Modern information technology has made us so used to a flow of bad news that it is easy to overlook the ways in which the world has improved during our lifetimes. In a book called “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World” Hans Rosling identifies common ‘instincts’ – that predispose us to pessimism about the true state of the planet. One of these, “the gap instinct”, leads us to “divide all kinds of things into two distinct and often conflicting groups, with an imagined gap—a huge chasm of injustice—in between.” Another lets us uncritically absorb broad and misleading generalizations. Taken together these cognitive failings often prevent us from trying to fix problems because we “conclude that nothing we have tried so far is working and lose confidence in measures that actually work.”
In fact, by many measures, there has been significant progress in addressing chronic problems like child mortality and the eradication of disease. New technology and imaginative policies have cut the costs and dangers of transportation, improved access to education and even started to rein in population growth – the UN expects rates to slow within a few decades until we hit a maximum of between 10 and 12 billion people by the end of the century. Yet most of us convince ourselves that the planet keeps getting poorer and sicker, and that we are doomed to keep producing unsustainable numbers of new humans for the foreseeable future.
Similar pessimism affects the way we view the environment. Although there is no doubt that our neglect of anthropogenic climate change requires immediate action, it is misleading to discount the progress which has been made in tackling some problems. The Guardian recently reported on Treesisters, a reforestation charity founded in 2014 that now funds the annual planting of 2.2m trees (at an average cost of US40¢ reach) in Brazil, Cameroon, India, Kenya, Madagascar and Nepal. Since 15 billion trees are felled each year this initiative by itself is, at best, a modest pushback against worldwide deforestation – but we ought to remember that just five years ago there was nothing remotely on this scale.
Reforestation checks global warming, improves rainfall and water quality, reduces air pollution, and it creates jobs in local communities. Adopted at sufficient scale it could provide almost 40 percent of the greenhouse gas mitigation needed to hold the planet’s temperature rise below the critical threshold of 2 degrees centigrade. In March, the UN launched a Decade of Ecosystem Restoration which hopes to reforest 350m hectares by 2030.
In Madagascar, Treesisters has supported a project that restores mangrove and dry deciduous forests. Mangroves not only revitalise local ecosystems, they act as defences against coastal floods, filter river water so that less soil is washed out to sea, and provide nurseries for young fish. Surprisingly, they also seem to capture four times more carbon than rainforest.
This is one of many stories that rarely reach the audiences which can expect bad political and economic news, military conflicts, or natural disasters. That is not to say, by any means, that collectively we do not face a wide range of serious problems. But it is an important reminder that we should avoid pessimism, especially when much of it all is driven by misleading facts and careless generalizations.
