The average person might be forgiven for assuming that we are “living through humanity’s most tragic period”. This was, after all, a misconception held by Dr Hannah Ritchie, Scottish environmental scientist and lead researcher at Our World in Data, even after completing a four-year degree in environmental geoscience.
Ritchie was so convinced of this fact that she was ready to change careers out of sheer hopelessness when she stumbled upon a man named Hans Rosling. Ritchie was charmed by the Swedish statistician’s passion for solid data – not surprising for a woman who carried How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything around as a bible. But what impressed her even more was the TED star’s ability to “turn the world upside down” in three minutes, challenging doomsday projections with positive trends in global development.
Infused with this spirit of crunching the numbers rather than succumbing to sensational reports, Ritchie’s debut book, Not the End of the World, offers practical, data-backed solutions to air pollution, climate change, deforestation, unsustainable food production, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics and overfishing. Remarkably, she does so without resorting to depopulation or degrowth – neither of which, she argues, are the “grand solutions” they are purported to be.
Ritchie’s variety of critical-minded, solution-focused optimism is beautifully systematic. She traces each of these seven environmental problems from their origins to the present, demonstrating that humans’ destructive impact – far from being a “modern” or “unprecedented” problem – spans centuries. Along the way, she highlights unexpected reversals in historical trends – global population growth rate, global deforestation, and global per capita CO2 emissions have all peaked and are now in decline. This has the effect of illustrating the dangers of extrapolating alarming environmental trends to some future apocalyptic outcome, such as “virtually empty oceans by 2048”.
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Of her specific solutions, some appear obvious, such as reducing our meat consumption, while others might strike the reader as somewhat counterintuitive, like optimising the use of synthetic fertilisers to increase crop yields or investing in sealed landfills (among other waste management strategies) to prevent the escape of plastics into waterways.
Similarly, the reader may be surprised to learn that some of their seemingly eco-friendly behaviours – such as recycling plastic bottles or replacing old light bulbs with energy-efficient ones – divert effort away from actions that will have far greater environmental impact. In the worst-case scenario, she argues that such popular “sacrifices” can actually aggravate the problem, such as eating local and organic food.
Though Ritchie writes that Rosling’s spirit of generosity as a teacher could not possibly be replicated, her intellectual humility shows her to be a formidable contender. She admits to once cheering on “the Ben & Jerrys of the world” for eliminating palm oil, and occasionally, she still experiences the “agonising pain” of arriving at the supermarket without a reusable shopping bag. Yet, she writes, “My understanding of the world was wrong.”
The data demonstrates that the optics of being a “good” environmentalist (including the “natural is best” fallacy) are poorly correlated with effective environmental action. Not only is the occasional plastic bag “not a big deal,” but boycotting palm oil may paradoxically lead to more deforestation rather than less. Beyond just her scientific credentials, it is this acknowledgment of her own human limitations, as well as her commitment to updating her intellectual position as the data (and her understanding of it) evolves, that makes me want to trust her. She prompts a reconsideration of the prevailing narratives, not to mention our own perspectives and behaviours.
To Ritchie, doomerism, climate denial and squabbling over whether renewables or nuclear are superior (both, she informs us, are equally legitimate substitutes for fossil fuels) all pose threats to our future sustainability. Such mindsets have the potential to dilute collective action and seldom offer viable solutions. While it feels strangely sinful to acknowledge the progress we have already made, she argues that failing to do so tends to reduce people’s motivation to solve the problem.
Not the End of the World, by contrast, serves as an ode to climate progress – celebrating both the strides we have already made and the potential for future progress. She reminds us that we can leverage past success stories, often obscured by the magnitude of the challenges we face, as precedents for future environmental solutions.
Sustainability has traditionally been viewed as a trade-off between human flourishing and environmental destruction. A key argument presented by Ritchie is that, with the support of wealthier nations, low-income countries now have the option to “leapfrog a long fossil fuel-powered development path” without compromising the wellbeing of their population or harming the environment. This is because, for the first time in history, our generation has successfully decoupled economic growth from environmental destruction by developing cheaper low-carbon technologies and dramatically improving energy efficiency.
By confronting the multiple, overlapping environmental problems we face, at the same time as acknowledging the much-overlooked progress we have already achieved, Ritchie underlines the value of holding two possibilities in our brains at once: an unstoppable downward spiral into climate catastrophe and our proven potential for effective course correction. The choice is ours to make but, as the data scientist reminds us, the clock is ticking.
