The New Yorker journalist and environmentalist, best known for the Pulitzer Prizewinning The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, meets biologists trying to preserve the world's rarest fish, engineers turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland, Australian researchers developing a 'super coral' that can survive on a hotter globe, and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth, changing the sky from blue to white. Inspiring and darkly comic, the book examines the challenges we face and the potential for solving them.

Alok Jha is the science and technology correspondent at The Economist and author of The Water Book.