Hannah Ritchie raises a very important question.

I was born in London before the end of World War II and to a great extent my upbringing was in the times of yesterday. But the world has moved on in many, many ways. It is too easy to say that we live in very strange times.

Thus it was enlightening to come across this talk, under the TED Talks banner, quite recently. I have great pleasure in sharing it with you. Plus, Hannah’s website is here. (From which I have taken the following words!)

(P.S. The YouTube video is just over thirteen minutes long. It automatically runs into the next video so you will have to stop it yourself.)

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The word “sustainability” gets thrown around a lot these days. But what does it actually mean for humanity to be sustainable? Environmental data scientist Hannah Ritchie digs into the numbers behind human progress across centuries, unpacking why the conventional understanding of sustainability is misleading and showing how we can be the first generation of humans to actually achieve it.

Why you should listen

Hannah Ritchie is deputy editor and research lead at Our World in Data, an online publication making data and research on the world’s largest problems accessible and understandable for non-experts. She is a senior researcher at the University of Oxford, where she studies how environmental issues intersect with others like poverty, global health and education. She has also done extensive research into the question of how to feed everyone in the world a nutritious diet without wrecking the planet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vox, Wired, BBC, Al Jazeera, The Economist and New Scientist.

In 2022, Ritchie was named Scotland’s Youth Climate Champion. She is also an honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation, and a fellow at the Energy for Growth Hub, focused on ending global energy poverty. Her forthcoming book, The First Generation, makes an evidence-based case for why we have a meaningful chance to solve global environmental problems for the first time in human history.

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It is a very inspiring talk; please watch it!