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

by Hannah Ritchie

Many changes that do profoundly shape the world are not rare, exciting or headline-grabbing. They are persistent things that happen day by day and year by year until decades pass and the world has been altered beyond recognition.

education or health, I’ve found that trying to build an environmental world view based on the latest wildfire

If we want clarity we have to take in the full picture, and that means giving ourselves some distance. 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.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, our impending doom leaves us feeling paralysed. If we’re already screwed, then what’s the point in trying? Far from making us more effective in driving change, it robs us of any motivation to do so. I recognise this from my own dark period when I nearly walked away from the field entirely. I can assure you that after reframing how I saw the world, I have had a much, much bigger impact on changing things. When it comes down to it, doomsday attitudes are often no better than denial. This option of ‘giving

Optimism is seeing challenges as opportunities to make progress; it’s having the confidence that there are things we can do to make a difference.

Complacent optimism is the feeling of a child waiting for presents. Conditional optimism is the feeling of a child who is thinking about building a treehouse. ‘If I get some wood and nails and persuade some other kids to help do the work, we can end up with something really cool.’

go. As my colleague Max Roser puts it: ‘The world is much better; the world is still awful; the world can do much better.’10 All three statements are true.

In 1987, the UN defined sustainable development as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

‘Treat the Earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.’

As recently as 1800, about 43% of the world’s children died before reaching their fifth birthday.9 Today that figure is 4% – still woefully high, but more than 10-fold lower.

Every day, 300,000 people get access to electricity and a similar number get clean water, for the first time. This has been the case every day for a decade.

Air pollution is one of the world’s biggest killers. Researchers estimate that it kills at least 9 million people every year. That’s 450 times more than die in natural disasters in most years.

What we think is effective in cutting our carbon footprint often isn’t Actions such as giving up a car, eating a more plant-based diet, reducing flights or switching to an electric car are most effective in cutting our personal carbon footprint.

environmental problems and food lies close to the centre. It really is at the nexus of sustainability. As

Ninety-nine per cent of the 4 billion species that have ever lived on Earth are now gone.29 Extinctions have been a natural part of the planet’s evolutionary history.30 Without them, we wouldn’t be here today. Species go extinct, and new species arise. This is evolution-in-action.