Review: Can We Save The Planet by Alice Bell

Chris Jerrey
4 min readJul 1, 2024

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Can We Save The Planet is a book in Thames and Hudson’s The Big Idea series and arguably there is no bigger idea. Can we save it? Can we save our home? Saving the only planet in the universe that we know supports life is always going to be a complex business, so some basic knowledge about what we are taking on would be a good idea. This is what Bell’s book intends to provide.

She starts strongly by asking “What, in the 2020’s, does it mean to save the planet?”

This is important. “Saving” a planet isn’t a matter of recycling or giving up things. It goes far deeper than that. The first step is to recognise the relationship that exists between humanity and the soil beneath our feet. The planet is everything, without it we are nothing. Bell is very strong on this: “Disrupt the ecosystems around us and we disrupt ourselves”. We depend on the Earth as a child depends on its mother. This book is about getting our relationship with Mother Earth back on track.

We have taken extraordinary liberties with this relationship. Even with a rapidly growing population, there are probably enough resources on Earth for everyone’s needs. But we don’t stop at needs. Technological development, empire building, making fortunes have all drawn on Earth’s resources far beyond what is needed to get by. Bell walks us through the rapid changes that have occurred over the last 300 years, the changes that have transformed us from living relatively simple lives to ones of enormous complexity, supported by a world-wide network of raw materials, manufacturing, shipping and consumption. Pretty much everything we see or touch or interact with is produced by humans. Unfortunately, that has caused us to forget that all the components of our complex life have come from the Earth. That layer of reality has been lost. We may live in the Anthropocene, the age of humans, but we are still utterly dependent on the Earth for everything. But we have forgotten this.

Chapter 2, A Crisis Situation opens with an image that sums up the crisis. A man and child try to make their way through a waterway which is completely choked with floating rubbish. It’s a great example of story-telling in a single image. The chapter continues to point out that this is a multi-faceted crisis. It isn’t just climate change, its plastic pollution, air pollution, persistent chemicals, deforestation, habitat-loss, mass extinctions, coral bleaching and novel diseases . All of these crises matter and we must tackle them all.

Can technology save us and by extension, the planet? We should never forget that our pursuit of novel technologies like nuclear power, steam power and artificial fertiliser is responsible for many of the crises we face. More specifically, the attitude we adopted to implementing these technologies led to our current situation. Chapter 3 looks at the flipside of technology, “techno-fixes”, their effectiveness and the ethical issues they raise. Bell reminds us that there are no “silver bullets” and it’s safe to assume there never will be.

Even if there were “silver bullets” whether or not we adopted them would depend on our will to do so. This expresses itself through our politics and the way our institutions operate. The global response to climate change has been pitiful, half the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been emitted since the Rio Earth summit in 1992. In the 30 years since we realised we had to make things better, we have made them much worse.

Bell negotiates the psychology of our responses in chapter 4. She doesn’t make a list of our failings, rather she looks at how we might succeed. But this is incredibly complex. As humans we don’t make simple rational decisions and stick by the outcome. We follow trends, we do as our friends do. We need leaders and we need to step up when we are called to be leaders. We need to build a culture that supports action to save ourselves.

This is a very sane book. This is very clearly seen in the concluding chapter. Bell states “We are the generation that gets to save humanity. You might not want to be cast in that role, but that is where we are now”. If you have read anything or watched any documentaries or lectures on this subject, you will know she is right. That is horribly uncomfortable but she is correct. If those of us who are active now don’t confront the crisis now, the next generation will have to do it and the crisis will be much worse.

If you have read a lot about the climate and nature crisis, there is still much in this book for you. There is a concise explanation of our predicament that you may have overcomplicated. Bell addresses the complexity but doesn’t over-complicate the explanation. That is skillful writing. If you are new to thinking about the crisis, this book is an excellent primer. Concise, full of information and comprehensive. You will learn a lot.

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Chris Jerrey

Photographer, blogger, environmental activist. Interested in the climate crisis, rewilding and trying to make a change for the better.