Hannah Ritchie is the head of research at Our World in Data, a website that publishes research and data to “make progress against the world’s largest problems”. It’s a fantastic resource, bringing together readable, user-friendly, open-source graphics and articles. Ritchie’s highly praised book Not the End of the World offers her ‘apolitical’, data-driven reading on “how we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet.”
The majority of Not the End of the World is staple Our World in Data. Each chapter delves into a different environmental metric, such as deforestation, air pollution or overfishing, giving Ritchie’s reading of how we got here, and how to “end it”. The writing is clear, the data crunching is impressive, and the core assessments of the technical transitions we need to deliver are, with some exceptions, hard to dispute. Using fewer cars is the only way to tackle both traffic air pollution and emissions, and beef farming is indeed a huge driver of a trifecta of biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation, for example. The rub is that you can’t be fully apolitical about any of these things.
Ritchie has been criticised for a lack of assessment of inequality and power in her analysis of these crises. She does, to be fair, discuss inequality to some degree, covering the inequity of the way in which wealthy countries have largely caused the climate crisis while the less wealthy bear more of its impact. She frequently references the need for countries with lower rates of public energy access to leapfrog oil and gas in favour of renewables. But she rarely considers how such inequalities and political knots might remain important to the ‘how’ we fix our planet, such as how historic power imbalances and priorities are very present in state decisions today, or how many corporates and petrostates are actively working to stop the leapfrogging.
This means that although the ‘what we need to do’ side of this book is often pretty convincing, the majority of the work – especially the ‘how to get there’ – is frustratingly simplistic. Ritchie rarely offers tangible answers to how we create change. The book is replete with assumptions that past trends in wealthier countries will inevitably happen for less wealthy countries: “Rich countries all have [smokestack scrubbers], and poor countries don’t. But just as we saw with China, each will reach its tipping point.”
The few tangible policies Ritchie does present are not explained with the detail and analysis she affords the environmental data. Carbon taxes, for example, are not the easy, breezy solutions that she implies. But, more often, having presented a detailed, well-researched assessment of what caused a problem and what systems we need instead, Ritchie presents no clear route to get there, abruptly ending chapters with passive calls to action: “We have the tools to do this. The question is whether we are motivated enough to use them”; “[the tools are] a demanding citizenship, the money and political will”; “Knowing that the world is capable of producing so much food should give us all the means and motivation we need to fix the problem.”
This passivity – the lack of tangible pathways to change in a book billed “how we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet” – is frustrating. What’s more, Ritchie seems to believe that the environment movement is overly negative, ill-informed, and choosing the wrong priorities. She frames the book around the errors of environmentalists – each chapter bemoans how difficult she found it to learn about these topics and how wrong people get it. Her point is the need for accuracy – fine. But in practice she essentially defangs the environment movement while putting very little pressure on governments and powerful people to make real, hard choices. Not the End of the World could have been a useful bible of environmental data, but it has been packaged all wrong, ending up as a gift to people who don’t want to do more.
Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie. Chatto & Windus, 2024. ISBN: 9781784745004.
