Book Review: Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie
Does Ritchie’s optimism hold up amid today’s attacks on science and environmental policy?
My rating: 8/10
Do I recommend reading? Yes!
Note: Our next book club meeting is June 30th at 8 p.m. EST. We’re reading John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis. I’ll send a Zoom link in our Substack chat group when the date gets closer.
I came to Ritchie’s book looking for good news, but also wondering how her findings would hold up in this political moment. The second Trump administration is already rolling back environmental protections, undermining science, and withdrawing from the types of agreements that made progress possible in the first place. So, what I wanted to know going into this book was what happens when a measured look at the data runs into the reality of regulatory rollbacks?
And the answer circles back to Hannah’s quote from her book above, which is that possibility isn’t inevitability. Or to frame it positively, progress is not guaranteed, but it is possible. And even now, especially now, that’s a message worth building on.
It feels like this is a message I was meant to hear (and maybe you were meant to hear it too), because I’ve been seeing the same theme pop up in another book from Mariann Edgar Budde’s How We Learn to Be Brave, where she shares a quote about not relying on hope, but instead focusing on possibility: “I’m not a fan of hope as a guiding principle, because it assumes that the outcome will be good, which is not given…but I am completely enamored with the amount of possibility that’s available to us.” Both Budde and Ritchie seem to have built their books around that same grounded sense of possibility. In terms of Ritchie’s book, she does this by showing what the world looks like when you let the data lead and not the headlines.
An Important Message About The Thin Line Between Action and Apathy
Ritchie opens with a tension I’ve wrestled with for years, which is how do you communicate the seriousness of environmental issues without overwhelming people into apathy? It’s a question I continue to face all the time while teaching. You want students to care and to act, but not to shut down under the weight of it all. She does a nice job of trying to keep the reader clear-eyed about the challenges we face, while also leaving space for action and imagination, which she calls “critical optimism.” I really like that terminology.
But at the same time, I also found myself wanting more depth in certain places, as I’ll detail below. Obviously, she couldn’t have predicted where we’d be today, but I found myself wondering how resilient she thinks her findings are. Maybe that’s beyond the scope of the book, but I would’ve loved to hear whether she still feels confident that her conclusions hold up when a major country takes a sledgehammer to environmental policy. And while it’s understandable that many of the charts she references stop around 2020 (she had to finish the book sometime), the world has shifted drastically since then (at least it feels like we’re in a different era).
It’s not exactly a flaw, but it did leave me wanting a bit more context for how durable her optimism really is. For example, one of the early charts highlights the emotional toll of environmental uncertainty. It’s a bar graph showing countries like India, Brazil, and the Philippines ranking highest in fear for the future and hesitancy around having children. I couldn’t help but wonder if those numbers reflect lived experience because these are places already experiencing the kinds of climate and environmental disasters and displacement that many others still talk about as “future risks.” Are they already living the very future the rest of the world fears?
And looking at that graph now, in the context of recent U.S. policy shifts like the cancellation of the National Climate Assessment, cuts to greenhouse gas reporting, executive orders limiting state climate efforts it starts to feel like we’re intentionally choosing not to measure or manage the very issues Ritchie believes we can solve. That tension between what the data shows and what policymakers are doing raises real questions about how her conclusions will hold up.
Part of what makes the gap between data and policy so frustrating is that even the way we talk about environmental issues is often skewed. It’s something I’ve been discussing with other academic friends lately. Mainly, what’s seen as “publishable” can distort how we understand the state of the world. Ritchie points out that alarming claims often come from outlier studies, like all fisheries collapsing by 2048. The pressure to publish dramatic, statistically significant results means that quieter, more nuanced findings (or replication studies) rarely get any attention. That creates a feedback loop where extreme claims get published, picked up by the media, and shape a public narrative that feels much more dire than the broader scientific consensus might actually support.
That doesn’t mean the science is wrong or the threats aren’t real, but it does mean we need better ways of communicating progress that are honest and actually help people grasp what’s at stake. Books like Ritchie’s are valuable because they pull back the curtain on the bigger picture, giving context to the extremes.
Highs, Lows, and Lingering Questions
Even though I enjoyed her book, there are areas where I think she could have gone further. Chapter 3, for instance, left me frustrated by the lack of attention to climate thresholds and tipping points. Think permafrost melt, ocean current disruptions, and feedback loops. These ideas are central to understanding what we’re up against, since we’ve already crossed the “red line” at which some damage is irreversible.
