This book analyses how and why we are living at a critical moment in the history of human life on earth and explores how we find grounds for the hopes that will enable us to address the challenges and crises of our time. The author analyses hope both practically and philosophically as a generative virtue to realistically discern the situations in which we find ourselves, and imaginatively to anticipate possibilities when the future is unknown and uncertain. The author argues that hope is a mean between anomy, disillusionment, and despair, on the one hand, and wishful thinking, dreaming, and fanaticizing, on the other hand. The book not only examines - and analyzes from a historical perspective - the contemporary crises such as climate change, environmental degradation and its effects such as the social costs of these developments, but also further analyzes the character and micro-dynamics of hope and how it makes a difference in how we manage the crises which inevitably emerge. Though contemporary crises are those we tend to focus on, the author also engages with what is involved in a due regard for history and the relevance of a sense of history for addressing the crises of our time. He shows us what we can learn from revisiting some thoughtful reflections by thinkers like Niebuhr, Jaspers, Camus, and Arendt. Finally, the author shows us what is involved practically in anticipating possibilities, by looking at hope as a social practice and noting how hopeful people make a difference.

This book analyses how and why we are living at a critical moment in the history of human life on earth and explores how we find grounds for the hopes that will enable us to address the challenges and crises of our time. The author analyses hope both practically and philosophically as a generative virtue to realistically discern the situations in which we find ourselves, and imaginatively to anticipate possibilities when the future is unknown and uncertain. The author argues that hope is a mean between anomy, disillusionment, and despair, on the one hand, and wishful thinking, dreaming, and fanaticizing, on the other hand. The book not only examines – and analyzes from a historical perspective - the contemporary crises such as climate change, environmental degradation and its effects such as the social costs of these developments, but also further analyzes the character and micro-dynamics of hope and how it makes a difference in how we manage the crises which inevitably emerge. Though contemporary crises are those we tend to focus on, the author also engages with what is involved in a due regard for history and the relevance of a sense of history for addressing the crises of our time. He shows us what we can learn from revisiting some thoughtful reflections by thinkers like Niebuhr, Jaspers, Camus, and Arendt. Finally, the author shows us what is involved practically in anticipating possibilities, by looking at hope as a social practice and noting how hopeful people make a difference.

“[A] landmark book . . . Solnit illustrates how the uprisings that begin on the streets can upend the status quo and topple authoritarian regimes” (Vice). A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of activists at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of our times in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. “One of the best books of the 21st century.” —The Guardian “No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.” —Bill McKibben, New York Times–bestselling author of Falter “An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways.” —The New Yorker

The essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it. “Hope Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a finite planet?" (Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction). “Hope Jahren is the voice that science has been waiting for.” —Nature Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions—from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles—that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before. She explains the current and projected consequences of global warming—from superstorms to rising sea levels—and the actions that we all can take to fight back. At once an explainer on the mechanisms of global change and a lively, personal narrative given to us in Jahren’s inimitable voice, The Story of More is “a superb account of the deadly struggle between humanity and what may prove the only life-bearing planet within ten light years" (E. O. Wilson).

Radical Hope in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon: The Moon and Meteor provides a careful consideration of the author's career, examining the ways in which the subversion of his early novels feeds into the radical optimism of his later works. The book's first half explores the author's use of the image of the Moon as a romanticized ideal that is irreparably corrupted by and corruptly manipulated by forces of worldly power. The second half takes up the meteor as an image of impending violence that has yet to be full realized, finding in the unlikely possibility of that violence being somehow averted, a reckless sort of hope. This foolhardy but nonetheless real hope to escape from violent, oppressive structures and forge a real ethical obligation to the other marks the development of these paired metaphors, and through them Pynchon introduces the possibility, however slight, that literature, with its powerfully intimate relationship with consciousness, may at least sustain that hope.