How Can We Thrive?

Scientific Inquiry and the Future of Sustainability

Ongoing work · Forthcoming 2026

Every object in your day, the phone, the meal, the light overhead, arrives through systems that stretch across the planet, and they run so quietly that most of us never count our share of them. In a wealthy country, that share burns like a hundred old-fashioned light bulbs, glowing day and night, for you alone. Most of the water in your life is hidden in your food, not in your taps. The clean car in the driveway carries about the weight of two adults in extra mined metal.

How Can We Thrive? takes you inside those systems, energy, materials, water, food, climate, cities, and the living world, asking at each step what the evidence shows, what the numbers mean, and what trade-offs no honest answer can avoid. The arithmetic never gets harder than multiplication and a sense of scale, and every number is one you can rebuild yourself, which is the point. I would rather you finish able to take apart a weak argument than recite a strong one.

I began asking these questions in 2014, in Karachi, in the middle of an energy crisis, when daily power outages decided whether hospitals functioned and children finished their homework. Energy, I came to see, was as much a human problem as a technical one, and more than a decade of teaching it that way grew into this book.

Whatever your background, you are exactly the reader I had in mind.