Life as We Know It (Can Be): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World

By Bill Weir

Award-winning journalist and CNN chief climate correspondent Bill Weir draws on his years of immersive travel and reporting to share the best ideas and stories of hope and positivity from the people and communities around the world who are thriving in the wake of climate change, and what we can learn from them to build a more promising future.

While reporting from every state and every continent, and filming his acclaimed CNN Original Series The Wonder List, Bill Weir has spent decades telling the stories of unique people, places, cultures, and creatures on the brink of change. As the first Chief Climate Correspondent in network news, he’s immersed in the latest science and breakthroughs on the topic, while often on the frontlines of disasters, natural and manmade.

In 2020, Bill began distilling these experiences into a series of Earth Day letters for his then-newborn son to read in 2050, to help him better understand the world he will have grown up in and be better prepared to embrace the future. Bill’s work and his letters were the inspiration for Life As We Know It (Can Be), which confronts the worry and wonder of climate change with messages and examples of hope for all of us on how a better future can still be written.

Highlighting groundbreaking innovation in fields of clean energy, food and water sources, housing and building materials, and more, and touching on how happiness, resilience, and health and wellness factor into the topic of climate change, Bill’s stories take readers on a global journey, from one community in Florida that took on a hurricane and never lost power, to the Antarctic Peninsula where one species of penguin is showing us the key to survival, to the nuclear fusion labs where scientists are trying to build a star in a box. In these pages, we join a search for ancient wisdom and new ideas.

Life As We Know It (Can Be) is a celebration of the wonders of our planet, a meditation on the human wants and needs that drive it out of balance, and an inspiration for communities to galvanize around nature and each other as the very best way to best prepare and plan for what’s next.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chronicle Books Digital
• Release date: Apr 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781797213620

Book preview

Prologue

Letter to the Future

DEAR RIVER,

Against all odds, you were conceived in a lighthouse, born into a pandemic, learned to crawl amid democratic and industrial revolutions, and have tasted just enough of Life as We Know It to resent us when it’s gone.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry we broke the sea and sky and shortened the wings of the nightingale.

I’m sorry that the Great Barrier Reef is no longer great, that we value Amazon much more than the Amazon, and that the waterfront neighborhood where you are growing up could be condemned by rising seas before you’re old enough to apply for a mortgage.

The Earth I joined in 1967 is gone now, and no one knows what kind of planet will replace it.

The United States of America I knew and loved is gone now, too, eaten from the inside by metastasized lies fed to furious people in forgotten places.

But I’m most definitely not sorry that you’re here. In fact, I’m delighted that your mom’s one remaining forty-two-year old ovary surprised us with the most lovable little boy nine months after a vacation to Croatia, birthplace of my Grandpa Miller. That’s where we found a Dubrovnik lighthouse on Airbnb, and until you know what it’s like to fall in love, the story will bring eyerolls of mortification, but I can think of no better omen for the kind of boy we hope to raise—a solid source of light for those who need it most.

I get to introduce you to mountains and oceans, penguins and lemurs. I get to watch you taste wild blueberries and see your expression the first time you hear your sister sing from a stage. We will zip open tents from the Boundary Waters to Baja and you will feel the rush that comes with dawn birdsong and no plans for the day. We’ll savor marvels made by water and wind and the hands of ancient women and men, and you will meet too many kind souls to remember as you build a better world on the wreckage of our mistakes.

Looking back from what’s left, it might be hard for you to understand how we could let it get this way. But we were under the spell of Genesis 1:28, a strange urge to carve straight lines out of nature’s curves, and a uniquely human force called profit motive.

Our impulses were supercharged by our species’ bottomless capacity to adapt, letting go of the Milky Way one streetlight at a time. Letting go of tidal pools and old growth forests, one starfish and fir at a time. It’s called shrinking baseline syndrome, with each generation passing down a little less Earth to the next, until a boy walks in silent woods with no way of knowing the songs he’s missing.

You will turn thirty in 2050 and I want to believe that reality will have made a comeback by then and that you’ll read this as soon as you’re ready for big questions. There is a section written to your sister, Olivia, so you’ll have someone to compare notes with while making fun of Your Old Man. By then, you’ll know whether the Disenlightenment turned deadly, if the Age of Unreason broke like a fever, and whatever happened to the President in the Red Hat.

