Will I love Not the End of the World?

I particularly appreciated the author's evidence-based management approach. It was refreshing that the author showed that we can be optimistic about solving the many challenges our planet faces. It is important not to think and work in terms of doom and gloom or slogans, but with data.

As a data scientist, Hannah Ritchie illustrates how problems such as climate change, deforestation, biodiversity, plastic in oceans, etc., can be solved. With the available data, you can then work out solutions.

The book is illustrated with many graphs and tables.

Ritchie’s book is often counterintuitive, a quality it shares with others in this list. It is also strongly evidence-based. She argues that we have the agency to avert climate and ecological disaster. Her analysis highlights the ways in which this is being exercised, ranging from deforestation and energy to fishing and waste.

Like Monbiot, Tree, and Pollan, she identifies dietary change as critical. Rethinking our relationship with meat is necessary, given the huge amounts of land being converted for pasture and animal feed. But she also shows that palm oil, much maligned, is a far more efficient source of vegetable… show more.

I can’t count all the ways that Ritchie’s book changed my mind, and all for the better, too, about sustainability, environmental restoration, and a science-based, all-too-possible hope for the future. I had forgotten (like so many of us) how well humans are doing: child and maternal mortality rates are falling, as is hunger and extreme poverty, while education and life expectancy are rising. Ritchie presents (well, she inundates) readers with data-driven arguments and real-world solutions to the core sustainability challenges of air pollution, climate change, deforestation, food production, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing.

I had forgotten that not all… show more.

As a scholar and a concerned citizen (and an often rather gloomy private individual), the end of the world has long been a major preoccupation of mine, and wherever I look, it seems the news is not good.

Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World offers a different perspective. The book does not downplay how terrible the state of the world is and how great the dangers for its future are. But it provides plenty of evidence that, by and large, the world has been getting better across history. Acknowledging this can help us to overcome paralysing pessimism… show more.

A clear-eyed introduction to the evidence that we've got a lot of work to do to ameliorate the worst impacts of climate change, but that we'll probably be okay and it's within our power to do some substantial good along the way.

None of which suggests we should rest on our laurels, but it's a good counter-point to climate doomerism, which can (counterintuitively) lead people to just throw their hands up and do nothing because it seems like there's nothing we can do.