Life As We Know It (Can Be)

Award-winning journalist and CNN chief climate correspondent Bill Weir takes readers through time and around our changing world to confront the biggest threats to life as we know it and search for proven ways to build happier, healthier, and more resilient communities, come what may.

While reporting from every state and continent, and filming his acclaimed CNN Original Series, The Wonder List, Bill Weir has spent decades telling the stories of unique people, places, cultures, and creatures on the brink of change. And as the first Chief Climate Correspondent in network news, he is immersed in the latest scientific warnings and breakthroughs while often on the frontlines of disasters, natural and manmade.

After the birth of his son in April 2020, Bill began distilling these experiences into a series of Earth Day letters for his boy to read in 2050, weaving the worry and wonder into a reminder to other anxious parents that they are not alone and a better future can still be written. This dialog with a boy born into “The Age of Unreason” inspired Life As We Know It (Can Be). With a storyteller’s flair, Bill digs into fascinating corners of history, psychology, technology, and his own biographyto connect the lessons he’s collected from the happiest, healthiest, and most resilient societies.

Bill’s stories take readers on journeys from the Greek Island where people live to 100 at an astonishing rate to the one community in Florida that took on a hurricane and never lost power, from the Antarctic Peninsula where one species of penguin is showing us the key to survival to the nuclear fusion labs where scientists are trying to build a star in box. In these pages, we join a search for ancient wisdom and new ideas.

Life As We Know It (Can Be) is a celebration of the wonders of our planet, a meditation on the human wants and needs that drive it out of balance, and an inspiration for communities to galvanize around nature and each other as the very best way to brace for what’s next.