Maybe yours will be a world with hydrogen airships instead of diesel tractor trailers and sting ray–shaped robots that sink seaweed to bury carbon instead of factory-fishing trawlers that clear-cut the sea. Maybe your buses will bring you to school on sunlight and then help power your classrooms after dark. The world’s most abundant fuel source might be the isotopes in sea water, or little nuclear fusion stars in boxes, or minerals mined on an asteroid named Psyche somewhere between Mars and Jupiter.

Right now, River, there is a spacecraft also named Psyche in the sky, and just the other day NASA fired up the solar- and xenon-powered propulsion system that will send this American invention the size of a tennis court across the galaxy at up to 124,000 miles per hour! You are four now, and when you turn six, Psyche will slingshot around Mars and by the time you are nine we’ll get our first pictures of an asteroid so rich in precious minerals it could be worth the trip.

Your great-grandparents were alive from the Wright Brothers to the space shuttle, but as the Earth unravels and artificial intelligence rises faster than our imaginations, their twentieth-century rate of changes-per-lifetime will seem as quaint as the butter churn.

Selfishly, I’m also glad you’re here to keep me in shape, educated, and fun because, believe it or not, Your Old Man used to be fun. Ask around.

I used to lead pub crawls and skydive and fight for more airtime for my wacky bloopers. Covering sports in Green Bay, Chicago, and LA was so much easier than covering climate. For one thing, when the Bulls lost to the Jazz, no one called the station to argue that Karl Malone is a Chinese hoax. And no matter how badly it hurts when our teams missed the playoffs, the beauty of sport is there’s always next season. In this gig, every day I’m forced to think about what happens if seasons go away.

Olivia arrived in 2003, when the wounds of 9/11 were still fresh, and we moved cross-country and settled next to the hole that once held the Twin Towers. I was a cub network anchor, and between reporting trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, Katrina and Fukushima, I watched your sister and One World Trade Center grow in astonishing leaps.

And the American story change in staggering ways.

She was sixteen when I first held you in the crook of my arm and felt the curl in your Tic Tac toes and in her lifetime our nation had moved from a so-called War on Terror to fresh wars with new terrors, homegrown. My Old Man did duck-and-cover drills in case of Russian missiles, I did them in case of tornados, Olivia did them for school shooters, and you may have to worry about all the above.

We brought you home from a plague and into the Age of Unreason, where gun violence had just passed car accidents as the leading killer of kids and your first kiss from your mother came through a mask that smelled like wildfire smoke. At this point in the pandemic panic, faceless and soulless internet profiteers were charging $600 for a box of N-95s, so Mom wore the leftover mask from my go-kit to the hospital, last used to cover a fiery place called California.

You entered a world in lockdown, with a death ticker in the corner of every screen, where people suited up like astronauts leaving the airlock to walk the dog on empty streets. We sanitized mail, forgot to unmute ourselves, drank too much, and cried. And as the President in the Red Hat instigated improvised rage in the background, I’d rock you, inhale the delirious scent of your tiny head, and thank the universe that you came with a Canadian passport.

On the day you first stood on your own, courts across the land made it clear that the President in the Red Hat had lost a fair election, but his believers stormed the United States Capitol with such violent force that seven people lost their lives and another lost an eye. They weaponized American flags and sporting goods and stomped, beat, and bear-sprayed men and women in uniform while yelling In the name of Jesus! and singing The Star-Spangled Banner. Staffers hid with knowledge gleaned in all those school shooter drills, while senators and congressmen fled.

A week later, on the day you learned to open kitchen cabinets, I packed body armor and flew to Wisconsin for the inauguration. The last time the threat of flying bullets was high enough to justify such a wardrobe, I was in the Kunar Province of Afghanistan where American soldiers were sent to contain bad actors and keep tribes from neighboring valleys from killing each other long enough for democracy to take hold. Ten years later, there were four times as many National Guardsmen protecting the US Capitol as all our soldiers in the Middle East, but the mission was essentially the same.

