Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet

by Hannah Ritchie

The more I read, the more humbled I became. I had got this wrong. Palm oil, deforestation and food are complicated problems, and I had been won over by simplistic messages that played on my emotions. When faced with such a problem, it’s tempting to look for a villain: ‘You’re the problem, so once we get rid of you, everything will be fixed.’ Palm oil fitted the role perfectly.

They say we should be eating alternatives such as coconut, avocado or olive oil instead. I’ve seen no credible evidence to support this. The basic argument for why seed oils are bad is that they contain a lot of omega-6s, which people argue are linked to inflammation.ii But many studies point to the opposite: that higher consumption of omega-6s is associated with a lower risk of disease. Researchers at Harvard University have loudly pushed against this backlash.29 A meta-analysis covering 30 studies found that omega-6s lowered the risk of heart disease: those with more in their bloodstream were 7% less likely to develop it.30 Another study followed around 2,500 men for an average of 22 years, and found that those with the highest blood levels of omega-6s had a much lower risk of dying from any disease. Studies show that they lower cholesterol and blood sugar.31

If we were to boycott palm oil and replace it with one of these alternatives, we would need far more farmland.

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. The single biggest driver, by far, is beef.34 Forest clearance to make room for cows to graze on is responsible for more than 40% of global deforestation.35 South America is home to most of this destruction. In fact, Brazilian beef production alone is responsible for one-quarter of global deforestation.

the message from experts is clear: cutting it out completely would be a big mistake. As seen earlier, if we were to replace palm oil with another oil, we would need to use much more land and potentially risk even more deforestation. But we shouldn’t accept that deforestation for palm oil is inevitable. We can use the benefits of its high productivity while protecting the orangutans’ forests at the same time. Boycotts won’t get us there. What can we do instead?

palm oil that is certified as sustainable, even if that means buying it at a slight premium. The most well known certification scheme is the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Certified suppliers conduct impact assessments, manage and protect high-value areas of biodiversity, don’t clear primary forest, and avoid land clearance through fires. Suppliers can only be certified if their plantations have not replaced primary forest or areas rich in biodiversity.

That’s why consumers – that is, you and I – need to demand sustainable palm oil. It puts pressure on food and cosmetic companies. It rewards the most sustainable growers and incentivises others to change their practices and get certified too. But our pressure doesn’t stop there. While RSPO standards are obviously better than no standards, they’re not perfect. There have been various examples of laxity from the RSPO, so if we want to stamp out deforestation completely, we not only need to get all of our crops covered by these certifications, we need to make the rules tougher too.

It’s used in industrial applications from shampoos to cosmetics, and substituting there to synthetic oils – oils produced in the lab – could give us what we need with a much lower impact.

Palm oil is also used in biofuels for transport. Here, we should absolutely stamp it out. Globally, we only put small amounts of palm oil into bioenergy. Just 5% of production. But for some countries – often the richest ones – bioenergy is a big user of palm oil. Germany is one example: 41% of its palm imports go to bioenergy. That’s more than it imports for food products. This is incredibly stupid, and terrible for the environment. To be clear: Germany imports palm oil from an area at high risk of tropical deforestation to put it into cars. What’s even more insulting is that it then counts this towards its ‘renewable energy’ target. In reality, biodiesel from palm oil results in more carbon emissions than petrol or diesel.40 Here, a boycott is certainly justified.

Beef is the largest driver of global deforestation. The most obvious way to reduce deforestation, then, is to eat less of it.

But that’s not our only option: we could just leave that land to be forest, grassland or other wilderness.

First, we can all try to eat less beef. That is the change that would have the biggest impact. It seems possible that people could cut back a bit, but we’re not going to all stop eating beef completely, any time soon. So we need some solutions for the beef that we do still eat.

switching to grain-fed rather than grass-fed beef. It

Unfortunately, the environmentally friendly or ‘efficient’ choice is often one that is worse for the animal. How you balance these priorities is up to you.

The third solution is to optimise for beef production in the regions that can do it most efficiently. The ‘worst’ (where we’re defining ‘worst’ as those that use the most land) 25% of beef producers use up 60% of the total land that is used for beef production. If globally we were able to reduce the amount of beef we eat by 25%, and eliminate this from the ‘worst’ beef producers, land use for beef production would be cut by a whopping 60%.

But if we need to pick the truly effective ones, the changes needed are often not as dramatic as we think.

It’s a romantic idea, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Our cities and urban areas take up just 1% of the world’s habitable land. Agriculture takes up 50%. Our biggest footprint on the world’s land is not the space that we ourselves take up, and build our houses on; it’s the land that’s used to grow our food. This is the biggest driver of deforestation, not the rise of urbanisation.

Around three-quarters of the world’s soy is used for animal feed: to raise chickens and pigs mostly, but also some cows and fish too.

It’s very unlikely that your tofu is killing the Amazon. Switching from meat and dairy to these alternative products is much more likely to save the forest than destroy it.

0.2% – turns into arachidonic acid. And not all of this causes inflammation. And arachidonic acid is a complicated compound: it also has anti-inflammatory effects. Some animal studies in rats have suggested that linoleic acid causes inflammation, but the opposite effect has been found in humans: it may lower inflammation, protecting against disease.

I was bricking it.

