Brad Plumer has a great post on why humanity seems to be doing relatively well even though the environment is falling apart. The same subject's been on my mind since I read a piece by Foreign Policy editor Charles Kenny a few days ago called "Best. Decade. Ever."
His argument is pretty simple: More people have more money, better health, more mobility, more food, and more security than ever before in human history. That chart on the right is from the Human Development Index, which tracks life expectancy, literacy, and other indicators of human well-being. The lines are heading up almost everywhere. Humanity doesn't seem to be suffering unduly for its environmental sins.
The natural world, however, is going to sh*t. Species are dying off, the oceans are acidifying, forests are getting eaten by pine beetles, ice is melting, and plains are becoming deserts. Remember the study in Nature about "planetary boundaries" and how we've crossed a bunch of them?
So what explains the disparity? Why are people doing better even as ecosystems are doing worse?
That's the subject of a new paper in Bioscience called "Untangling the Environmentalist's Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade?" Brad lists the researchers' four possible answers:
- Maybe humanity isn't really better off.
- Advances in food production are more important than anything else.
- Technology makes us less dependent on ecosystem services.
- The worst effects of ecosystem degradation are still yet to come.
Click here to see illustrative charts and to read the rest of this article.
