Bill McKibben's highly successful Step It Up campaign may have overshadowed the release of his latest book Deep Economy, which probably overshadowed the recent paperback re-release of one of McKibben's earlier books, 1995's Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth. Luckily, this second edition of Hope (Milkweed Editions), largely in part because of a new afterword by McKibben, remains relevant, and, like its title says, hopeful.

The book discusses, in four sections, pockets of civilization that can give us hope for sustainable communities and environments. McKibben starts with arguably the driest section, chronicling the regrowth of wildlife in New England despite our best efforts to completely destroy it. Although the most tedious of the book, I found this section full of promise because it reminded me that in our quest to "save the environment", we are really saving humanity: the earth will continue to bounce back long after we're gone.

The second two sections discuss two local solutions to global problems in the communities of Curitiba, Brazil and Kerala, India. In the first, ambitious city planners in Curitiba use practical, yet ingenious solutions to the city's problems to create a sustainable city where people's desires are met, no matter what their income, and residents feel a strong sense of community. For example, Curitiba's favelas, or slums, were constantly overwhelmed with trash piling up. Local officials started a program where residents of the favelas could exchange bags of gathered trash for equal-weight bags of food purchased, by the city, from local farmers who had a surplus. A model public-transportation system, based on buses owned by private companies, but with fares and routes dictated by the city, had, in twenty years, grown from 25,000 riders per day, to 1.5 million. City planners changed much of the downtown business district into pedestrian-only areas.

Kerala's story was different, but no less remarkable. In a region where people survived on, at the time of first publication, $330 per year, life expectancies were equal to those of Americans, there was virtually 100% literacy, and education was a community priority, for adults and children alike. Keralites have been able to avoid the abject poverty that pervades much India, due to their leaders committing to putting people first, and breaking down socioeconomic barriers such as race, class, and gender through community commitment to problem solving.

The stories of these communities are so completely intriguing, mainly because of their innovative, yet practical approaches to solving problems that also plague us here in America. It indicated to me the glaring ethnocentrism that we sometimes demonstrate when it comes to looking outside our own country for answers to problems.

The final original section of the book covers McKibben's reflections on the first three, although I found the afterword much more fascinating, as McKibben reflects on the original text ten years later. Were Curitiba and Kerala able to sustain the successes they had achieved? How have NAFTA, the WTO, and 9/11 affected sustainability? Are we doomed, or does hope still exist? McKibben doesn't have all the answers, but I was left with hope that those answers are out there, waiting for us to discover them.