Apr 18, 2025 Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet (New York: Little, Brown and Spark)
In her 2024 book, “Not the End of the World”, Hannah Ritchie (Scottish data scientist and researcher at the University of Oxford) begins by noting surveys that document how pervasively young people today feel that “humanity is doomed” and “the future is frightening.” She immediately retorts that their assumptions are wrong and argues that “the world needs more urgent optimism Ritchie explains that her motivation for highlighting the numerous positive trends in the world comes from her inspiration by Hans Rosling, a Swedish optimist known for his TED talks and who wrote Factfulness and was behind the launch of Gapminder.
While grappling with a range of global problems, Ms. Ritchie explains that it’s possible for three things to be true at once: the world is awful, yet the world is getting better in many ways, and the world can be much better.”
Ritchie draws on her work as the Head of Research for “Our World in Data” and attempts to correct misperceptions about a range of issues, each occupying a chapter, as discussed below. Her conclusions are not new, and she is full of graphs with trendlines. For each problem she reviews, she recommends that if people make systematic changes, problems can be reversed, though without practical predictions of whether this will happen, or if people will prove inward and selfish.
Always looking for silver linings, she glides from one naïve suggestion to the next. Among her uncontroversial conclusions is the idea that “We can give to environmentally focused charities, but charities focused on other areas such as health, education, or poverty alleviation also help on our path to sustainability.”
Ritchie heavily emphasizes technological solutions, such as renewable energy, nuclear, and agricultural innovations, as the primary path to sustainability. She believes electrifying everything and transitioning to renewable energy sources can significantly reduce our carbon footprint.
Throughout her book, Ritchie focuses more on hopeful experiences from Europe than from much of the world. This gives her the false sense that population growth is a problem in the past, but not today. Never looking at China, India, or Africa, she concludes that deforestation rates are declining. Although the Amazon rainforest is shrinking and becoming drier, the overall rate of forest loss has indeed decreased.
Disasters
Ritchie’s observations regarding various trends are fair and accurate. Ritchie correctly observes that death rates from disasters have fallen over the last half century, as have famine deaths and deaths from conflicts. However, the sheer number of people exposed to disasters keeps increasing, including populations affected by flooding and mass forced migration.
Conservation
In her book, Ritchie illustrates the interconnectedness of environmental, energy, and food issues. She begins her discussion on sustainability by stating, “For thousands of years – more so since the agricultural revolution, but also before then – humans haven’t been environmentally sustainable.”
To combat climate change, Ritchie argues for pulling people out of poverty, without acknowledging how much of the world remains trapped in poverty.
Unlike climate change, which captures more attention, she stresses that habitat destruction, such as deforestation for agriculture, is the primary cause of extinctions today. Yet, she’s skeptical of habitat protection programs. Instead, she sees hope in how a “by-product of slowing climate change, fixing our food systems, stopping deforestation, ending plastic pollution, and protecting our oceans is that we stop piling pressure on the species around us.”
She dedicates a section to whale conservation as a source of hope. She observes how whale populations were hunted to near extinction, at which point hunting wound down. “It will take a long time for whale populations to recover. But the world acted just in time to allow them to do so.”
Extinctions and Biodiversity
Ritchie discusses the interconnectedness of life and writes that worms, insects, and bacteria are just as fundamental as cute mammals. Yet, her review of biodiversity decline is unconvincing. She states, “Deforestation, hunting, fishing and farming are all direct threats to our wildlife. These activities put thousands of species at risk of extinction. Many species face more than one threat. The good news is that the solutions are cross-cutting: eating less meat would reduce the amount of land we use for farming, climate change and biodiversity loss. Stopping deforestation will reduce habitat loss and greenhouse gas emissions.” She selects a few species that have seen numbers rebound and draws optimism for the rest, despite the unrelenting extinction rate. Once extinct, species do not come back.
The author highlights that the major extinctions that occurred millions of years ago due to asteroids and tectonic events fundamentally differ from the current extinctions caused by human activities. She appears skeptical of claims that species extinction rates are higher today than ever. According to her, the ongoing extinction of species is often based on a mistaken assumption, and she does not acknowledge that the global population, which poses the greatest threat to habitats, is projected to increase by another 2 billion people in the next sixty years.
