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

It’s easy to be defeatist about the fate of our planet. The climate crisis persists, extinctions are accelerating, 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 considers the science behind climate change to be a “fraud”.

But I refuse to be too discouraged. Green energy technologies have already advanced so far and become so cheap that even Trump won’t slow them down, especially when China is determined to take over the world with low-carbon technologies.

Call me a prisoner of hope, but pessimism is the enemy of action. With that in mind, here are five reasons to have at least some hope about the future of our planet.

First reason: nature is making a comeback in many places. Even in the most toxic landscapes, it adapts, evolves and reconquers its own territory. Wolves roam all over Europe and tigers proliferate in India. I’m not saying we should stop worrying about biodiversity loss, but the good news is that nature is not that fragile. And in many parts of the world, we’re giving it more leeway to do its job. For example, farmers are abandoning their land to nature in some regions.

Second reason: the demographic bomb is being defused. We once thought that the continued baby boom was the ultimate threat to the planet. Almost all actions aimed at stopping it were justified. In 1983, the United Nations awarded the Population Prize to the architect of China’s harshly enforced one-child policy. But today, couples have 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 extremely low fertility and population decline.

Third reason: technical solutions to environmental risks can and do work. When the Climate Change Convention was adopted in 1992, there were only a handful of tiny wind turbines on a hillside in California, solar panels were incredibly expensive devices developed for space travel, and no one had yet imagined the rise of electric cars. Thirty years later, more than 40% of the world’s electricity is produced by cheap, low-carbon technologies. Change is not yet rapid enough, but our global dependence on fossil fuels is ending.

Reason Four: “Cutting Edge Things” Happen. Our modern world is less and less consuming of materials. Over this century, material consumption in the UK (food, metals, fossil fuels, etc.) has increased from 16 tonnes per year per capita to 11 tonnes.

For what? Modern manufacturing does more with less. And today’s affluent consumers are spending less of their income on things and more on lifestyle experiences: restaurants, gyms, concerts. Of course, much of the world still needs basic commodities – but the “consumption bomb” is also being defused.

Fifth reason: local wisdom is a shining light. One of the great environmental revelations of recent years is that rural communities are not always the enemies of their environment, as deforesters in chief, but their saviors. Tropical deforestation occurs less inside indigenous reserves than outside them, and in many African countries most wildlife protection now takes place outside national parks.

The idea that our greed means we are doomed to destroy the planet – the so-called tragedy of the commons – is simply false. I hope that if communities can act collectively to share nature at a local level, it can also work for the planet’s great commons: the atmosphere, climate systems and oceans. Finding ways to do this is our biggest challenge.

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

Fred Pearce is the author of Despite everything: a manual for climate hopes and a former New scientist environmental consultant