The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

Dr. Hope Jahren is a geochemist and geobiologist who currently lives and works in Oslo, Norway. She was born in Minnesota in 1969, a place and date that feature heavily in The Story of More. Jahren earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of Minnesota in 1991 and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996. Jahren has worked at multiple universities, including the Georgia Institute of Technology, John Hopkins University, the University of Hawaii, and most recently the University of Oslo. Jahren is a highly celebrated scholar, who has received three Fulbright Awards, among many other honors.

Jahren published her first memoir, Lab Girl, in 2016. The book follows Jahren’s upbringing in Minnesota and subsequent career as a woman in science. Lab Girl received many awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. In the memoir, Jahren established her witty, forthright writing style that grabbed the attention of a broad range of readers. Popular Science recognized her as one of the “Brilliant 10” young scientists in the United States in 2005. In 2016, Time named her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Jahren published The Story of More: How we Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here in 2020. Although Jahren works as an academic scientist, The Story of More is not an academic text. Its intended audience is the average reader who fosters some curiosity about the health of our global environment and human population. On her personal website, Jahren notes that The Story of More is about “the last fifty years of my life, of your life, of our lives, and how the Earth feels about the mess we made” (Jahren, Hope. “The Story of More (2020).” #HOPEJAHRENSURECANWRITE. Accessed 29 Dec. 2021).

Jahren moved to Norway in 2016, in part due to the lack of support her laboratory research received within the United States, which she recounts in The Story of More. She lives in Oslo with her husband, son, and dog.