BOOK REVIEW: The end of the world as we know it?

At last: a smart, colloquial and commonsensical book that debunks myths and hyperbole about the environmental crises facing humankind.

Hannah Ritchie, head of research at the nonprofit organisation Our World in Data, which is a partnership between the University of Oxford and the Global Change Data Lab, delves into myriad facts and figures in her debut, Not the End of the World.

Data can be complex, especially for people not adeptly numerate, so it can be used to propagandise issues or to obfuscate its critical take-out. Simply, statistics can be boring; they need to tell a story in order to convey implications in a way that moves and motivates us.

Creditably, Ritchie does this, with eight chapters addressing the component parts of a healthier planet. It’s a depressing contents page list, albeit mitigated by the book’s title. The overall question of sustainability is discussed in terms of an introduction to air pollution, climate change, food and agriculture, deforestation, biodiversity loss and the separate but related issues of ocean health criteria, plastics pollution and overfishing.     

Ritchie confesses that the list, and the scale of urgently needed change, are indeed depressing. Recalling that her four-year degree in environmental geosciences at the University of Edinburgh covered not a single positive trend, she writes, “the shame of our ecological sins got heavier with every lecture”. Add the inclination of news editors to headline negativity and ignore the less dramatic stories of progress, and she assumed that we are living in a tragic period in humankind’s history. “I, too, used to be convinced that I didn’t have a future left to live for,” she says.

The chapter on the future of the world’s food production and supply typifies the idea, structure and methodology of the book. “Google ‘harvests left’ and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of results,” Ritchie notes. This, she says, inevitably pushes sensationalist claims that have become normalised in the doomsday scenarios painted by environmental activists and in clickbait news articles. She’s right: five years ago even reputable media such as The Guardian were headlining their coverage of the issue with warnings that there were just 60 harvests left.

Ritchie debunks this as “nonsense”. The source for the statistic, a speaker at a 2014 agriculture conference arranged by the UN Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO), didn’t back the statement up with scientific data, and the FAO has never subsequently clarified the source, let alone defended the number — because there is no number. The idea that the world’s diverse environments, land, and soil compositions have a single expiry period is preposterous.

Having allowed readers to breathe easy, the chapter shifts into the facts. These are concerning enough, without hyped embellishment, to quell complacency. Though the world produces far more food than the global population needs, it does so in ways that are often harmful, inequitable and unsustainable. Global food production generates a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. It is primarily responsible for deforestation and the resultant biodiversity loss and threat to wildlife, and consumes 70% of freshwater resources. Yet we can’t go backwards; organic farming and pastoralism will not feed the world.

Similarly, the chapter on overfishing opens with the mantra from the 2021 Netflix documentary Seaspiracy: “We will see virtually empty oceans by 2048.” Fleshing out nuances of where the dramatic media headline originated, Ritchie pinpoints a 2006 paper by renowned marine ecologist Boris Worm. Examining Worm’s work more closely, she finds that his scientific definition of “collapse” is not the same as fish species being wiped out to levels close to extinction. And the year 2048 came from a statistical trend line extrapolation — no more than a “thought experiment” technique that scientists use.

Data does the talking

What to do, then? Absolutely, we must implement urgent measures to protect the oceans. And, yes, we need to eat less meat. The data shows the biggest improvements in the sustainability of the global food chain — by a factor of 100 on some measures, such as farmland requirements — would come from eating less beef and lamb in particular. 

These kinds of enlightening perspectives and hopeful conclusions wrap up each chapter. It’s a formulaic approach — a shocking statistic at the start, its unpacking and debunking, the refocusing on the real problems, and pinpointing where genuine solutions lie. Nonetheless, the book maintains interest. The issues are diverse enough to keep spiking readers’ interest, and Ritchie makes data speak, and often sing, in a way that makes it easy to pay attention. 

To an extent, she is mirroring the concept of authoritative works by the likes of Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. In his 2018 book Enlightenment Now he says the news cycle plays a part in distorting perspectives and that — using graphs and charts as proof-points, as Ritchie does — in reality the world has made enormous progress on multiple critical measures in the past 50 years.

Swedish physician and statistician Hans Rosling’s Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think is an even more direct template for Ritchie. Indeed, she credits Rosling with overcoming her doomsday vision of the future and with inspiring her to make a difference by joining Our World in Data, itself an organisation modelled on Rosling’s Gapminder Foundation.

Treat the Earth well. It was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children

—  Kenyan proverb

Importantly, however, and implicit in her book’s subtitle, How We Can be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, Ritchie is writing for a target reader seeking new voices, not those of the generations that have caused the Anthropocene.

Further, because her analyses are balanced and her tone understated, she avoids Pinker’s Pollyannaism and the sometimes joyful idealism of Rosling. She’s not blind to geopolitics and deeply complex structural issues within the global economy. “When our economies run on fossil fuels, we’re at the mercy of those that produce them,” she writes in reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resultant shock to global energy prices, as well as the regression to coal power in some major nations.

But the data, empirical studies and scientists back her conclusions that in many ambits of modern life we don’t need to change too much. We’re overstressing about plastic packaging, because it helps preserve food, without which there would be enormous further food wastage. Eating only local is nonsensical, because optimum health hinges on significantly varied diets; besides, transportation accounts for only 5% of the food chain’s overall carbon emissions. And about eating organic, having trawled for conclusive evidence that conventional farming is worse for land use or emits more greenhouse gases than organic methods, she says there is none. Nor, according to the World Health Organisation, are the tiny residuals of non-organic pesticides damaging to human health.

Threading through the book is a moral angle hinged on the concept of sustainability, which is often misunderstood or used as a catchphrase in corporate presentations. Ritchie sees it as having two sides: it needs to balance the flourishing of current generations with the protection of the conditions that will enable future generations to flourish too.

According to this definition, sustainability has never yet happened. Can people alive today be “the first generation to achieve a sustainable world”? The author believes so, as long as we heed a Kenyan proverb: “Treat the Earth well. It was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.”

* Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, by Hannah Ritchie (Penguin Random House, 2024)