hands Off' protests of April 5, and no matter what the numbers were, they wouldn't make a difference.
That morning was warm and cloudy, and as I passed my local Metro station on the way to the grocery store, I was surprised to see that the station was as busy as on a pre-pandemic weekday morning. A stream of cars dropped people off at the Kiss & Ride; from all directions, Virginians approached on foot, carrying placards and backpacks and folding stools.
Intrigued, I rode my bike into downtown D.C. that afternoon to see what was happening. By that time, the protest had been going on for a while, and people were starting to disperse. As soon as I crossed the Potomac, I passed little clots of protesters walking away from the Mall, looking tired but happy, rolled-up signs tucked under their arms. The closer I got, the more the sidewalks filled with people. Eventually the throngs became so thick that I chained my bike to a lamppost and walked down 15th Street, against the tide of hundreds of protestors. If there were this many on this one street at this one moment, I thought, what enormous number of people had actually shown up for this thing? (Estimates of the D.C. crowd later ranged from tens of thousands to more than 100,000, and organizers said that nationwide turnout numbered in the millions.) At the Washington Monument itself, the masses had thinned enough that I could sit comfortably on a patch of grass, but all around me were still uncountable numbers of Americans, chanting, clapping, buzzing with dissent, high on hope.
Is there anything left to hope for? That's the question I've been asking myself, that maybe you've been asking yourself too. What good does hope do? As the Earth cooks, as species die out, as the long American century ends, is hope a frivolity, or—worse—a capitulation? 'Hope is for weaklings,' an environmentalist snapped at the author Alan Weisman as he was reporting his new book, Hope Dies Last. 'What we need now is courage.'
Weisman is the author of The World Without Us, a sui generis masterpiece, speculative nonfiction about how the Earth would persist and recover if every human being disappeared. Back in 2007, its conceit seemed fanciful, or overly pessimistic, but these days—.64 of a Celsius degree later—it seems downright oracular. Weisman's new book sees him traveling the globe to meet individuals and organizations who are still, despite everything, fighting to avert a world without us: seaweed farmers, wetlands revivers, pipeline protestors, fusion engineers.
In many ways, the book resembles other attempts at good-news journalism, like the New York Times' '50 States, 50 Fixes' series, which highlights one small-bore environmental solution from each state, such as the geothermal project that heats nearly 500 buildings in Boise, Idaho. Weisman's book features the kinds of datelines—the Marshall Islands, the Netherlands, Iraq, Mexico—that suggest an advance well spent, but shares with such projects the belief that it is still possible, even useful, to help readers feel good about the future, even for a moment.
I'm not sure it is. I loved reading about the plucky entrepreneurs whose solar-sharing technology is streamlining the power grid in a Bangladesh refugee camp. But the tales of political upheaval, government corruption, and foreign meddling surrounding SOLshare's failure to break into the rest of Bangladesh paint a picture of utter futility. The chapter ends as so many of Weisman's chapters do, with the heroes facing a precarious future, their ingenious idea struggling to make much headway against the local forces opposing it—much less against the global climate catastrophe. 'If the country that stands to most suffer from climate consequences can show a pathway out, the world should listen,' SOLshare's founder tells Weisman. 'If we can do it here, you can do it anywhere.' Yet it feels like the real lesson of so many of these stories—the jaguar conservationist whose life's work is undone by Trump's border wall, the Iraqi wetlands restorer who is kidnapped and tortured while every year the levels of the Tigris and Euphrates drop and drop—is the opposite: If they can't do it there, no one can do it anywhere.
I was often reminded, reading Hope Dies Last, of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, a novel that this nonfiction book often resembles in its valorization of the can-do spirit of those battling the odds. The utopian Ministry dares to dream up a route to solving the climate crisis, but its heroes are bureaucrats: the staffers of an obscure international body formed in response to the Paris Agreement, dedicated to protecting the rights of future generations. Their solutions are not only ingenious scientific 'fixes' but enormous structural transformations, the kinds that might only be able to be effectuated by rethinking the world's governments, legal systems, and financial models. Ministry bears a dedication to Robinson's onetime Ph.D. adviser, Fredric Jameson, who once noted that 'It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.'
Weisman's previous book imagined the former; his new one struggles to imagine the latter. For all their derring-do, passion, and brains, his heroes primarily are not bureaucrats engaged in policy transformations; they're scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. (On the rare occasion I did come across a reference to a government official, such as NASA's climate impacts director, all I could do was wince and wonder if they will still have a job at the end of the year.) Such is the book's seeming faith that it's still the free market that can address these worldwide threats that a late chapter profiles, of all people, a Google A.I. engineer. I don't doubt that the man is sincere in his efforts to use A.I. to minimize the harm of jet contrails in the atmosphere, but a few to-be-sure sentences aside, Weisman doesn't really grapple with the enormous energy cost of A.I., much less the amount of power that Google wields across the world. Yet even this guy gets a section-ending, hard-won, motivational speech straight out of Ministry:
His eyes squeeze shut. 'We can't despair—that would just be giving up. We have no alternative.'Eyes open. 'Everybody knows it's going to be terrible. But what else can we do? Even if most things we try don't work, we have to keep going.'
We have to keep going, yes. It is obviously good to try to make the world a better place. But when you are hoping against hope, what are you hoping against? When hope dies last, what has died before it? Just as whether you recycle that water bottle or not has zero impact on the future of the Earth, so will the efforts of even the most hardworking of these individuals fail to save the world for humanity. And so an entire book highlighting these wonderful, inspirational, doomed efforts can become a little hard to swallow.
Much of Kim Stanley Robinson's novel focuses on the ministry of the title and their work restructuring human society using the tools of government and the law. But the novel also features a darker, parallel storyline, set in the world of agitators, protestors, rioters—of ecoterrorists and guerilla fighters in the climate war. Though the ministry can never formally acknowledge their work, without them, Robinson makes clear—without worldwide outrage and action—the ministry would never be able to succeed. And so the most encouraging chapters of Hope Dies Last are the ones that focus not on the makers, ginning up magical new solutions in their labs, but on the obstructionists, the ones dedicated to gumming up the works of the great machine that every day devours a little more of the world. I found myself more inspired by the scrappy pains in the ass at Climate Defiance, who shout at Bank of America's CEO during a $100-a-plate dinner until they get tossed out, than all the seaweed farmers and oyster-bed designers in the world. Weisman himself was thrown in jail for his presence at a blockade of a Canadian oil company's pipeline through northern Minnesota's Mississippi River watershed.
Walking around the protest at the Monument, I didn't feel a lot of hope. I thought, Why aren't people doing this every single day? But you can't protest every day without protesting for the first day. Someday, I hope, there will come a protest that is just the beginning of a wave, a wave that might wash away some of the things that are broken about human society and force us to rebuild in a better way. Should that happen, I hope some of the tinkerers and optimists of Hope Dies Last are there with their good ideas, ready to step into the breach.
Before I left the Monument to ride home, I saw my favorite sign of the day. A little girl, maybe 10 or 11, was sitting with her parents, worn out, her hand-drawn sign lying on the grass. 'I am very unhappy,' the sign read, with a frowning face and an arrow pointing down. 'May I take a picture of your sign?' I asked, and she brightened. She picked up the sign and held it so that the arrow pointed to her. In my photo, the girl is beaming.
