Not the End of the World: I Agree, but for Different Reasons

I appreciate Hannah Ritchie's optimism, but disagree about whether organic farming can feed the world.

I’m always on the lookout for new books related to agriculture, organic farming, and the environment, so I was excited when someone at the OEFFA conference told me about Hannah Ritchie’s book Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. The title intrigued me because I also don’t believe the world is ending, but I knew she didn’t think organic farming could feed the world. Now that I’ve had a chance to read the book for myself, here’s my take on it.

Ritchie and I have a lot in common. We’re the same age, we both care about the environment, and we both spent most of our lives assuming that the world was going to end and that it was too late to do anything to stop it. We’ve researched some of the same topics and both come to the conclusion that things aren’t as dark as we thought, that doomsday isn’t inevitably imminent, and that there’s hope for the future. But we’ve reached that conclusion for different reasons.

I haven’t spent enough time researching some of the topics Ritchie covers—like plastics in the ocean, overfishing, or deforestation—to knowledgeably comment on them. We definitely disagree on the role nuclear power should play in our future energy mix. Like most pronuclear advocates, Ritchie completely ignores the issue of disposing of spent nuclear fuel, or the radioactive pollution from uranium mining, refining, and enriching. I’ve done enough research on energy to know that completely phasing out fossil fuels isn’t going to be as cheap or easy as she makes it sound. But I’m glad she points out that per capita carbon emissions are going down—I’ve known that for at least ten years, but it’s usually not mentioned by environmentalists. And the chapter on how much progress we’ve made cleaning up air pollution—even in China—is very encouraging.

But I was definitely disappointed in the chapter on food. This is the first book I’ve read where a Millennial has tackled this issue, and I was hoping for a fresh perspective. Instead, it was all the same stale old arguments that agronomists have been throwing around since the 1970s. Heroizing Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and Norman Borlaug. Claiming half of the world’s population is only alive because of nitrogen fertilizer. Statements that could have come straight from Earl Butz, Charles Black, or Dennis Avery, like “The reality is that the world cannot go organic. Too many of us rely on fertilizers to survive” (p. 152). Equating organic farming with “slash-and-burn” agriculture (p. 167). Claiming that grain-fed beef is better for the environment than grass-fed beef (p. 137). And, of course, the old, tired, “But in fact it’s not obvious that organic farming is better for the environment than ‘conventional’ farming,” because of the allegedly uncloseable yield gap (p. 188).

I’ve answered most of these arguments elsewhere (see my last three blog posts on nitrogen and my video on “Can Organic Feed the World?”), so I won’t go into the details here of why I actually do believe that organic not only can feed the world, but is the best way to do so. It disappoints me that Ritchie has given these tired, old, disproven, data-massaging arguments a life extension by republishing them. But I understand why she was attracted by them. As the subtitle of her book clearly shows, she’s a technological optimist. She truly believes that advances in technology can make the world more sustainable than it ever was in the past. That’s more than I can offer—I don’t think any kind of technology (or organic farming, for that matter) is going to solve the world’s deep-seated social problems and inequities. Time will tell which of us is right. But both of us agree that we have that time—because it’s not the end of the world.