Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World

 

- This is a stunningly good book and highly enlightening on the serious environmental and sustainability problems the world faces today. Dr Hannah Ritchie is senior researcher in the Programme for Global Development at Oxford University. She clearly outlines all the problems we face yet she remains positive and hopeful. We can, if we work together and with determination, solve them. This is the challenge of our times. 

- What I very much enjoyed about the book is Ritchie's clarity of thinking and writing. She clearly navigates so many difficult terrains in plain, non-academic English, providing not just loads of valuable information and data, but insight and sense. And the book has a very personal flavour. She's describing her own journey. 

- I can do no better than the back cover blurb to describe the book in detail:

Feeling anxious, powerless or confused about the future of our planet? This book will transform how you see our biggest environmental problems - and how we can solve them.

We are bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won't be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, that we should reconsider having children.

But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. The data shows we've made so much progress on these problems, and so fast, that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in history. 

Packed with the latest research, practical guidance and enlightening graphics, this book will make you rethink almost everything you've been told about the environment, from the virtues of eating locally and living in the countryside, to the evils of over-population, plastic straws and palm oil. It will give you the tools to understand what works, what doesn't and what we urgently need to focus on so we can leave a sustainable planet for future generations. 

These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let's turn that opportunity into reality.