Hannah Ritchie

Hannah Ritchie has given us a cautiously optimistic and very informative book about the climate crisis and related problems that bedevil the world today. The 12-page conclusion to "Not the End of the World", is worth reading by itself.

Ritchie is a data scientist, educator, and dedicated environmentalist who is also lead researcher at the respected and useful website, Our World in Data. She begins by describing her own journey from a feeling of hopelessness to one of conditional but urgent optimism as she delved into data about the past and current state of the world. Thus the subtitle: "How We can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet".

Sustainable means "meeting the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".

The world has never yet been Sustainable. For 10,000 years or more, humans have been doing what all species do, using resources to survive, without much choice as to what resources are available.

Statistics show that within the last century things have been getting better, slowly, not for everyone on the planet, but we are living longer, more healthy, less poor, less violent than in previous times. This is not news, others have pointed this out, but it’s not easy to see the big picture today. Things are bad, getting better some places and worse in others, but when looked at worldwide over time, most things are improving.

Now, if we use technology well and if we have good governance , we have choices, choices of how we produce an use energy, how to provide food, how to use land, how to treat people, how to treat other living things, and much more. We don't need to pollute the air by burning things in order to produce energy, for example.

And, if we continue to do the right things, soon enough, we can become a sustainable planet in time. Ritchie believes it could happen in her lifetime, in the lifetimes of people alive today. That seems a bit optimistic to me, but maybe.
And she provides much advice on how to act.

In eight chapters Ritchie takes on major problems one-by-one, air pollution, climate change, deforestation, food, bio-diversity loss, plastics, over-fishing, and mentions other problems and possible solutions along the way.

We, as individuals, can act toward reaching these goals, but it will also take much more. These are all a systems problem, one of politics, economics, land use, technology, and the will to proceed. They are really all one big systems problem of sustainability.

This book is only one set of ideas about getting out of the mess we are in, but it is one of the best ones.

If only every politician on the planet were familiar with the ideas in it.… (meer)

Ritchie's data-backed argument for "urgent optimism" is convincing. She focuses on seven (interrelated) things we need to tackle if we want to create the sustainable future she envisions: air pollution, climate change, deforestation, food, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing. In each chapter she addresses where we are today, how we got to now, how to tackle the problem, how to adapt, and things to stress less about. Because these problems are related, often the steps we take to solve one will help with another one (or two) at the same time. In many cases, it's simply a matter of political will, especially when it comes to developed countries helping developing countries, which have the opportunity to "leapfrog" over fossil fuel reliance straight to new, clean energy sources such as solar and wind.

U.N.'s 1987 definition of sustainable development: "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." (17) ...We need to make sure that everyone in the world can live a good life AND we need to reduce our environmental impacts so that future generations can flourish too...No previous generation had the knowledge, technology, political systems, or international cooperation to do both at the same time. (19)

See also: H is for Hope by Elizabeth Kolbert

Quotes/notes

Venn diagram of true statements: (1) The world is better, (2) The world is still awful, (3) The world can be much better (p. 14)

...new technologies are allowing us to decouple a good and comfortable life from an environmentally destructive one. (34)

When weighing up the price of taking action, we tend to compare it to the alternative of investing nothing at all. But that's wrong. There are societal costs to not taking action that we forget to factor in. We might think that spending hundreds of millions of dollars is expensive. But that's because we ignore the alternative: the costs of not fixing the problem. (57)

The argument for having [a carbon tax] is that the current price we pay for things is not an accurate reflection of what they actually cost [in terms of climate change, air pollution, etc.] (107)

...the goals of animal welfare and environmental impact are not always aligned. (137)

Hunger and famine still exist today, but they're political and social in nature. The limits to us feeding everyone are entirely self-imposed....only constrained by our choices of what to do with the food we produce. (147)

...even when the challenges seem insurmountable, there is often an opportunity to engineer our way out. (154)

...we can feed everyone a complete, nutritious diet if we want to. (154)

Series of bar charts p. 172: What foods have the largest environmental impact? (Greenhouse gas emissions, land use, freshwater withdrawals, water pollution)

A better rule [than "eat local"] is to eat foods that are grown where the conditions are optimal. (187)

If we want to get strict on single-use plastic straws, fine. But it can't be a government's leading policy for tackling plastic pollution. (251)

A good principle...is to be wary of attacking others that we're broadly aligned with. (298)

A sustainable future is not guaranteed - if we want it, we need to create it. Being the first generation is an opportunity, but it's not inevitable. (299)

Ignore those who say that we are doomed. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. (299)… (meer)