Not the End of the World, by Hannah Ritchie, wants everyone to calm down 

by ERIC ROSTON 

THE way things are going, electric cars and other climate tech are likely to become only better, cheaper and more popular. Actions taken by governments, companies, communities and individuals will continue to lessen the worst-case climate disaster scenarios. 

The way things are going is also the subject of an affable, intelligent new book, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet (US$30 [RM141.60], Little Brown Spark) by Hannah Ritchie, which kicks off 2024 with a reality check for anyone intimidated by global environmental burdens. Specifically, the book is designed to help those who see apocalypse everywhere (“doomers” for short) to appreciate overlooked, brightening elements of environmental progress. Cleverly framed and narrated in Ritchie’s contagiously upbeat voice, the book will help its audience dismiss unduly upsetting narratives, even as duly upsetting material remains in ample supply. 

Ritchie is deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data, a treasured Internet reference that tracks global trends across the human experience. She is also a senior researcher in the Programme for Global Development at the University of Oxford. The coupled scale and economy of her work is enviable. She delivers a guide to help readers start to do something that the Internet, media and political tribes too often make impossible: Think straight. 

A chasm has always separated people who are reasonably “alarmed” by evidence defining environmental woes and people who are “alarmist”. It’s a space wide enough to fit a breakaway ice shelf. Ritchie writes that doomers fail to recognise the power of human agency to simultaneously improve well-being and rectify environmental destruction. Evidence for this is abundant; it’s just not always visible. 

Debunking Myths 

In crisp, well-structured chapters, she guides readers through seven pressing topics in environmental science, including air pollution, climate change, food production and plastics waste. Each chapter begins with Ritchie assembling evidence that eviscerates a point of widely disseminated misinformation. 

Will all life and civilisation perish in a world 6°C hotter than the 19th century? No. Will humanity’s last harvest come within 60 years? No.

Would razing the Amazon basin (a truly horrific idea on its own) starves breathing things of oxygen across the planet? 

Have we lost 70% of all animals since 1970? Does the ocean hold more plastic than fish? No. No. No. 

To boot: Eliminating plastic straws matters not a whit to global pollution. 

The chapters are laid out in a coherent structure, with sections on the backstory of each environmental challenge, its current status, how to solve it and happily, “things we should stress less about”. Part of the relief for readers comes simply from imposing
a rational analysis on unembraceable global chaos. Her approach owes inspiration to Hans Rosling, the founder of Gapminder Foundation and author (posthumously) of the bestselling 2018 book, Factfulness. 

It’s relatively straightforward to write news stories that update readers on familiar topics: Water scarcity woes here, new climate video games there. Ritchie is trying to do something more difficult — one at least as important as finding the next news update. She wants to change a public narrative. 

The proverbial forest has been shifting while people focus on its missing trees. 

Countdown Timer 

Anyone stuck in a green-tinted doom loop should become aware of this new Big Story, because it’s opening up opportunities to lock in real, positive change. They won’t be available forever. 

Agency must be a critical element in any positive outlook today, Ritchie says. “Optimism is seeing challenges as opportunities to make progress,” she writes in the introduction. Optimism is not an attitude or perspective; it’s creative work. This approach echoes a line of thought increasingly welcome in climate writing. Kate Marvel, senior scientist at Project Drawdown, wrote a 2018 essay entitled “We Need Courage, Not Hope, to Face Climate Change”, and writer and activist Rebecca Solnit defines hope as “an axe you break down doors with in an emergency”. 

There’s a bit of well-deserved tough love for doomers. It’s a common, and still somewhat useful, oversimplification to say that climate change will inconvenience people in rich countries and kill people in poor ones. So, being a privileged doomer living in a rich country — when vast parts of the “global south” and less fortunate parts of nations and communities in the global north are already fighting for their livelihoods — is not a great look. Choosing what to think about climate change may be the 21st century’s ultimate privilege. Doomerism may be the ultimate First World problem. 

Are doomers the right audience? As a rule, left-leaning catastrophists don’t wield power. Should government and corporate leaders read Ritchie, too? 

Of course. Ritchie understandably avoids talking to outright deniers directly. 

Ritchie is conscious of not wanting to overstep the role she has chosen. She is a scientist and communicator. She wants to reach people who are curious but crushed under an unsupportable sense of inevitability. She articulates this most clearly in the sustainable food chapter: “I don’t want to tell people what to eat. It’s none of my business,” she says in a passage about food labelling. “At the same time, I do want to give clear and straightforward answers to the basic questions of how we can eat more sustainably.” 

Plastic straws and forks. Ritchie says eliminating plastic straws matters not a whit to global pollution

Action Points 

With these answers in hand, what to do next is the big question. Ritchie intends to provide options without sugarcoating them. Fixing human and natural systems can be “boring and unglamorous, but also pretty expensive”, she observes in discussing trash collection and management. Fortunately, the way the climate tech economy is starting to roll, just as one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, one person’s “boring and unglamorous” is another person’s vocational obsession.

It takes nothing away from Ritchie’s accomplishment to point out an error. A look at 10 randomly selected pages suggests that Not the End of the World has roughly 19 facts on every page. Multiplied by 296 pages, that comes out roughly to more than 5,600 facts in the book — many more, if you include the charts or information-dense notes section. I bring this up to contextualise a mistake in the deforestation chapter. It was roughly 2.5 billion years ago, not million, that photosynthesizing cyanobacteria flooded the atmosphere with oxygen for the first time. If it had occurred only 2.5 million years ago, it’s hard to reckon how big multicellular life would have evolved to write and read books. 

Similarly, because of the book’s patient, primer-like approach, Ritchie omits productive drama that makes environmental affairs — contrary to everything you’ve probably been taught — an exciting, thought-provoking domain. 

By providing a baseline view of the Big Environmental Story at this point in history, she avoids the heart-thumping variability above and below that baseline. Following climate change, deforestation, air pollution and biodiversity loss in recent years is a roller coaster ride — not because of the politics, but despite it. Progress! Disaster! Both at the same time! Environmental progress can look like 2,557,920 steps forward and 2,557,918 steps back. What’s gained in coherence is lost in nail-biting, whiplash drama. 

Change is hard. But winding down destructive lifestyle patterns isn’t an abstract task. It is specifically aimed at reducing the suffering inflicted on vulnerable people who didn’t cause the problem. It’s not the end of the world, as Ritchie proves. But that doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. — Bloomberg

• This article first appeared in The Malaysian Reserve weekly print edition