I usually post a book review on a Monday, but the book I read last week isn’t out until January and so I’ll write about it then. It’s a good one – Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World.
If you’re not familiar with Hannah Ritchie, she’s a Scottish data scientist who works for Our World in Data. In the last couple of years she has emerged as one of the most interesting new voices in the climate conversation, and you should sign up to her Sustainability by Numbers newsletter and follow her on Twitter.
The tagline of the book is ‘how we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet’. That’s a direct response to the idea that comes up sometimes in climate circles and particularly youth activism, that we are the last human generation. ‘Last generation before the tipping points’, says the banner in the header image, and I have some sympathy with that. However, Ritchie argues that there’s another way to read the current moment. Given that no previous generation was sustainable – according to the full definition of the word – we live in a much more hopeful era than the media and the climate movement might think.
Now, I can explain and justify that opinion, or I can let Ritchie do it in her own words. And that happens to be the subject of a recent TED talk – Are the the last generation – or the first sustainable one?
You can pre-order the book on Earthbound Books if you’re so inclined, and what do you think? Are you more motivated by the fear of humanity’s ending, or the possibility of a new chapter in the human story?
The Earthbound Report 