Why I’m still an environmental optimist – despite it all

It is easy to be defeatist about the fate of our planet. There is an ongoing climate crisis, extinctions are in overdrive, forests are disappearing, water cycles are collapsing and pollution is choking cities and creating dead zones in the oceans. And there is also US President Donald Trump, who thinks the science behind climate change is a “con job“.

But I refuse to be too despondent. Green-energy technologies have already advanced so far and become so cheap that even Trump won’t hold them back, especially when China is hell-bent on conquering the world with low-carbon tech.

Call me a prisoner of hope, but pessimism is the enemy of action. So, in that spirit, here are five reasons to be at least a little bit hopeful about our planet’s future.

Reason one: nature is making a comeback in many places. Even in the most toxic landscapes, it is adapting, evolving and reclaiming its own territory. Wolves are prowling across Europe and tigers are proliferating in India. I am not saying we should stop worrying about losing biodiversity, but the good news is that nature isn’t so fragile. And in many parts of the world, we are giving it more room to do its thing. For example, farmers are abandoning land to nature in some regions.

Reason two: the population bomb is being defused. We used to think a continuing baby boom was the ultimate threat to the planet. Almost any action to halt it was justified. In 1983, the United Nations awarded its population prize to the architect of China’s viciously enforced one-child policy. But today, couples are having half as many children as half a century ago – by choice. It turns out that trusting people works better than coercion. Today, the fear in much of the world is ultra-low fertility and declining populations.

Reason three: technical fixes for environmental perils can and do work. When the Climate Change Convention was passed in 1992, there was just a handful of tiny wind turbines on one hill in California, solar panels were impossibly expensive devices developed for space travel and nobody had yet imagined the rise of electric cars. Thirty years on, more than 40 per cent of the world’s electricity is generated by cheap low-carbon technologies. The change still isn’t fast enough, but our global addiction to fossil fuels is ending.

Reason four: “peak stuff” is happening. Our modern world is growing less materials-intensive. This century, the UK’s consumption of materials – in food, metals, fossil fuels and so on – has fallen from 16 tonnes a year per head to 11 tonnes.

Why? Modern manufacturing makes much more with less. And today’s wealthy consumers spend less of their income on stuff and more on lifestyle experiences: eating out, gyms, gigs. Of course, much of the world still needs the basics – but the “consumption bomb” is being defused too.

Reason five: local wisdom is a shining light. One of the great environmental revelations in recent years is that rural communities aren’t always the enemies of their environments, as deforesters in chief, but their saviours. Tropical deforestation happens less inside Indigenous reservations than outside them, and in many African countries, most wildlife protection now happens outside national parks.

The idea that our greed means we are doomed to trash the planet – the so-called tragedy of the commons – is plain wrong. My hope is that if communities can act collectively to share nature locally, then this can also work for the planet’s great global commons: the atmosphere, the climate systems and the oceans. Finding ways to achieve that is our biggest challenge.

I admit, the worst could still happen. To avoid it, we have no choice but to act. And that means embracing optimism.

Fred Pearce is author of Despite It All: A handbook for climate hopefuls and a former New Scientist environment consultant