Between Al Gore’s environmental blockbuster, An Inconvenient Truth, and books like Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn’t Seem to Care), it feels like the world’s climate is... well, pretty much screwed.

Enter Chris Turner’s The Geography of Hope, a new take on climate change that’s — dare I say it? — uplifting. “It was something between a hypothesis and a dare,” says Turner. “The standard climate change book has 10 chapters of absolute terror and then a chapter of generic big-picture fixes. The End of Nature by Bill McKibben basically says that if deep ecology — putting other species on an equal footing with humanity — conquers the world mindshare, we might save ourselves. You look at that and say, well, that’s impossible.

“There have been a couple of reports that say, we have the tools, but we don’t have the will,” he continues. “When William McDonough designed the headquarters for the GAP, it got the cover feature of the Wall Street Journal’s marketplace section. In the article, the big revolutionary design feature was operable windows. That’s how ass-backward we are — if you have windows that open, that’s the front page of the Wall Street Journal. How do you create the will? Maybe hope is a better motivating force than fear. I guess that was the dare: could I find a patchwork quilt of a sustainable society? Was there enough stuff out there already?”

With that, Turner embarked on a world-spanning tour, searching for havens of sustainability in Asia, Europe, India, the southern United States and other locations. “It felt like following breadcrumb trails,” he says. “I’d read about this island in Demark that had eliminated fossil fuels, and I found this architect in Bangkok who built a house that produces more energy than it consumes. Every single thing I uncovered was, plain and simple, the right thing to do. They are better ways of producing energy, of moving people around, of housing people — whether or not climate change is the compelling factor, they’re just better solutions.”

Case in point: when Google wanted to redesign its headquarters, it called McDonough. “Google doesn’t particularly care about their carbon footprint. They want to attract the best and brightest, and the way they’ll do it is by being the greenest company in Silicon Valley. All this sustainability green stuff has its own logic: you don’t really need to sell it beyond showing people that it exists.”

At the end of an exhaustively optimistic list of sustainable advancements, Turner offers a solution of his own: mass marketing. “A lot of people in the environmental field are mistrustful of the mass media,” he says. “If you need to change all of human behaviour, who’s done better than Nike? There are people in the hills of northwestern Thailand that want a piece of that! Proctor and Gamble spends billions and billions of dollars every year trying to figure out what people want and how to change their behaviour. Why wouldn’t you tap that resource? My hope is that if you point the spotlight on good ideas, people will see that it makes no sense to work in an office where you can’t open the windows.”

Turner’s Calgary book launch is at Broken City on October 24, 7 p.m.