In autumn 2025 and spring 2026, as part of a global reporting project called the Out of Eden Walk, Paul Salopek undertook an arduous foot journey of 400 miles along the "Lost Coast" of Alaska, a little-visited shoreline wilderness that—due to its complex interplay of warming temperatures and extraordinarily dynamic geology—has been described by biologists as perhaps the most rapidly changing landscape on the planet.
With its dizzying mosaic of shifting rivers, suddenly appearing (and disappearing) lakes, "migrating" shorelines, and reshuffling forest habitats, this vast subarctic ecosystem represents a sobering laboratory of the future. In some ways, it is the natural world's mirror of the enormous upheavals roiling humankind in the early 21st century. Among the debris belched from its melting glaciers: the wreckage of modern aircraft and huge, 12,000-year-old spruce trees that seemed to have fallen only yesterday, and not in last Ice Age.
The Geography of the Future takes readers on an unsettling wonder journey into a corner of the subarctic that is poised at the crossroad of extreme climate change, hyperactive geophysics, and the limits of human adaptation. Picking his way among ephemeral beaches, collapsing mountains, and the startling arrival of new warm-climate species, Salopek's story offers a travelogue into—and a preview of—an emerging global panorama of uncertainty.
