Not the end of the world — Hannah Ritchie

Book review

I’m going to tell you about a book, probably the one that impacted me the most in 2024: Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie, published in 2024.

Yves Caseau, in his article “An Alternative Perspective on Climate Change and the Transition to a Sustainable World”, references this book, and the way he presents it immediately caught my attention.

In today’s particularly tense context, this book stands out like a UFO in ecological debates.

It seems to me that the population is generally divided into two camps: those who “ignore” or tend to downplay the recognition of a global ecological and environmental problem, and those who are highly aware of it and hold a rather pessimistic view of the future. Culturally, I belong to the second camp.

And this is where Hannah Ritchie shakes up our beliefs.

Indeed, based on an in-depth data analysis, Hannah Ritchie confirms, moderates, or debunks widely held ideas, often supported by “reputable” media outlets and sometimes even pushed by leaders around the world.

Although I don’t personally have a data scientist background, I am particularly drawn to facts and data that can support a discourse or theory. As the lead data scientist at Our World in Data, Hannah Ritchie dedicates her time to studying and analyzing data related to energy, pollution, agriculture, and food, which ultimately gives her a “realistic” global view of many indicators and their evolution over time.

Hannah Ritchie debunks some preconceived ideas about air pollution, for instance, using data. She also confirms other notions, such as the pollution linked to beef farming. The only “limitation” I find in her book is that the data scope is very macro and doesn’t delve into the details of certain regions of the world.

Far from a simplistic partisan discourse (either “everything is fine” or “everything is doomed”), the message conveyed in her book is that yes, human activity has a major impact on the environment — critical in some cases — but it’s not too late. Progress, technology, and collective intelligence can enable us to adapt and fix what is harming our planet. You finish the book with an overall optimistic message, which is uplifting because not everything is lost. And that’s where the book becomes “unsettling.”

I highly recommend reading this book and then discussing it at a family dinner — it’s guaranteed to spark lively conversations!

If you’ve read this book, let me know what you thought about it!