Similarly, the biodiversity chapter makes a strong case that species loss isn’t as dramatic as many believe, but leaves out the fact that many of the species that are thriving may be invasive. Having worked on the IPBES invasive alien species assessment, I was surprised not to see this mentioned more directly. Invasive species are one of the leading drivers of biodiversity loss worldwide.
In our book club meeting, one of our members discussed wanting to see more on land use, and I agree. Ritchie’s deforestation chapter makes some valuable points, but skips over things like the ecological differences between turf grass and native landscaping.
Another book club member noted that they would have liked more specific policy recommendations. Any recommendations mentioned felt very “30,000 feet” level, such as “protect biodiversity,” “end deforestation,” and “slow climate change.” On the other hand, she does a nice job detailing policies we don’t have to worry about (e.g., you don’t have to stop watching TV, streaming movies, or using the internet). And I suppose her not getting too into the weeds on policy is understandable given her background as a data scientist rather than a policymaker. However, it still felt like a missed opportunity, especially given the current political stakes. Perhaps she has more on her website, but I haven’t had a chance to explore that further.
Still, for all the critiques, I found this book very useful and even comforting. Ritchie doesn’t pretend everything’s fine or dismiss the severity of environmental challenges. What she does offer is a reminder that improvement is possible, and in some cases, already happening.
I liked how she explored tradeoffs and her willingness to challenge assumptions about local food, organic farming, or even plastics. I’ve spent years trying to prioritize local and organic food, and Ritchie makes a convincing case that these choices aren’t always as impactful as we think. In fact, that section felt like a bit of personal relief.
Her discussion of plastics is also worth noting because it acknowledges that plastic, for all its problems, has some real advantages. It’s light, durable, flexible, and often better than the alternatives. The challenge isn’t eliminating plastic altogether, but managing its use and disposal more intelligently. The same kind of reasoning applies to the Environmental Kuznets Curve, which she implicitly touches on throughout, where environmental outcomes tend to worsen during the early stages of a country’s development, but improve once income levels rise. Richer countries can help poorer countries leapfrog those worst phases, assuming they’re willing to provide support, not just finger-pointing.
This also hits on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theme, which looms in the background. When people are worried about basic survival, like healthcare, democracy, and war, long-term environmental goals understandably take a backseat. It provides a (hopeful) context for some of what we’re experiencing today.
Final Thoughts
I’ll leave you with one of Ritchie’s most important takeaways, which is that being an effective environmentalist doesn’t always look as we expect. You won’t make perfect choices every time, and that’s okay. Not everything natural is automatically good, and not everything synthetic is automatically bad. What matters is moving in the right direction. Sometimes progress means embracing the good enough, so we don’t get stuck waiting for perfect.
This is especially important in a time of policy whiplash, when even the most optimistic data trends can reverse quickly with a shift in leadership. One example that came to mind while reading her chapter on deforestation was Trump’s executive order to expand logging in national forests, which is likely tied to the trade war with Canada. Will that undo some of the progress Ritchie highlights? Time will tell.
And I’d be remiss not to point out one of the surprising supporting blurbs on the cover from the famous fiction writer Margaret Atwood (Handmaid’s Tale, among others). Because only in fiction do we really imagine the kind of sudden, total planetary collapse that some people are bracing for. Atwood reminds us that while worst-case scenarios make for compelling stories, they can also help us think more creatively about what’s possible. We’ll need that kind of imagination, alongside clear data and better communication, if we want to meet this moment. May the odds be ever in our federal policy favor.
Dr. McD
Fascinating post.
I wanted to mention that, especially when it comes to climate change, it's getting harder to know what's an extreme claim versus what's reasonable. The actual rate of increase in global heating over the past few years has completely defied the "best" climate models and has tracked more closely with some of the predictions from the so-called "hot models," which assume higher climate sensitivity than what's typically recognized by the IPCC. Now, I myself think those hot models won't be right in the long run (I'm using that term to mean something like 20-30 years from now). But it does underscore that we're in very uncharted waters, and no one really knows what's going to happen. That's especially the case now if climate research is gutted thanks to the current administration.