What makes me most optimistic is the number of people I meet who are all pushing for this. Surround yourself with those people. Be inspired by them. Ignore those who say that we are doomed. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let’s turn that opportunity into reality.

The arrows pointing in the same direction as me are those that are focused on building solutions that move us forward. Doomsayers are not interested in solutions. They have already given up. They often try to stand in the way of them. At best, they are just counterweight to progress. At worst, they’re actively pulling the other way; just as

The average person will spend around 80,000 hours at work throughout their lifetime.ii Pick a great career where you can really make a difference and your impact could be thousands, or millions, of times greater than your individual efforts to reduce your carbon footprint.

Unfortunately, to make real and lasting progress we need large-scale systemic and technological change. We need to change political and economic incentives.

Lab-grown meat, dense cities and nuclear energy need a rebrand. These need to be some of the new emblems of a sustainable path forward.

Yet it’s something that we need to overcome. The fact that our intuitions are so ‘off’ is a problem. At a time when the world needs to eat less meat, we’ve seen a pushback against meat-substitute products because they’re ‘processed’. When we need to be using less land for agriculture we’ve seen a recent resurgence in organic, but more land-hungry,

The other commonality between our environmental problems is that their historical arc is the same. We’ve told ourselves that all of our environmental problems are recent. We believe they’ve been created in the last few decades through an exploding population and greed. In reality, nearly all of them have a long history. Humanity’s environmental

Tackling biodiversity loss on its own might seem impossible, but we won’t tackle it in isolation; we’ll get most of the way there by fixing the other problems. Do this in the next few decades and we’ll see a great wildlife turnaround. Thousands of years of humans versus other species will end, and both will be able to flourish at the same time.

Sustainability is humanity’s North Star. Make sure current generations have opportunities for a good life, shrink our environmental impact so that future generations have the same (or better) opportunities, and let wildlife flourish alongside us. That’s the dream. And I hope I’ve shown over the course of the book why it’s one I believe we can