Beyond the doom and gloom of climate change

Propelled by concern about the bleak future his young daughter might face, Chris Turner spent a year touring the world looking for solutions to the planet’s environmental crisis. `I started off feeling the need to be hopeful,’ the Calgary author admits. But, `I feel the depth of my hope deepening ..... I’m finding my expectations exceeded regularly.’ His new book, The Geography of Hope describes many examples of things being done right. But as Turner researched and wrote it, he also came to the conclusion that most of the environment movement has been spreading the wrong message. The news must be turned on its head, he says. It’s time for us to shift from despair to dreams.

Can Al Gore equal Martin Luther King Jr.? The apparently bizarre, possibly irreverent, question comes to mind while reading The Geography of Hope, a new book by Calgary author Chris Turner.

Turner argues it's time to stop blaring dire warnings about the perils of climate change and, instead, start enthusiastically proclaiming solutions.

We need to dream rather than despair, he says. Just as King did when he was the nearly mythic champion of the U.S. civil rights movement.

Gore has far more presence and appeal than anyone else crusading about the world's major environmental threat, climate change.

But, in Turner's view, he's a long way from being to that cause what King was to his. In his An Inconvenient Truth movie, book and slide shows, the former U.S. vice-president and 2000 contender for the White House, is strong on portraying the dangerous state of the world, but weak on solutions.

"It remains to be seen if he can turn the corner from being the best messenger of the urgency of the thing into the one who points the way ahead," Turner says.

But whether it's Gore, someone else, or – a very long shot – all of us, his main contention is that the message must be turned around.

Turner is not among those who deny soaring greenhouse gas emissions threaten the world. We must confront it, he writes, "unless you consider rendering the planet unfit for human life a viable option."

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