Not the End of the World, by Hannah Ritchie

My son is currently working towards grade four in piano. If he gets down about his mistakes, I remind him of how hard those exam pieces felt when he tried them for the first time. He is learning and making progress, and all forms of progress exist in tension between what was and what will be.

That tension is easy enough to hold with small things, like building a jigsaw or repainting a room. But it seems to me that the bigger the issue, the harder it is to keep perspective. For something like global poverty or climate change, progress is measured over decades. It’s very easy for it to become invisible, especially if you’re coming in halfway through the story.

With the greatest respect, Greta Thunberg is a good example. “Some people say that we are not doing enough on climate change,” she told Davos in 2019. “But that is not true. Because to ‘not do enough’ you have to do something. And the truth is we are basically not doing anything.”

This is a common refrain in climate circles, that nothing is being done. For Hannah Ritchie, it was nearly enough for her to give up on her passion for the environment altogether. As an environmental geoscience student, every day was a deep dive into depressing trends and a world falling apart. It left her feeling helpless, and she started applying for jobs in other sectors.

What changed her mind was a presentation from Hans Rosling, the Swedish data scientist who hit late career Youtube fame for his striking explanations of progress. There was more to do of course, but the world was getting better and not nearly enough people knew about it. (See the book Factfulness) Rosling focused on social trends such as poverty and health. Ritchie wants to do exactly the same thing with environmental issues.

That’s the heart of her book Not the End of the World, which looks at progress across a range of important topics – air pollution, climate change, biodiversity, overfishing, plastic and more.

There’s often good news to report on these things. Total carbon emissions are rising globally, but per person emissions have peaked. As a data scientist, that gives Ritchie confidence that overall emissions will follow. She expects the peak “in the 2020s”. Fast enough? Sadly not. But it’s a long way from ‘nothing is being done’.

This often surprises people, Ritchie writes, and I find this in my own work. I have a little activity in my climate action workshops that gets people to estimate the trend in the UK’s carbon emissions. It’s very rare for anyone to know that our emissions have been falling for a solid 50 years. It’s an empowering discovery: we’re already halfway down the mountain, I tell them. Our task is to finish the job.

Not the End of the World makes this point again and again. Global deforestation peaked in the 1980s. Low carbon energy is now the most economic option in many contexts, making the case for itself in ways few people expected ten or fifteen years ago. Moving to these cleaner technologies will mean less mining and resource extraction, not more. Some of these things I know and have written about. Some I didn’t: did you know petrol car sales peaked in 2017?

As you’d expect for someone who works for an agency called Our World in Data, there’s no shortage of facts and figures, and calculations on what makes a difference and what doesn’t. I liked how each chapter outlines ‘where we are today’ on an issue, presents the solutions, and then has a section called ‘Things we should stress less about’. Like eating local food, for example, which matters far less than most people think. “Being an effective environmentalist might make you feel like a bad one”, Ritchie warns. “The societal image of sustainability needs to change.”

Some sacred cows fall, and there are lines in the book that will make more traditional environmentalists shudder. But unlike some authors I could name, Ritchie isn’t out to score points. As with Rosling, this is a book that is enthusiastic about possibilities rather than shaming people for their ignorance.

Neither is it naive in its optimism. Ritchie is honest about how much there is to do, but we mustn’t forget how far we’ve already come. Environmental debate so often revolves around breaking news stories and projections of the future. It’s only when we step back and consider the past too that we can put these things in context – and often that’s encouraging. As she writes, “If we take several steps back, we can see something truly radical, gamechanging and lifegiving: humanity is in a truly unique position to build a sustainable world.”

2024 will no doubt have its share of setbacks and bad news. I’d suggest Not the End of the World is the perfect book to start your new year reading on a hopeful footing, and you can pick up a copy from Earthbound Books.