When I became the CEO, WRI was in a good place, but the world was not. In fact, society was broadly failing on the very topic Gus had founded WRI in in 1982 to fight--climate change. What kind of a leader did I need to be if my organization was doing well on paper, but the problem it was set up to solve was getting worse? I was keenly interested in examining the arc of history, to pinpoint exactly where we were in the journey to fight climate change. Where had we succeeded since the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, when the world finally came together and agreed to collectively act? Where had we failed? Most critically, what was the path forward? Climate change was identified as an existential threat long before Rio, but the summit also created the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)--the UN forum for countries to come together on climate. Hence, with 2022 approaching, it made sense to look deeply into what has occurred over these thirty years. My quest to understand our progress included conversations with key people who have played an outsized role in the climate movement, some of whom once worked at WRI. These initial conversations led to many more--with over a hundred people around the world, each one with an incredible story that has helped shape our modern environmental movement and ensure our progress. This book is a result of these conversations.

You will meet many of them in the pages that follow. The picture painted by all these stories ended up much bigger than I had expected. At their core, the stories are about incredible collective progress. But they are also about how fascinating people form unusual partnerships, how leadership can come from any corner, how it may take many years to get something done, and how people sometimes lose their lives before others can move forward. The stories illustrate the messiness of real progress, with meaningful steps forward never moving in a straight line but often in a tortuous squiggle. They are about the grueling climb up mountain after mountain, with many organizations and institutions working together in almost every instance to achieve significant goals. Despite the difficult road we have taken to get here, we are still far from our destination, with time running out. The path forward has many more mountains--different and much taller.

But what interests me most in these stories is not the mountains themselves, but how we climbed them. Rather than celebrate our progress toward expanding renewable-energy use by 2030, for example, why not emphasize how we can use that information to clear the next hurdle--namely, how we might reduce fossil fuel use further as demand continues to outstrip supply. We have chosen to ignore the lessons of the past, the very knowledge that will help us climb the mountains in front of us much faster than before. We have focused on what our goals are while overlooking how to achieve them--how to orchestrate necessary change.