Author Says We Can Build a Sustainable Planet

Book Review

Special to United Methodist Insight

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie (Little, Brown, Jan. 9, 2024 - Science - 352 pages)

Hannah Ritchie was born in Scotland in 1993, the year that saw the creation of the European Single Market and President Bill Clinton sworn into office. She writes, “I spend most of my time thinking about the world’s environmental problems. It’s my job and my passion, but I nearly gave up on it.” What she found in focusing her studies on the environment was that the more she studied, the more she felt she could do little to improve the increasing negative impact that climate change was having on the world. That led to her being more and more depressed. Four years later, I left [university] with no solutions. Instead, I felt the deadweight of endless unsolvable problems.”

Whether it was what her classes taught her or what the news headlines told her, “I believed I was living through humanity’s most tragic period…Then, one evening, everything changed. I saw bubbles darting across the television screen. A small man was chasing after them.” The man was Swedish scientist Hans Rosling.

“In his lectures, Rosling explained what the data really told us about the most important metrics of human well-being: the percentage of people living in extreme poverty, the number of children dying, how many girls did or didn’t get to go to school, and what percentage of children are vaccinated against diseases…my understanding of the world was wrong. Not just slightly wrong. I’d assumed everything was getting worse… The only way to really see these changes is to step back and look at the long-run data.”

Ritchie now calls herself a data scientist and is the lead researcher for a web site called Our World in Data, which is maintained by a group located in Oxford, England. They have collected over 12,000 data charts on over 100 topics. Among them are many that show data about the environment including factors of climate change. This has placed her in a unique position to write her book.

Ritchie says that how we approach our environmental crisis makes a difference. “[L]et me make one thing absolutely clear: I’m no climate change denialist.” But she believes that doomsday messages are not helpful: she finds the doom narratives are often untrue, our impending doom leaves us feeling paralyzed, and the option of "giving up"’ is only possible from a place of privilege. “Pessimism still sounds intelligent and optimism dumb...But the world desperately needs more optimism,” she writes.

Without having an environmental science degree, it's hard to tell whether she is being unduly optimistic. First, hers is not the only book on climate change to indicate a level of optimism. Rebecca Solnit, an author I have found reliable, last year published a book, "Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility." Second, a Google search for reviews of Ritchie’s book produced several results, none of which undercuts her main conclusions.

From her vantage point Ritchie says, “We can be the first generation to achieve a sustainable world…. don’t think we’re going to be the last generation….We will start high up in the atmosphere and travel downwards, encountering the seven biggest environmental crises we must solve if we are to achieve sustainability.”

Sustainability, Ritchie says, is a tale of two halves: we must "meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs…. first is making sure that everyone in the world today – the present generations – can live a good and healthy life. The second half is about making sure that we live in a way that doesn’t degrade the environment for future generations.”

Ritchie writes that there has never been a time of sustainability. “The world has never been sustainable because we’ve never achieved both halves at the same time.” Certainly, any previous generations who did not seriously deplete the environment but had death rates for children of 40% by age 5 could not claim to be sustainably healthy. She quotes ancient Kenyan proverb: "Treat the Earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children."

Ritchie points to seven indicators showing the progress we have made the last 200 years in bringing us closer to living a good and healthy life: child mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy, hunger and malnutrition, access to basic resources such as clean water, energy, sanitation; education, extreme poverty. For instance, “for most of human history, nearly everyone lived in dire poverty. In 1820, more than three-quarters of the world lived below the equivalent of this poverty line. Today that figure is less than 10%.”

“Now it’s time for the second half of the equation.”

This brings us to the seven big environmental problems that are tackled in this book:

  • Air Pollution
  • Climate Change
  • Deforestation
  • Food
  • Biodiversity Loss
  • Ocean Plastics
  • Overfishing

A chapter is devoted to each of the problems. Each chapter is filled with data, with charts and graphs, and with explanation of how, with a common will, we can solve each problem. Underlying the solutions are advances in technology, finding and employing new means of energy production.The environmental crisis will continue to be with us, and I think her approach is sound. So, it deserves to be best read chapter by chapter rather than from cover to cover.

The Rev. H. A. "Bud" Tillinghast is a retired clergy member of the California-Nevada Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, now residing in Oxford, England.