The Geography of Hope

   Chris Turner is a journalist worth knowing. First of all he is has received many awards. Secondly, he is a really good writer, easy to read and fun.  I've just finished his 2007 book (Random House Canada): The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need.
   It is precisely that: a tour around many initiatives in different parts of the world to look at sustainable development that harbours hope for the future. He looks at wind and solar power, options for public transportation as well as trends in car manufacture, new ways of building houses and urban design to avoid sprawl. He brings in examples from Europe, North America and several countries in Asia. The approach allows him to tell stories and tell them well.
   Most of all I was impressed with the second part that tries to put together some of the threads that deserve analysis in the "business" of sustainability: the economics of it, its ideological bent, the development industry and the role of community.  In this last category he waxes eloquent about a number of communities he visited including the exiled Tibetans in India and the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland.
   The epilogue alone is worth the whole book. Copyright restructions won't allow me to copy it in full--though I'd like to. Nevertheless, here are a few lines to savour.  He is standing on a hill overlooking Calgary, Alberta, where he now lives. It is not exactly the first city one would think of as a location for a discussion of sustainability. Nevertheless:

I look out now from Scotsman's Hill, and I see hope. It surprises me just how much. It's not obvious or easy and it's far from certain, but it's there nonetheless. I see the city with new eyes, through new lenses. This will have to be my sustainable city on a hill, because the piecemeal map I've assembled must in time become a map of the whole world.

    He points to any number of urban initiatives already underway including the Light Rail Transit powered by a Wind Farm to the south of the city. But he also imagines all kinds of other possibilities drawn from real experiences he has discovered--and the city is transformed in his eye.

My greatest hope, the one I'd set out on this journey to find, is that all of this represents the first faint glimmering of a sustainable dawn.

   At a time when it is all to easy to point out the catastrophic possiblities that loom before humanity, it is energizing to read a young author who is so filled with hope and to find that hope based on real possibilities that are just waiting to be fulfilled.