Not the End of the World

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. Hannah Ritchie. New York & Boston: Little Brown Spark, 2024. 341 pp., references & index. $30.00 hardcover.

As the weather gets warmer and more extreme, with more numerous killing heat waves, floods, and devastating storms, folks can be immobilized by discouragement if we focus mainly on our understanding that humanity’s pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere continues to increase.  Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World aims to relieve us from that discouragement by showing all the ways that humanity is now doing a much better job than is widely understood in addressing the monumental environmental issues that face us, including climate change.  Not the End of the World does not suggest that we can now rest on our laurels – far from it!  It does, however, show that we are finally doing quite well, and we need to keep working on it, on multiple fronts.

A data scientist at the University of Oxford in the UK, Ritchie has academic training in the environmental sciences.  Most of her early research focused on global food systems.  While studying at university and beginning her professional career, she paid lots of attention to the news, as she tells it, and that convinced her that humanity was doomed due to the threats of climate change and other environmental calamities.  She felt helpless before the enormity and seeming hopelessness of humanity’s situation and Earth’s condition until she encountered the work of Hans Rosling (now deceased), a Swedish physician who undertook statistical analyses of various trends in the human living conditions.  Although people generally think matters are getting worse, Rosling showed that conditions have greatly improved globally over the past century.  Most people are better off now than ever in human history, and the proportion of humans who still live on the edge of survival is smaller than it has ever been.  He promoted these ideas not to foster complacency, nor to suggest that things will be fine in future, but rather to show that humans have the capacity to address big problems, that we have made great strides, and if we keep working at it, we can continue improving human living conditions.

Ritchie takes Rosling’s approach to environmental issues.  The biggest threat to Earth and human survival, she says, is still nuclear holocaust, and that is beyond the scope of her book.  The other two greatest risks, according to Ritche (and again both beyond the scope of her book), are a global pandemic worse than the one we just experienced, and artificial intelligence.  Climate change is at the top of the list of environmental threats facing us and over which we have control.  The other threats include air pollution, deforestation, food supply, loss of biodiversity, plastic in the oceans, and overfishing.  In chapters addressing each of these issues, she always re-emphasizes two things: 1) that in addressing these environmental issues to enhance human sustainability, we must include reducing the gaps in well-being between the relative haves and have-nots; and 2) in showing the great strides we have made, she is not denying the monumental nature of the issues, nor is she suggesting we can relax our efforts.  In fact, we must work harder.  She says we can become the first generation to create a sustainable world.

Ritchie defines sustainability as having two components: 1) everyone on Earth must be able to live “a good and healthy life,” and 2) we must achieve that without degrading the environment for future generations.  By that definition, she asserts, humans have never lived sustainably.  Certain communities, for some periods in history, have led sustainable lives, but globally, throughout history, human suffering has been vast, and for thousands of years humans have polluted the air and driven large animals to extinction.  In the past century, however, child mortality and maternal mortality are greatly diminished, life expectancy has doubled, there is less food insecurity, more people have access to clean water, sanitation, and good hygiene, and a much higher percentage of the population is literate.  Two hundred years ago, nearly 80 percent of the world’s population lived in poverty; a century ago, about half lived in poverty; today, less than 10 percent live in poverty.  At the other side of the sustainability equation, air pollution is much lower than it was 100 years ago (London’s air in 1900 was much worse than Delhi’s is today), and we now recognize species extinction and take steps to prevent it.

Being a data scientist, Ritchie looks at numerous of polls to monitor people’s attitudes concerning environmental issues.  Our supposed understandings are often far from the facts.  One poll she explores in this regard concerns natural disasters.  A 2017 study asked people about deaths from natural disasters over the past century.  Have deaths: A) doubled, B) stayed about the same, or C) decreased to less than half?  The correct answer is C, but only 10 percent of respondents gave that answer.  About half of respondents thought A was the correct answer.  Deaths from natural disasters have decreased because we are collectively much more able to protect against them; Ritchie attributes our misconceptions about this question to present-day frictionless disaster reporting, i.e., we are much more aware of disasters around the globe as they happen than we once were.  Her book summarizes many polls showing the distance between people’s perceptions and the facts about environmental matters.

A similar dynamic is at work in our understanding of a future with climate change.  We know the factors that lead to climate change, and we learn immediately about floods, fires, and heat waves caused by climate change.  That can foster a sense of hopelessness.  Using that dichotomy, between our perceptions and actuality, Ritchie addresses the steps we should be taking individually and collectively to continue addressing climate change (like eating less beef and lamb), and the steps that can help but that we needn’t stress over (like replacing our old incandescent bulbs).  About our choice of shopping bags, s for example, he writes, “your plastic bag actually has a lower carbon footprint [than a paper bag], but it doesn’t matter much” in the bigger scheme of things

In each of her chapters on an environmental issue (how we’re doing, and what still needs to be done), Ritchie describes steps that seem positive but would actually be damaging because of the impact on one of the other environmental issues.  A particularly challenging chapter in this regard concerns food production.  Many people advocate moving our agricultural systems toward more organic methods, but she cautions that organic methods are less productive than methods that are not strictly organic.  The drawback, she asserts, is that trying to feed 8 billion people using organic methods would lead to more deforestation and the depletion of critical habitat for endangered species.  Providing the world’s population with good food is multidimensional, of course, and she addresses the many other steps we should adopt, including moving away from beef and lamb, moving toward more plant-based foods, and not trying to produce foods in areas that require excessive inputs to be productive.  And we need to be more interdependent globally.  Transporting food has far less carbon footprint and environmental impact than cutting down forests to support local beef production.

In addition, Ritchie addresses two approaches that many people think will be necessary to create a sustainable world: depopulation and “degrowth” (reducing our economic activity).  Regarding depopulation, Ritchie’s response is nuanced because she recognizes that trying to enforce a global population reduction would be inhumane.  Moreover, the rate of population growth has already been decreasing since the 1960s, and demographers now see that we have reached “peak child.”  In other words, the number of children in the world peaked in 2017, and it has been falling since.  Regarding degrowth, Ritchie asserts that we need economies to continue growing to keep lifting people out of poverty.  The challenge for future growth is to implement sustainable technologies.

Not the End of the World is packed with good information that is clearly presented.  It helps to dispel a number of ideas that are not conducive to sustained and effective environmental action.  And most of all, it is a hopeful book.

Fredric L. Quivik