This was a fantastic read, Hannah. Your work is always amazing. Please keep sharing these insights and information. You have a wonderful way of making issues relatable and understandable. It's inspiring. Thank you!
I like to think of the position we're in now is analogous to the 'MaxQ' moment at rocket launch: the moment of maximum danger during launch when the dynamic pressure on the rocket (a combination of friction from the atmosphere combined with accelerating speed) means any flaws in the design can be fatally exposed. Our species and it's aim to be sustainable (to get into orbit) is the rocket.
To link this to your three-statements:
- 'the world is awful' means we still have friction from the atmosphere (the 'legacy' issues of human development up to this point)
- 'the world is much better' means we are going ever faster, powered by the 'tech' of the rocket itself.
- 'the world can be much better' - orbit beckons!
A growing consensus around the Fermi Paradox ("why isn't space full of civilisations?") is that typically the 'rocket' design never makes it to orbit: we go extinct because the pressures (or flaws) are too great.
But we have to try. As Luke Kemp says at the end of Goliath's Curse "take comfort in defiance. It is worth doing the right thing even if the odds are stacked against us".
While this is very uplifting, as was your book, I wish ongoing biodiversity loss wasn’t glossed over quite so much, particularly insects, amphibians, birds etc. I would love to see one of your graphs or essays address this kind of data.
What is interesting here is that the destruction of the environment was driven by a few companies, a few countries, and a few billionaires. So, everyone suffers for a few to profit. This is the history of colonization - capitalism - neoliberalism.
Back in Europe the forests were destroyed in Neolithic times. Peasant farmers extended their holdings into the wild. Monasteries organised flicks of sheep. Miller's dammed the rivers. Even when coal mines and mills arrived it was hundreds of individuals who built them. Only in the 20th c did we see your billionaires, and the environmental destruction was still driven by thousands of individual farmers.
The environment, climate and biodiversity are too important to be used as ammunition in political polemics.
As it says in the piece the most destructive force to the natural world has been agriculture. By far. This is people eating. Not companies wheeling and dealing.
Well, to be even more accurate, it's more and more people eating, with per-capita impacts lately multiplied by companies wheeling and dealing. But yes, it's the ancient propensity of the "free" market to socialize all the transaction cost it can get away with. Only collective intervention can mitigate specific impacts. I can only implore US voters to vote Democratic, as the defacto US party of collective action for public good, in every election.
I understand the sentiment behind your claim, but it's more accurate to say the destruction of the environment was driven by the global marketplace, with its ancient propensity to socialize all the transaction cost it can get away with. As Ms. Ritchie points out:
"By this broader definition, humans have never been truly sustainable. Yes, many generations of our ancestors had a lower environmental impact than we do today. But by many basic metrics of human wellbeing, life was not good."
I'm in favor of collective action to take the profit out of selling fossil carbon. I'd be personally gratified to see fossil fuel producers and investors punished for funding their decades-long, all-pervasive disinformation campaign against collective action, without which the US economy would already be substantially decarbonized. But every human consumes resources, excretes waste, and socializes all the private cost they can get away with. The Industrial Age merely accelerated per-capita "environmental" (i.e. social) impact, while mechanization increased food production, and together with modern medicine, allowed our population to explode.
Meanwhile, critical technological factors multiplied our per-capita impact. Considering climate change specifically, a change in energy production technology is even now bringing an end to ever-growing fossil carbon emissions. Subsequently, all our other impacts will continue, but at least climate will stabilize!
Now it looks like population will soon (a few decades) stabilize, then begin to decline. Will economic growth continue for long?
The progress which improved the human condition worldwide is from a few companies, a few countries and a few billionaires. So everyone has vastly improved lives while a few profit. This is the history of capitalism.
Thank you Hannah, for again furnishing insights that might otherwise escape us. However I am baffled that us being presented as past peak air pollution seems predicated on anthropogenic CO2, N2O, and CH4 not being treated as pollution.
I know you've said it before, but thanks for saying it again. It's much easier to give up in despair, or to see everything as unfixable unless we overthrow capitalism, or whatever the ogre of the week happens to be.
Even if Trump drives the USA into reverse for a few years, or anti-China propaganda delays solar power, the trend is inexorably one of improvement.
What might a process look like through which people everywhere want, decide & act to adopt options for meeting their physical needs that scale back human-created extraction flows out of the biosphere and pollution flows into the biosphere, that allow the biosphere to regenerate itself, that allow the regenerated biosphere to heal the ecological crises as a whole, and that allow the biosphere to meet the physical needs of all living beings, including human beings?
