When I started research on The Geography of Hope, my global survey of solutions to the climate crisis, back in 2005, it was a kind of dare. I told myself (and my publisher) I was on the hunt for “the state of the art in sustainable living,” that I was assembling “a patchwork map of a world that works,” but what I was really looking for was an answer or two for my newborn daughter – something I could tell her, once she was old enough to ask, about how we were going to get out of this mess.

There was a tinge of desperation to the project that I didn’t really admit to myself at the time. I barely understood what “sustainable living” was and I had no clear idea what I’d find, and I had a kind of cognitive itch at the back of my skull that said maybe I wouldn’t find much of anything. But I quickly came to realize that the tools for building this sustainable world were more plentiful and much closer at hand than I’d imagined. I soon understood as well that there were unique properties to the global consciousness in these first years of what has come to be know