Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future by Alan Weisman | Dutton | $32 The expression “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” is meant to convey a sense of futility, of meaningless action in the face of catastrophe, but I have been thinking recently of how it might be turned on its head, reimagined as a small gesture of purpose, of good work left to be done aboard that superlative metaphor for capitalist overabundance and technological hubris. I concede, it is not a perfect thought exercise, nor one nearly so elegant as those often deployed in the writing of the environmental journalist Alan Weisman, but I keep returning to it as I read Hope Dies Last, his final installment in a trilogy that also includes The World Without Us (2007) and Countdown (2013). Weisman has an acumen for moving fluidly between a cataclysmic big picture and intimate first-hand accounts of its impact and his rigorously researched storytelling is well-suited to the challenge of writing about a phenomenon as vastly incomprehensible as climate collapse. “We can’t picture 6,780 pyramids of Giza,” Weisman writes, so it is hard to visualize the 40 million tons of carbon humanity produces each year, but we can start to comprehend its impact through the stories of the people on the ground trying to do something about it—engineers at work restoring Mesopotamian wetlands in Iraq or plasma physicists developing commercial-scale fusion power at MIT. There are architects in this book too—including projects in the Korean DMZ by Bijoy Jain, Shigeru Ban, Seung H-Sang, and Minsuk Cho, and a Bjarke Ingels’ proposal for a floating city in Busan inspired by Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao—but Hope Dies Last’s immediate relevance to readers of this publication may have more to do with a statistic familiar to these pages, the 40 percent of global greenhouse emissions for which the construction industry is responsible (a share second only to the oil and gas sector). Our ecological crisis is, at least in part, a byproduct of our built environment. (Courtesy Dutton) Weisman writes about that built environment beautifully. His description of the natural world’s ruthless repossession of a post-human Manhattan in the third chapter of The World Without Us is a small masterpiece of infrastructural prose. Many moments in Hope Dies Last, including a description of the massive network of dams, dikes, locks, levees, and storm surge barriers that comprise the Netherland’s Delta Works, are equally compelling. When COVID-19 locked much of humanity indoors, Weisman was seen as something of a visionary, but what makes his writing so griping is less his sweeping prognostications than his doggedly pragmatic realism. We cannot begin to address our climate crisis without looking rationally at and learning from its myriad constituent parts. The Netherlands’ methodically planned Delta Works, for example, cost less than a tenth of what the U.S. paid to clean up after hurricane Katrina. We need to be smarter about how we build. We also need to build less. Weisman’s second book, Countdown was a study of a central logical fallacy of late capitalism—that technology can solve for the impossibility of infinite population growth on a planet with very finite resources. We don’t like to talk about population control because it can feel coercive or contrary to our values but placing faith in technology to solve for unlimited human growth is lunacy. The same may be said of our hugely energy-intensive development of artificial intelligence infrastructure. A future edition of Countdown might include in its preface the 2023 story of a Belgian man despondent over the climate crisis, who committed suicide after a conversation with a chatbot that arrived at the logical conclusion that most impactful thing he could do to save the earth would be to remove the burden he placed upon it. The environmental outlook is far worse now than when Weisman began his career; the message at the core of Hope Dies Last is more somber than the two books that preceded it. Hope is not an expression Weisman uses lightly. Early in the book he unpacks the foreboding that lingers within a word that conveys an emotion more powerful than optimism precisely because it also carries a tinge of doubt. Hope, he notes, is a word that struggles against itself. That struggle is compounded by the uncomfortable truth of the astonishingly destructive work that has been done in the weeks since Hope Dies Last went to press. Even my advance copy has begun to feel outdated as I watch the current administration slam the door on so many small last best hopes. Yet, there is still work to be done and much of it by the people who think about how we build the world around us. In the words of a naturalist named Rosario whom Weisman meets while she is helping to clear the beach of plastic bottles during a turtle census in the Yucatán: “It’s a lost cause, but we do it anyway.” Justin Beal is an artist and author based in New York. His first book, Sandfuture, was published by MIT Press in 2021. He teaches at Hunter College and the Yale School of Architecture. This post contains affiliate links. AN may have a commission if you make a purchase through these links.