A very good read thank you. It does strike me that changing the food and farming system is key and deeply fraught. Good to hear that pesticide use has reached its peak but it’s still all pervasive. Very little seems to be changing in the world of food packaging for example. New technologies in farming just don’t seem fast enough as yet and growing hydroponically questionable although it may surprise us. Good to see the bigger picture though and acknowledge some of man’s achievements!
Can we break the human development-environment trade-off? In the most basic terms, the answer would be "no". The Paris Agreement itself is an example. This agreement is essentially dooming most coral reefs to collapse, as they will be sacrificed (or traded-off) at +1.5C.
We are currently living in a period of major consequences, and the scholars and academics in sustainability theory have grossly failed to meet the challenge. We still don't have a convincing theoretical model for global sustainability. The green growth vs degrowth debate currently dominates at the highest-level of the conceptual debate. The underlying ideas of Georgescu-Roegen are flawed because of scientific errors, and Herman Daly's steady-state model is also inadequate due to scientific misunderstandings. There is intense polarisation between the green-left and neoclassical economics, and there is very poor inter-disciplinary communication between economists and natural sciences. Progress seems to be measure in social media impressions. Virtue signalling in progressive economics is extreme and scholars seem to be forming tribes instead of collaborating. Money for fundamental research is scarce. Science tells us that survival is the underling law for long-term success of any species, not "wellbeing" or "sustainability". These are cultural concepts, and they're mostly imagined.
There is only a certain amount of time during which the world will be able to coordinate on new global policies for deep GHG emissions cuts. Climate feedbacks and tipping points, circa 2050, will destabilise all dimensions of civilisation, and the notion of "wellbeing" or "sustainability" will lose value—and go out of fashion circa 2040, when they're no longer useful to society.
Fingers crossed that we can achieve "escape velocity" with some fundamental breakthroughs in sustainability theory.
Very cool Hannah. Yeah, technology trends basically make sustainability inevitable now, IF peace if maintained.
Those of us who like to worry can now focus on what increasingly looks like a breakdown in world order and end to peace, or at least the biggest challenge to it in a long time. War would absolutely stop the path to sustainability, though that would also become a very secondary concern.
You are truly the best, Hannah. I don't know anyone doing more important work. Hans Rosling is lucky to have you pick up the cause.
John Green points out that fewer human children died last year than have died in many many thousands of years -- since humanity's population was tiny.
And you don't have to go back far to see a time that was just incredibly worse:
https://www.mattball.org/2025/04/times-are-great-people-are-terrible.html
This was a fantastic read, Hannah. Your work is always amazing. Please keep sharing these insights and information. You have a wonderful way of making issues relatable and understandable. It's inspiring. Thank you!
Thank you! The best and most balanced summary on this complex discussion I've seen! Keep going Hannah.
I like to think of the position we're in now is analogous to the 'MaxQ' moment at rocket launch: the moment of maximum danger during launch when the dynamic pressure on the rocket (a combination of friction from the atmosphere combined with accelerating speed) means any flaws in the design can be fatally exposed. Our species and it's aim to be sustainable (to get into orbit) is the rocket.
To link this to your three-statements:
- 'the world is awful' means we still have friction from the atmosphere (the 'legacy' issues of human development up to this point)
- 'the world is much better' means we are going ever faster, powered by the 'tech' of the rocket itself.
- 'the world can be much better' - orbit beckons!
A growing consensus around the Fermi Paradox ("why isn't space full of civilisations?") is that typically the 'rocket' design never makes it to orbit: we go extinct because the pressures (or flaws) are too great.
But we have to try. As Luke Kemp says at the end of Goliath's Curse "take comfort in defiance. It is worth doing the right thing even if the odds are stacked against us".
While this is very uplifting, as was your book, I wish ongoing biodiversity loss wasn’t glossed over quite so much, particularly insects, amphibians, birds etc. I would love to see one of your graphs or essays address this kind of data.
What is interesting here is that the destruction of the environment was driven by a few companies, a few countries, and a few billionaires. So, everyone suffers for a few to profit. This is the history of colonization - capitalism - neoliberalism.
Back in Europe the forests were destroyed in Neolithic times. Peasant farmers extended their holdings into the wild. Monasteries organised flicks of sheep. Miller's dammed the rivers. Even when coal mines and mills arrived it was hundreds of individuals who built them. Only in the 20th c did we see your billionaires, and the environmental destruction was still driven by thousands of individual farmers.
The environment, climate and biodiversity are too important to be used as ammunition in political polemics.
As it says in the piece the most destructive force to the natural world has been agriculture. By far. This is people eating. Not companies wheeling and dealing.
Well, to be even more accurate, it's more and more people eating, with per-capita impacts lately multiplied by companies wheeling and dealing. But yes, it's the ancient propensity of the "free" market to socialize all the transaction cost it can get away with. Only collective intervention can mitigate specific impacts. I can only implore US voters to vote Democratic, as the defacto US party of collective action for public good, in every election.
