Hannah Ritchie challenges us to be optimistic about the future of the planet
Also this week, the rise of "dopamine culture" and a Roaring Twenties mansion in the heart of Vancouver.
Hannah Ritchie is one of the most interesting voices in the global discussion about climate change. The University of Oxford data scientist, author of Not The End of The World: How We Can Be the first Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, argues that we should not allow troubling statistics about global warming to make us despondent. We still have hope for a manageable outcome.
I've listened to several interviews with Ritchie in recent weeks and find myself in agreement with her approach.
While the data clearly shows the harmful effects of climate change, it's important not to become complacent and spiral into a doom-and-gloom mindset. Ritchie argues in favour of what she calls "urgent optimism."
One way to understand urgent optimism is to see what it it is not. Pessimism, for example, simply gets in the way of any progress. Blind optimism doesn't work either. (It's a kind of hands-off attitude: "I'm sure we'll be fine."). But urgent optimism means that we acknowledge our problems and get together to work on solutions as quickly as possible. We still have time to make a difference.
How Ritchie became optimistic
Ritchie admits she, too, was becoming despondent as a university student in environmental studies as she analyzed wave after wave of negative data. She was later appalled when she heard an expert telling children in elementary schools that the situation is totally hopeless and the planet is dying. Ritchie grew up with environmental change and shares the anxiety felt by youth today, but she wasn’t willing to accept a hopeless outlook for future generations.
Her turning point came when she saw the work of Hans Rosling (1948-2017), a Swedish statistician and public speaker, who had a gift for visualizing data to explain global development trends. Rosling helped Ritchie see that in almost every metric of human development, well-being is improving. Despite our present troubles, there has never been a better time to be alive.
(To give you an idea of Rosling’s data presentation skills, I’ll link a video at the end of this newsletter. In a four-minute presentation, he deftly tracks humanity’s progress over 200 years.)
Hopeful signs
Some examples of environmental and societal improvement include the following trends, supported by data:
- Air pollution is decreasing substantially around the globe, even in places like India and China, were air quality had been poor for decades. Acid rain is no longer a threat, nor is the depletion of the ozone layer.
- Per capita emissions have been falling steadily for the last 10 years. Our carbon footprint is much smaller than it was in the 1970s and 1980s.
-More and more areas of the world’s oceans, vital for the health of the planet, are being protected. Around 83% of the fish we consume comes from sustainable sources.
-Infant mortality has been dramatically reduced in the last 200 years from 50% to 4%.
Last year may have been the warmest year on record, but we are quickly adapting our technology to reduce the impacts of climate change and give us and the planet a fighting chance. The situation is serious, but we are making steady progress in the right direction.
In her own words
Interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Ritchie said that even if we don't meet our targets, it's still worth finding ways to limit the impacts of climate change:
I kind of wanted to give a slightly different message about climate and the other environmental problems.
It's not to dismiss these problems or say they're not urgent, or they're not big, or they won't have really catastrophic consequences in the future; but more to acknowledge [that], yes, these are big problems, but there are ways that we can talk with them. And, actually, we are starting to see progress. We just need much, much more of it.
We're very, very far past the position of debating, "Is climate change real? Or humans causing it?" I'm kind of setting that aside and saying: Yes, it's real and we are the driver.
It's more about solutions. We need to move past the "Is it happening?" to the "What do we actually do about it?"
There's such large inequalities in the world on who climate change will impact the most. It will predominantly fall on people [with] lower incomes in poorer countries who have done the least to cause this.
In rich countries, in particular, if we step back and say, "Oh, this is too hard, we don't want to tackle this," to me, that's a selfish position to take because ... the adverse impacts will most heavily fall on the poorest that haven't really contributed to the problem.
From a CBC interview: “This scientist was paralyzed by the threat of climate change. How she found hope”
In short, if we concentrate on finding solutions, Hannah Ritchie believes we can find a balance between the needs of humanity and the needs of the planet. We could become the first sustainable generation.
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More info:
https://www.positive.news/society/hannah-ritchie-data-climate-solutions/
University of Oxford profile
Ritchie’s book: Not The End of The World: How We Can Be the first Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet
Additional material can be found at the bottom of the newsletter, including links to two videos.
A wake-up call for artists and audiences
Ted Gioia, a music historian and writer, recently published an intriguing essay on the unique characteristics that define our culture in present times. Gioia's position is one well-worth considering. As a cultural historian he has studied the ebbs and flows of the arts and entertainment world, noting how the fundamental economics of artistic production have changed.
In his essay, Gioia highlights how the business model for all art, from writing to music to painting, has funnelled creators and audiences into new formats and new habits, specifically into ever shorter works designed to attract audience attention. This is done with the support of - or likely because of - giant technology and social media platforms whose interest lies in keeping us glued to their sites for as long as possible. As you may have guessed, Gioia sees algorithms feeding addictive responses in all users. As a result, our attention spans are also becoming shorter and shorter. It’s the effect of dopamine, the feel-good neurotransmitter that boosts mood, on popular culture. He writes:
Even the dumbest entertainment looks like Shakespeare compared to dopamine culture. You don’t need Hamlet, a photo of a hamburger will suffice. Or a video of somebody twerking, or a pet looking goofy.
Instead of movies, users get served up an endless sequence of 15-second videos. Instead of symphonies, listeners hear bite-sized melodies, usually accompanied by one of these tiny videos—just enough for a dopamine hit, and no more.
This is the new culture. And its most striking feature is the absence of Culture (with a capital C) or even mindless entertainment—both get replaced by compulsive activity.
Gioia offers this chart by way of explanation:
Gioia goes on to look at how our addictive habits, based on positive mental stimuli, ironically reach a point where they no longer have the same effect and result in depression and other psychological maladies.
Beyond the changing qualities of our culture, this trend is another wake-up call for better self-care. I’m looking at the face in the mirror. The message is as much for me as for anyone else. It’s important to take longer breaks from the virtual worlds we spend so much time exploring. We feel better when we take the time to get active again, observe nature, be with someone else in person or just focus on something that’s not on a screen. If we don’t do this, we may be flirting with a mental health crisis on a global scale.
You can read Gioia's essay here:
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A quote worth remembering
Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl on freedom:
Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
Source: Man's Search For Meaning
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Shannon Mansion
My sketch this week is of Shannon Mansion in Vancouver. It was built for Benjamin Tingley Rogers, an American businessman who founded the British Columbia Sugar Refining Company. In the 1920s he purchased this parcel of land from a farmer named William Shannon to build a second home in what is now the South Kerrisdale neighbourhood. It was completed in 1925. As you can see, it's on a grand scale, built in brick-and-stone, in the Beaux-Arts style. It contains 40 rooms. The property also includes a large coach house and a gate house. In the Roaring Twenties, the mansion was the site of elegant parties and was considered the largest residence west of Toronto, according to The Province newspaper.
In 1967 the property was purchased by financier Peter Wall. Condos, rental apartments and townhomes have since been built all around it. However developers were careful to preserve the original buildings, along with a public garden where I sat when I sketched this the other day.
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Thanks for reading this newsletter.
A full collection of my articles, with an archive and thematic headings, is at the Zanepost web page, located here. Please visit.
Until next time,
-Renato Zane
If you prefer, you can just buy me a coffee. It’s easy. Here’s how: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/renatozane
Additional resources on Ritchie and Rosling.
This is a 2009 video showing Hans Rosling’s data visualization of 200 years of human development.
Hannah Ritchie outlines the reasons for her optimism in this TED Talk, posted in April 2023:
Video: https://www.ted.com/talks/hannah_ritchie_are_we_the_last_generation_or_the_first_sustainable_one