As of the time I’m writing to you, over one thousand insurrectionists have been arrested, over five hundred convicted, and over three hundred sent to prison. The President in the Red Hat is under ninety-one indictments, not just for his actions related to the events of January 6, but also for allegations of leaning on Georgia officials to find him some votes, keeping state secrets in his Florida bathroom, and paying hush money to a porn star. He is also the leading Republican candidate in 2024, by a mile.

After day-drinking from the firehose of peer-reviewed scientific dread, I still do the New Old Dad stare into the middle distance, but so much good has also happened during the first four years of your life that I now wake with more wonder than worry.

How? I can hear my peers echo with an edge.

Because we are made of stories that never end.

If the lifespan of our 4.5 billion-year-old planet was scaled down to a forty-five-year-old house, the Himalayas were installed five years ago, homo sapiens moved in about three months ago, and the Industrial Revolution began just a minute ago when you read the first word on the last page.

In that blink of Earth Time, the new human tenants went from cave monkeys to demigods. We rose from bands of insignificant hunter-gatherers to city-building, river-bending, mountain-moving, space-traveling hordes with weapons, tools, and unintended consequences that grow mightier by the minute.

How? Was it our nifty opposable thumbs? Chimpanzees have those. Was it our ability to work together? Ants, wolves, and killer whales do that quite well, but they have yet to land a remote-control robot on Mars or build—and repeatedly crash—a stock market.

No, son, our secret sauce came around six weeks ago on that forty-five-year timescale, when we stumbled across fire and learned to cook, unlocking the kind of nutrition that grows brains big enough to create, store, and amplify the one thing that makes us human.

Stories.

All the flags and borders, money and markets, laws and religions—every post and beam in this old house—came from the stories we tell ourselves. Some are older than others, but all of them are under constant revision.

Now, more than ever, human stories will be the difference between destruction and salvation. Old stories got us here, but new ones can get us out. They are the most powerful things we have, and they start with the stories we tell ourselves. For example, there is an old story that most Americans either don’t know that Earth is overheating or don’t care. This story was so sticky that if I’d asked my average countryman in 2022 to guess the percentage of fellow citizens concerned about climate change and supportive of action, they would have said between 37 and 43 percent.

In reality, researchers¹ at Princeton, Boston College, and the University of Indiana found it is 66 to 80 percent.

Supporters of climate policies outnumber opponents two to one, the authors of the study found, while Americans falsely perceive nearly the opposite to be true. They call this pluralistic ignorance, which means we are surrounded by allies we never knew we had. At the same time, while two-thirds of Americans say they are at least somewhat worried about global warming the same percentage says they talk about it with friends and family rarely or never.²

River, this means that change for the better depends on the brave, lucky few born with the means and freedom to start conversations and a conviction to use that means and freedom, come what may.

The day I saw your scrunched little face for the first time, I went from the ultrasound to a climate march led by Greta Thunberg. By the time you read this, you’ll be able to find volumes written on how she was canonized and demonized, but back then I knew her as a young woman your sister’s age who had captured the world’s attention by leaving school every Friday to stage a lonely climate strike outside the Swedish parliament. When we met, she quietly entered the interview room with her hand-painted protest sign tucked under one thin arm, and she quickly showed a mind curious enough to digest the warnings from the scientists that others were ignoring, and honest enough to call out the arrogant ignorance and ignorant arrogance of all the grown-ups in charge. Her work has connected millions to the allies they didn’t know they had, and that post-ultrasound march was walking, breathing, traffic-stopping proof that the story might be changing.

But then those kids were sent back to their rooms by a virus, and when a policeman in Minneapolis used his knee and nine minutes to murder a Black man in the street, a brave young woman captured and shared it all. The moment unleashed a fury that brought down statues—and statutes—most assumed would stand forever. Meanwhile the push for climate action moved online in ways that made the movement harder to see. Even worsening floods and droughts couldn’t rekindle the mass passion we saw gather behind Greta, and democracy itself seemed under siege everywhere.