I understand the sentiment behind your claim, but it's more accurate to say the destruction of the environment was driven by the global marketplace, with its ancient propensity to socialize all the transaction cost it can get away with. As Ms. Ritchie points out:
"By this broader definition, humans have never been truly sustainable. Yes, many generations of our ancestors had a lower environmental impact than we do today. But by many basic metrics of human wellbeing, life was not good."
I'm in favor of collective action to take the profit out of selling fossil carbon. I'd be personally gratified to see fossil fuel producers and investors punished for funding their decades-long, all-pervasive disinformation campaign against collective action, without which the US economy would already be substantially decarbonized. But every human consumes resources, excretes waste, and socializes all the private cost they can get away with. The Industrial Age merely accelerated per-capita "environmental" (i.e. social) impact, while mechanization increased food production, and together with modern medicine, allowed our population to explode.
Meanwhile, critical technological factors multiplied our per-capita impact. Considering climate change specifically, a change in energy production technology is even now bringing an end to ever-growing fossil carbon emissions. Subsequently, all our other impacts will continue, but at least climate will stabilize!
Now it looks like population will soon (a few decades) stabilize, then begin to decline. Will economic growth continue for long?
The progress which improved the human condition worldwide is from a few companies, a few countries and a few billionaires. So everyone has vastly improved lives while a few profit. This is the history of capitalism.
Thank you Hannah, for again furnishing insights that might otherwise escape us. However I am baffled that us being presented as past peak air pollution seems predicated on anthropogenic CO2, N2O, and CH4 not being treated as pollution.
Thank you for repeating the message in a short form, so it can be shared easier with more people!
I know you've said it before, but thanks for saying it again. It's much easier to give up in despair, or to see everything as unfixable unless we overthrow capitalism, or whatever the ogre of the week happens to be.
Even if Trump drives the USA into reverse for a few years, or anti-China propaganda delays solar power, the trend is inexorably one of improvement.
What might a process look like through which people everywhere want, decide & act to adopt options for meeting their physical needs that scale back human-created extraction flows out of the biosphere and pollution flows into the biosphere, that allow the biosphere to regenerate itself, that allow the regenerated biosphere to heal the ecological crises as a whole, and that allow the biosphere to meet the physical needs of all living beings, including human beings?
Love this Hannah. Thank you so much for giving realistic hope in what can sometimes seem a grim world.
A very good read thank you. It does strike me that changing the food and farming system is key and deeply fraught. Good to hear that pesticide use has reached its peak but it’s still all pervasive. Very little seems to be changing in the world of food packaging for example. New technologies in farming just don’t seem fast enough as yet and growing hydroponically questionable although it may surprise us. Good to see the bigger picture though and acknowledge some of man’s achievements!
This is brilliant - thank you!
Can we break the human development-environment trade-off? In the most basic terms, the answer would be "no". The Paris Agreement itself is an example. This agreement is essentially dooming most coral reefs to collapse, as they will be sacrificed (or traded-off) at +1.5C.
We are currently living in a period of major consequences, and the scholars and academics in sustainability theory have grossly failed to meet the challenge. We still don't have a convincing theoretical model for global sustainability. The green growth vs degrowth debate currently dominates at the highest-level of the conceptual debate. The underlying ideas of Georgescu-Roegen are flawed because of scientific errors, and Herman Daly's steady-state model is also inadequate due to scientific misunderstandings. There is intense polarisation between the green-left and neoclassical economics, and there is very poor inter-disciplinary communication between economists and natural sciences. Progress seems to be measure in social media impressions. Virtue signalling in progressive economics is extreme and scholars seem to be forming tribes instead of collaborating. Money for fundamental research is scarce. Science tells us that survival is the underling law for long-term success of any species, not "wellbeing" or "sustainability". These are cultural concepts, and they're mostly imagined.
There is only a certain amount of time during which the world will be able to coordinate on new global policies for deep GHG emissions cuts. Climate feedbacks and tipping points, circa 2050, will destabilise all dimensions of civilisation, and the notion of "wellbeing" or "sustainability" will lose value—and go out of fashion circa 2040, when they're no longer useful to society.
Fingers crossed that we can achieve "escape velocity" with some fundamental breakthroughs in sustainability theory.
Very cool Hannah. Yeah, technology trends basically make sustainability inevitable now, IF peace if maintained.
Those of us who like to worry can now focus on what increasingly looks like a breakdown in world order and end to peace, or at least the biggest challenge to it in a long time. War would absolutely stop the path to sustainability, though that would also become a very secondary concern.
Good one!