Hannah Ritchie, a renowned environmental scientist, used to be a gloomy teenager who believed that the world was slipping into a watery abyss due to runaway global warming and rising oceans. But, moving forward to her current age of 29, she is a rare, positive, fact-based voice in the realm of environmental data, vastly different from her angsty teen self. According to Ritchie, sustainability is tantalizingly within reach, and for the first time in the history of humankind, we all have the potential to embrace it. In her first book, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, Ritchie takes readers along her data-led journey of discovery and offers practical guidance for making this change faster and better.
Ritchie argues that we need to shift the conversation of sustainability beyond environmental concerns only and keep ourselves in balance with decent living standards as well. Equipped with cheap, low-carbon technologies and vastly more efficient food systems, she believes that we now have the potential to balance both sides of the sustainability equation. She cites the example of air pollution in rich countries, which is often thought to be at its worst, but in reality, strict pollution policies have undone years of historical damage and are saving lives.
While Ritchie acknowledges that things are still serious, she pushes back on the message that there is nothing we can do. “We very clearly can do something, and good stuff is happening – we just need to accelerate it faster,” she explains. Ritchie’s work has also provided a sense of hope to those who are anxious about the future and feel helpless in the face of environmental disasters. She teaches them to take a holistically positive approach that emphasizes progress and the importance of data-based solutions to problems.
Ritchie’s turn to an optimist came after she discovered the works of late Swedish physician Hans Rosling, who demonstrated on key human wellbeing metrics like poverty and child mortality that the world today is far better than it was 200 years ago. It was an awakening moment for Ritchie and helped her to understand that environmental problems required a closer look at the data. Today, Ritchie works for Our World in Data, a well-known open-access online resource that mines datasets from trustworthy sources and explains trends with clear and effective visuals
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