Join journalist Devi Lockwood on this “monumental achievement” (Richard Moor, bestselling author of On Trails) as she bikes around the world collecting personal stories about how flood, fire, drought, and rising seas are changing communities.
It’s official: apocalyptic climate predictions finally came true. Catastrophic wildfires, relentless hurricanes, melting permafrost, and coastal flooding have given us a taste of what some communities have already been living with for far too long. Yet, we don’t often hear the voices of the people most affected. Journalist Devi Lockwood set out to change that.
In 1,001 Voices on Climate Change, Lockwood travels the world, often by bicycle, collecting first-person accounts of climate change. She frequently carried with her a simple carboard sign reading, “Tell me a story about climate change.”
Over five years, covering twenty countries across six continents, Lockwood hears from indigenous elders and youth in Fiji and Tuvalu about drought and disappearing coastlines, attends the UN climate conference in Morocco, and bikes the length of New Zealand and Australia, interviewing the people she meets about retreating glaciers, contaminated rivers, and wildfires. She rides through Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia to listen to marionette puppeteers and novice Buddhist monks.
From Denmark and Sweden to China, Turkey, the Canadian Artic, and the Peruvian Amazon, she finds that ordinary people sharing their stories foes far more to advance understanding and empathy than even the most alarming statistics and studies. This “luminous book” (Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Poison Squad and The Poisoner’s Handbook) is a hopeful global listening tour for climate change, channeling the urgency of those who have already glimpsed the future to help us avoid the worst.
"This is a great adventure story, but also a completely necessary book—the climate crisis has reached the point where people around the world feel it, understand it, and talk about it in ways that everyone needs to hear."—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
"A hybrid of travel literature and oral history, Lockwood somehow shrinks the ungraspably vast problem of climate change down to a human scale, then, patiently, carefully, combines those individual voices into a planetary chorus. A monumental achievement."—Robert Moor, bestselling author of On Trails: An Exploration
"Devi Lockwood's luminous book, 1,001 Voices on Climate Change, is a testament to the power of listening, and an amazing chance to let yourself hear the symphony of grief and of courage that plays through lives of people around the world, all trying to find their way on a relentlessly changing planet." —Deborah Blum, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Poison Squad and The Poisoner's Handbook
" "Tell me a story." Is there a more fundamentally human sentence than that? Devi Lockwood circles the globe, seeking people’s experiences with water and climate change, from cultural myths, to rising seas’ impacts on daily life, to one woman’s pain, tuned to the voices of the trees. Lockwood seeks and you, dear reader, shall find." —Erica Gies, environmental journalist, science journalist, and author of the upcoming book Water Always Wins: Going with the Flow to Thrive in an Age of Droughts, Floods, and Climate Change.