Hunger and famine still exist today, but they’re political and social in nature. The limits to us feeding everyone are entirely self-imposed.

The evolution not just of food systems but food cultures is so vast, so varied, so individual, that I can never do it proper justice in just one chapter of a book.

As we’ll see in the next chapter, slowly but surely, humans contributed to the extinction of many large mammals. What’s staggering is how few humans there were at the time.

The total impact of our hunter-gatherer ancestors might not be comparable to ours today, but the notion that they lived in perfect balance with other species is a fantasy.

When archaeologists look at the skeletons of humans across time, they tend to find that those in early farming societies were shorter than their ancestors, and shorter than their neighbours in foraging tribes.

transition from a diverse diet that included meats, fruits, vegetables, seeds and other foods to one dominated by cereals probably worsened the diet for the average person. But what it did do was feed a lot more people. Human societies could grow, with enough calories to go around.

The agricultural revolution was probably bad for the individual, but advantageous for the population as a whole.

The reality is that the world cannot go organic. Too many of us rely on fertilisers to survive. As we’ll see later, many countries can reduce the amount of fertiliser they use without sacrificing food production, but we can’t do this everywhere.

What makes his book so terrible are the inhumane policies he advocated for based on this strong (and wrong) conviction. World population had to be strictly managed. Humans were cancer – a reproducing organism that had to be controlled. As he put it: ‘we can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out’.

That’s nauseating. But it’s nothing compared to his suggestions for ‘underdeveloped countries’. Not only did he suggest sterilisation programmes, but he also proposed a ‘triaged’ system of who should be left to starve to death. Some countries could be redeemable – they might be able to dig their way out of it. But some countries were a lost cause. Rich countries should withdraw any food aid and support, and just leave them to die. It’s not clear how committed Paul R. Ehrlich really was to these ideas. But many – including senior officials in the US government – took his suggestions seriously. He could have cruelly affected the lives of billions based on predictions that turned out to be wrong.15

The obvious answer is global inequality. Hundreds of millions don’t get enough to eat, but billions get too much. Around four in 10 adults in the world are overweight. For most of human history the biggest battle was to get enough food to eat. Now, the hungry are a minority. The fact that obesity rates have increased so quickly across the world is actually a signal of how new and rare this situation is: evolving in a world of scarcity, we’ve been programmed to make the most of any food we can get our hands on. So, yes, part of the answer is that globally we eat more than we need. Still, we’re not eating 5,000 calories per day. We’re probably eating around half of that. The bigger question is how we can possibly lose half of the food we produce before it even reaches our plates.

The reason is that we feed livestock and cars, not people. The world produces 3 billion tonnes of cereals every year. Less than half of this goes towards human food; 41% is fed to livestock, and 11% is used for industrial uses, like biofuels.

They might lose a lot of the protein we feed them but what they do produce is higher quality, with a full spectrum of the essential amino acids we need for good health. Cereals have some but not all of these amino acids. If you were to eat only cereals, you would be protein-deficient.18 This is not the case with all plant-based products. Pulses such as peas, beans and soy have a very good amino acid profile. If someone has a mix of cereals and pulses in their diet, they can easily meet their protein requirements.

The exception to this is vitamin B12, which is only found in animal products. This is the one nutrient that vegans should be supplementing their diet with. So, technically we don’t need meat and dairy for a nutritious diet.

Agriculture is responsible for around 70% of global freshwater withdrawals. In some tropical countries, more than 90% is used for farming.

Again, food production is the biggest pressure on the world’s wildlife.20

The world’s wildlife has been waiting thousands of years for us to stop expanding. There is finally the opportunity to make this happen.

(1) Improve crop yields across the world We’re now in a unique position. We’ve broken that deadlock with nature: we can now get more food from less land.24

Improving crop yields – especially across sub-Saharan Africa – needs to be part of the plan. If the region achieves this – if it manages to close its ‘yield gaps’ of what is biologically and technologically feasible – then it can feed itself without losing any forest or natural habitat at all. The good news is that we know how to do this.

(2) Eat less meat, especially beef and lamb

We would cut emissions, land use and water use by much more if half the population went meat-free two days a week than we would from increasing veganism by a few per cent.

(3) Invest in meat substitutes: building burgers in the lab

That’s a great sign: we want plant-based meats to be something everyone is open to trying. They should never be a niche product for the vegans and vegetarians of the world.

Switch your beefburger for a Beyond Meat or Impossible Burger and you’ll cut emissions by around 96%.

As the world moves towards a low-carbon energy grid, the footprint of these foods will get better too. That’s not the case with meats: we’re quickly reaching our limits on how efficiently we can produce animals.

(4) Build a hybrid burger While many would be happy to tuck into a plant-based Impossible Burger, others will want to stick with beefburgers. Well, maybe they can have their beef but save some too. One option is to blend beef with chicken, soy or other low-carbon protein sources, to build the hybrid burger.

(5) Substitute dairy with plant-based alternatives In the typical diet in the EU, dairy accounts

(6) Waste less food Around one-third of the world’s food goes to waste.34, 35 Here, by ‘waste’, I’m not including all of the energy we lose when we feed crops to livestock or put them in our cars. I’m talking about food that literally rots away, without being used for anything.

We also need to increase refrigeration from farm to market, and while food is at the market.