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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/04/not-the-end-of-the-world-by-hannah-ritchie-review-an-optimists-guide-to-the-climate-crisis>
"Data scientist Hannah Ritchie has written a good-hearted, generous book that
tries its very best to reassure us about the various environmental crises we
face. Which, obviously, is much appreciated: God knows we need all the optimism
we can get.
Ritchie is lead researcher at the groundbreaking
Our World in Data, a website
run out of Oxford University. She begins by describing the moment of revelation
she experienced when, after years of feeling helpless and anxious about the
state of things, she discovered the Swedish professor Hans Rosling, and
“everything changed”.
Rosling, who died in 2017, was one of what you might call the “big optimists”,
alongside cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. Like Pinker, he tried to
present a counterpoint to the creeping sense of global doominess – what he
called the “overdramatic worldview” – that has overtaken many of us in the past
couple of decades. He argued, with plenty of good evidence to back it up, that
poverty was declining, global health improving, and that many of the things we
thought were wrong with the planet are actually fine.
Rosling’s positive outlook proved infectious for Ritchie, and she reoriented
her work in a similar direction. With this book she wants to do for
environmental problems what Rosling did for social ones – zoom out from the
daily news stories, which are a “terrible way to understand the bigger
picture”, look at the long-term data in order to get a clearer view of what is
really going on, and then explain that to people. “If we take several steps
back, we can see something truly radical, game-changing and life-giving:
humanity is in a truly unique position to build a sustainable world,” she
writes. And thus, with some sensible caveats in place, she addresses air
pollution, climate change, deforestation, food, biodiversity loss, ocean
plastics and overfishing.
I would love to say that I came away from this book as convinced and optimistic
as Ritchie. I was genuinely excited about reading it, as someone who spends my
days editing and commissioning the daily news stories that Ritchie is so
concerned about. And it’s certainly true that there is lots of interesting
information in here. In the chapter about deforestation, for example, she
explains that palm oil is actually an extremely productive crop, with yields of
2.8 tonnes of oil per hectare compared with, say, 0.34 tonnes for olives, 0.26
tonnes for coconuts and 0.7 tonnes for sunflowers – so if companies turned to
alternatives because of palm oil’s bad reputation, that could actually lead to
far more deforestation. In the same chapter she presents a wonderful graph
showing the way that forests have come and gone in the US, France and Scotland
over the past 1,200 years."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