But then in a twist of electoral fate, just when it seemed that all hope for American climate action would die, a Senator from Coal Country miraculously changed his mind and helped pass the most ambitious climate law in US history despite party-line resistance. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 held more carrots to lure investment than sticks to punish polluters, but it put clean energy on sale in a way that is bringing a chorus of relieved sighs from scientists around the world and shouts of excitement from engineers and entrepreneurs. Since Joe Biden signed it into law, over half a trillion dollars in private investment has been added to fuel this next Industrial Revolution.

And it never would have happened without those kids in the streets and their calls down the corridors of power.

I don’t know what becomes of this movement now. If the pandemic is any guide, we will whipsaw between progress and setback, inspiration and despair. Fewer than half of US states have a climate plan, and while the new law tries to entice the rest into joining them, the country can’t even agree on reproductive rights, gun laws, or science.

But here’s your hopeful plot twist.

After a century and a half of burning our fuel because it was cheap, the cheapest form of fuel man has ever known now comes from solar-powered batteries and onshore wind. And that is why, despite fierce partisan and industry resistance, Texas produces more of this clean energy than California.

It’s not the end of life.

It’s the end of as we know it.

And climate change on a degraded planet is not a problem created or solved by physics or technology. It is a problem created and solved by stories.

River, you have a good shot at seeing the twenty-second century!

And when you get there, I want you to tell them how we came together, sorted out our shit, and wrote a better story.

The Physiological Needs

YOUR OLD MAN HAS FALLEN FROM AN AIRPLANE 128 TIMES and once from a hot air balloon, sprinted across a valley in Afghanistan with the First Infantry as bullets pew-pewed overhead, and accepted more rides with impaired drivers than I care to admit. I’ve been sent into wildfires and hurricanes, swam with sharks in Galapagos, been surrounded by grizzlies in Alaska, and once hid on the floor of a stalled car in Gaza as a convoy of Hamas fighters rolled by. In each of those moments, exhilaration flooded fear, and if I ignore the prices paid by the less dumb-lucky around me, these memories feel like adventure. But my narrowest brushes with death came from the sudden change in the basic ingredients of life. Oxygen and hydrogen. Air and water.

The most recent scare came in 2019 on the Italian island of Ischia a few days before your mom and I checked into the Dubrovnik lighthouse of your provenance. There is a little arch next to that hole in the rock, our captain said as he pointed to the shoreline cliffs. We’d hired his boat for a languid cruise, dropping anchor here and there in perfect little bays. If you swim under it, you will find an interesting grotto.

We dove in without masks, fins, or floatation. First mistake. Then, with a bloodstream still full of boat drinks (second mistake), I did a 100-yard crawl toward the cliff face. Without checking to see if your mom was behind me (that’s right, third mistake), I took one big breath and plunged into the first submerged passageway I could find.

The entrance was about the length and width of a school bus, and swimming through, I thrilled with the thought of emerging into a magical cavern of shimmering light, but that idea turned to terror as my head bonked into the rock ceiling, inches above the water line.

Wrong grotto.

I could try to breathe from the pocket of air between water and rock, but the waves were too choppy and the light too dim for me to judge the wisdom of that option. I pictured sucking a lungful of Mediterranean brine and began to panic with the realization that I would have to make it out on the same breath that brought me in. The cliché that life flashes before your eyes is a cliché for good reason; I joined the club that believes it as I watched a supercut of milestones and moments of banality as I paddled furiously with one hand and clawed the wall with the other.

Your mom paddling in confusion out in the sunlight.

My mom, my dad, their divorce, my divorce.

Your sister at my funeral.

Then my vision began to close, like looking through a paper towel tube, just like it did on that media flight with the Thunderbirds when the F-14 took a 9G turn and my blood was centrifuged into my legs, and at the end of the tube I saw Olivia hiking Your Old Man’s ashes up Mount Sopris and—GASSSSSSP.

I’ve never seen you so afraid, your mother told me before swimming off to help save an elderly man in the water nearby who was crying out in Italian. Coincidentally, he was muscle-cramped or exhausted and we were the closest to him, so she held his head above water until help could arrive while I dogpaddled alongside, still in shock at how close my own thrill-seeking stupidity had put me to death. If I’d drowned, she would have been too distracted to save him, and I began to recognize some common denominators in my brushes with death.

Air and water, taken for granted.

Since you showed up, River, Your Old Man has been thinking deeper about wants and