Although the impacts of climate change are felt all across the world, and the death toll and cost of climate disasters are only rising, we’ve seen a decline in coverage by many news outlets. According to the Media and Climate Change Observatory, climate reporting was down 14% in 2025 from 2024, and down 38% from 2021. “Climate change” was hardly discussed during Canada’s last federal election, yet its effects are felt by Canadians like never before. Intensified wildfires, thawing permafrost, flooding, and the warmest years on record, with our northern regions warming twice as fast as the global average, tell us urgent action is needed. The question becomes, how do we reprogram our society to act in a sustainable fashion?
Todd Dufresne’s The Future Belongs to Those Who Fight: Climate Revolution for Beginners serves as motivation and manifesto. It is the climate change book for our current moment, written with the force necessary to wake us from our collective slumber that has delayed action on climate change, deferring it to some unnamed later date, downloading the heavy lifting onto our children and grandchildren.
What strikes me as a long-time follower of this subject is how much the discourse in the public sphere has changed, even if that on the government and corporate level have not. Ideas that once seemed extreme, such as “we should tax billionaires out of existence” now stand on the threshold of common sense. Dufresne does away with the simple slogans and easy fixes that have been thrust onto the average citizen, rather than the main corporate polluters. This book doesn’t suggest Meatless Mondays or carbon footprint counting apps. It recommends revolution.
This book doesn’t suggest Meatless Mondays or carbon footprint counting apps. It recommends revolution.
Dufresne doesn’t ignore personal responsibility for the climate crisis, but he places the blame squarely on the shoulders of those doing the lion’s share of the polluting. At no point does the author suggest that lowering meat consumption or cycling to work are pointless diversions, but he calls upon each member of our society to push for a greater course correction, as the book identifies the real problem. It’s not merely climate change, but rampant capitalism, the endless hunger for profits and ceaseless consumption of cheap goods to feed an ever-expanding economy on our finite planet.
The Future Belongs to Those Who Fight does some very heavy lifting for such a slim volume. The book is under 200 pages, about a third of which are notes and bibliography. Its concision is one of the book’s strengths, a concentrated formula of data, analysis and philosophy that shocks readers out of their frog-in-a-pot compliance. Covering current affairs, climate science, philosophy and political science, this well-researched and well-reasoned book makes the case that no amount of tiny, band-aid actions can prevent the worst of climate disasters if we don’t fundamentally change our relationship with the economy and our planet.
Dufresne doesn’t use the word “revolution” lightly. He quotes JFK: “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Done with the polite deference of the political centre, Dufresne calls upon us to name the problem, to address capitalism directly, and to adopt a utopic realism going forward. In his terms, this means embracing the tenets of Western Enlightenment, such as “the search for meaningful existence and freedom constrained by reason and duty to others.” All this while basing our path forward on, and living within, “objective environmental limits.”
Although utopic realism may sound far-fetched when discussed at a dinner party, Dufresne goes to great length to demonstrate how its opposite, our current economy based on perpetual growth at unsustainable rates is the real fantasy. It is a Ponzi scheme, as Dufresne points out, and sooner rather than later, humanity will have to pay the piper.
Dufresne serves up uncomfortable truths and harsh realities, but a current of optimism undergirds the book. A belief in collectivity, in people power, in the idea that we can free ourselves from the yolk of a small number of billionaires who put quarterly profits over long-term prosperity for all. The author arms his readers with facts and the infectious conviction of a rock anthem like Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Going to Take It.” He provides inspiration, a path forward and the belief that the game is not lost, the climate revolution is just beginning.
A belief in collectivity, in people power, in the idea that we can free ourselves from the yolk of a small number of billionaires who put quarterly profits over long-term prosperity for all.
Todd Dufresne is a Canadian philosopher and the author or editor of a dozen books, including The Democracy of Suffering: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, Philosophy in the Anthropocene.
Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press (March 24, 2026)
Paperback 8.5″ x 5.5″ | 186 pages
ISBN: 9780228026839
Jeff Dupuis is a writer and editor living in Toronto. He is the author of The Creature X Mystery novels and numerous short stories, which have been published in The Ex-Puritan and The Temz Review among others. Jeff is the editor, alongside A.G. Pasquella, of the anthology Devouring Tomorrow: Fiction from the Future of Food, which will be published in 2025 by Dundurn Press.
