Virtual Event: Devi Lockwood

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes science and climate journalist DEVI LOCKWOOD for a discussion of her book 1,001 Voices on Climate Change: Everyday Stories of Flood, Fire, Drought, and Displacement from Around the World. She will be joined in conversation by renowned folklorist MARIA TATAR, author of The Heroine with 1001 Faces. 

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While payment is not required, we are suggesting a $5 contribution to support this author series, our staff, and the future of Harvard Book Store—a locally owned, independently run Cambridge institution. In addition, by purchasing a copy of 1,001 Voices on Climate Change on harvard.com, you support indie bookselling and the writing community during this difficult time.

About 1,001 Voices on Climate Change

It’s official: 2020 will be remembered as the year when 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 cardboard 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 Arctic, and the Peruvian Amazon, she finds that ordinary people sharing their stories does far more to advance understanding and empathy than even the most alarming statistics and studies. This book 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.

Praise for 1,001 Voices on Climate Change

"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