Learning to be optimistic about the future of our planet

As difficult as it may seem, we still have time to turn away from apathy and come together to accomplish a lot of good

Sampling water quality. Photo by USGS on Unsplash

What’s happened to environmentalism? In the last few years, it appears to have steadily dropped in importance on many nations’ priority lists. Concerns over rising inflation and interest rates, war in the Middle East and in Ukraine, tariff uncertainties and, also influenced by the U.S. president, renewed support for the fossil fuel industry have all played a part in pushing the health of our planet into the background.

In the current scenario, it is easy to lose hope in the face of so much apathy and policy fatigue. But some researchers are still focused on making positive changes and sharing information about progress.

This week I want to revisit a post that focuses on the perspective of a well-known data scientist who encourages us to keep going.

Hannah Ritchie believes we can still build a sustainable planet

Hannah Ritchie (Photo by Ryan Lash, TED)

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.

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.)

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

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”

If we dedicate our talents on devising solutions, even little ones, 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.

It’s a message that can inspire us to keep collaborating and keep innovating.

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More info:

Ritchie’s book: Not The End of The World: How We Can Be the first Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet

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

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Quote of the week:

A reminder that by imagining we can affect in ourselves the changes that we seek.

“Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.”

— British writer C. S. Lewis

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Sketch

This week, a rough study of trees and sky for a city view.

Thanks for reading Zanepost.

Until next time,

-Renato