Optimism for a Pessimistic Purview

Before I came to Cornell to study environmental science, a man I know from the same field gave me the following advice: “Basically, the only thing you need to know is that we’re all screwed.” This does seem to be the mindset of the discipline these days. We read page after page of depressing publications, lecturers admonish that we are changing the world at an unprecedented pace, and activist groups all scramble to convince us that their crusade is the most important. Maybe we are all doomed to a future on a desolate planet, in a dismal world entirely of our own making. If it’s true, we may as well just give up now and live as hedonistically as we can, exploiting the world while it still has something left to give us.

            Just the other day I sat through hours of presentations about everything that is going wrong with the world right now. Oceanic pH is dropping, and soon no shell-bearing creature will be able to survive. Temperatures are warming, and corals will all be bleached to death within 50 years. Butterfly ranges are shifting north, insect pests are thriving, the hardiness zones of garden plants are being rearranged on the map, the list goes on and on. With the cynicism of one much older, I can probably say that this semester I’ve heard pretty much every environmental doomsday prediction that there is. But I’m not ready to give up on our world. And I don’t think that humanity should either.

            If you stop to think about it, many of the predictions that environmentalists make are just seen as “bad” because they are different. They never actually explain to us why shifting butterfly ranges are bad. They just leave it up to the audience to know, by this point, that change is bad, without offering any reason to justify their stance. Who’s to say that organisms won’t just slowly move to better environments and adapt to suit the changing climate? While heat stress and shifting ranges can be used as evidence for climate change, they are not “bad” things in and of themselves, and we need to distinguish between things that reflect actual environmental harm and things that are just a bit different than the way they were before.

            The Earth is far more resilient than people seem to realize. In fact, I think that laymen have the edge here. Perhaps their blind belief that the Earth is too big for humans to wreck is actually a form of wisdom. Those who devote their lives to studying the environment sometimes act like overprotective parents, fearing that any and all injury will automatically result in permanent disability. To quote Darth Vader, I find their lack of faith disturbing.

            The Earth has survived 5 mass extinctions, each time managing to rally and create newer and more fantastic life forms than had existed before. To those who argue that our current rate of extinction is unprecedented in global history, and that industrialization and population explosion are to blame, I would point to the megafaunal extinctions that began during prehistoric times. Or to the desertification that has taken place around the world since the dawn of agriculture. Some of our most destructive days took place before even our most primitive technology came to be, and yet the Earth still survived, productive and habitable as ever. Sadly, humans seem to always find a way to alter our environment, no matter what our level of development. Perhaps it is just in our nature. But my point is that doomsday predictions, placing all of the blame and guilt on our current generations, and talk of hopeless futures are overblown and do nothing to further our cause; in fact, they inspire resignation and defeat.  

            I believe that hope for humanity lies in the demographic transition. The demographic transition is perhaps my favorite thing in all of environmental science. It’s intuitive, it can be seen all over the world, and it explains a lot. And it is in the demographic transition that our salvation rests. As countries become more developed, we live longer, healthier lives, and eventually come to reproduce less. This can already be seen in many industrialized countries, especially Japan. The United States would be in a similar situation if not for the continued supply of fresh immigrants. As we reproduce less, our populations shrink to a more sustainable level. We use resources more efficiently, and increased affluence allows for more care to be taken of the environment, with stricter regulations being put in place and more sustainable ways of doing things to be undertaken. Most countries of the world are at some point in this transition, and in time, God willing, all countries will progress through this transition so that our population will reach a sustainable level.

The world is beginning to make a turnaround. Deforestation in the temperate zone has decreased to the point that forests are actually increasing at a rate greater than they are being cleared. CO₂ emissions in the United States are dropping. Population growth is slowing. These environmental concerns that we face will not continue to spiral out of control indefinitely; we are beginning to see their end. This fact, combined with continued technological improvements, mitigation and restoration strategies, and ever-improving efficiency, are reasons that we can still hold out hope for the future of Earth. Don’t underestimate the resilience of nature. It may just surprise us with its recovery.