Swelling numbers of middle-class consumers worldwide will lead to a growing demand for cars and goods. However, Richie does not address this issue. Instead, she expresses optimism in noting that per capita CO2 emissions peaked a decade ago. As the world population continues to grow, she anticipates, “Per capita measures will peak first, then it’s a tug-of-war over whether our impacts per person will fall more quickly than the population is growing.”
Despite humans’ ability to terraform the face of the Earth, she sees civilization as a minor part of the global ecosystem: “Humans account for just 0.01% of life on Earth, as measured by biomass.”
In contrast to Ritchie, other authors express a more pessimistic view. The 2020 Living Planet Report highlighted a 68% decline in wildlife populations since 1970, a finding reaffirmed in 2021. This report noted extreme declines in specific populations, such as freshwater fish, which indicate that imminent extinctions may occur. According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), approximately 1 million species are currently threatened with extinction, “many within decades,” and “the rate of species extinctions is accelerating.” The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) reported in 2020 that global wildlife populations declined by 68% since 1970, highlighting severe population declines that often precede extinction.
Ritchie indirectly addresses habitat destruction by dedicating a chapter to deforestation, particularly focusing on the Amazon rainforest. She points out, “Deforestation is almost entirely about farming: around three-quarters of it is driven by the conversion of primary forests for agriculture or plantations for the paper and pulp industries.”
Plastics
Ritchie devotes a significant chapter to the problem of plastic waste in the oceans, arguing that the solutions are straightforward. We already know of ways to break down plastic chemically and can regulate its trade. She writes, “Invest in waste-management systems and we could stop this. The biggest barrier is money. Most of the world’s plastic pollution now comes from low- and middle-income countries. Rich countries have a responsibility as manufacturers and trade partners to help other countries make landfills and recycling centers a priority. Work together, and plastic pollution will be solved in the next few decades.”
Air Pollution
Ritchie recounts how air pollution has dramatically decreased in some of the world’s most polluted cities, leading to measurable health benefits.
Food
Looking at food systems, she argues that eating locally-sourced food is not always better for the environment. She consistently advocates against eating meat. Plant substitutes for meat are unequivocally better: “If both McDonald’s and Burger King made all their burgers a 50:50 blend of beef and soy, it would save 50 million tons of greenhouse gases each year.” Additionally, she points out, “Switch your beefburger for a Beyond Meat or Impossible Burger and you’ll cut emissions by around 96%.”
Ritchie writes about persistent hunger in the world, but waves it off as due to a lack of political will. She writes that the existence of surplus food in some countries means that malnutrition in low-income countries is self-imposed. The book paints the world in broad brush strokes without appreciating the enormous differences between countries.
She does not address the ongoing famines in countries like Yemen, Sudan, Nigeria, and Somalia, or regions where malnutrition remains a significant issue. Instead, she writes in general terms about the whole world, observing that crop yields could be higher, meeting the needs of growing populations. She observes: “in the poorest countries, farmers use very little fertilizer. They can’t afford it. This is bad for them because they get poor yields and earn little money. It’s also bad for the planet because they need to use more farmland. As they get a little richer, fertilizer use starts to rise. Crop yields improve. But, eventually, the focus shifts toward using these inputs more efficiently. Fertilizer use doesn’t fall to zero, but farmers learn to use just the right amount to give crops the nutrients they need.”
Final Comment
Not the End of the World is a valuable read, consolidating important data on many global trends. The author’s numerous conclusions and recommendations make it suitable for book club discussion and debate, as well as for a graduate course reading.
Steven Hansch is a humanitarian aid specialist with extensive field, management, and evaluation experience. He teaches at several universities and serves on several nonprofit boards involved in human development and humanitarian aid. Leslie Barcus has served on national and international animal protection organization boards. Her professional activities include work in more than forty countries addressing animal protection, microfinance, biodiversity conservation, organizational capacity building, and international economic development