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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

252 | Hannah Ritchie on Keeping Hope for the Planet Alive

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.84.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2023

⏱️ 76 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Our planet and its environment are in bad shape, in all sorts of ways. Those of us who want to improve the situation face a dilemma. On the one hand, we have to be forceful and clear-headed about how the bad the situation actually is. On the other, we don't want to give the impression that things are so bad that it's hopeless. That could -- and, empirically, does -- give people the impression that there's no point in working to make things better. Hannah Ritchie is an environmental researcher at Our World in Data who wants to thread this needle: things are bad, but there are ways we can work to make them better.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/10/02/252-hannah-ritchie-on-keeping-hope-for-the-planet-alive/

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Hannah Ritchie received her Ph.D. in geosciences from the University of Edinburgh. She is currently Senior Researcher and the Head of Research at Our World in Data, and a researcher at the Oxford Martin Programme in Global Development at the University of Oxford. Her upcoming book is Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.


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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast, I'm your host Sean Carroll.

0:04.7

The world you may have heard is in a bit of a mess, and I know you're immediately thinking

0:09.8

well which way is in a mess, is it because democracy is dying or because the climate

0:15.4

is falling apart or because there could be another global pandemic?

0:20.4

All of these AI extinctions, solar flares, there's a worry that bad things are happening

0:26.3

to the world.

0:27.3

Today's guest, Hannah Ritchie, is here to tell us that not everything is necessarily

0:33.0

completely impossible to solve.

0:35.5

So today's guest, Hannah Ritchie, is here to say that for certain problems, we might

0:41.2

actually be able to solve them, in particular the environmental problems.

0:47.2

Now this is one of those things where it's a subtle, careful, very specific message

0:52.2

that is easy to caricature.

0:54.8

So let me try to get it right, Hannah is saying that when it comes to the environment,

0:59.9

so climate change, food sustainability, pollution, things like that, the situation is bad.

1:07.2

No doubt that the situation is bad and getting worse in some ways, but not necessarily going

1:14.2

to continue to get worse, that there are reasonable solutions that are within our grasp

1:21.0

if we make the effort to do it.

1:23.2

So her point is that there's a kind of inaction that comes from just ignoring the problems,

1:29.8

but there's also a kind of inaction that comes from being too sad, too bleak in one's

1:36.4

outlook.

1:37.4

If you don't think the problems are addressable, you don't do anything either.

1:43.0

So Hannah has a new book coming out called Not the End of the World, where she makes

...

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