5
It is estimated that the 6.1 billion
people now living represent about 10% of all the people that have ever lived on
the earth. In terms of all the indicators of human well-being, mankind has
never had it so good. In The Skeptical
Environmentalist, the Bjorn Lomberg backs up this
optimistic assessment with a mass of statistical data:
·
In
the last 100 years, the average human life span has more than doubled for both
the developed and the undeveloped world.
·
Human
health has improved correspondingly. There are less infectious diseases. Better
sanitation and water has played a huge part in reducing millions of premature
deaths and illnesses.
·
With
food production outstripping population growth, world food prices have fallen
to 1/3rd of what they were in 1957. More than 90% of people in the
world now have more food and are better nourished.
·
The
race is becoming stronger and taller.
·
People
in the first world are 8 times wealthier than they were in 1800 and the real
wealth of developing countries has tripled in the last 50 years.
·
Most
people in the world are better educated now than they have ever been throughout
history, and they enjoy much more leisure time. Average working hours have
halved in the last 120 years.
·
People
today have access to travel, communications, culture, entertainment and
information undreamed of by people in the past.
·
In
the developed world the average person uses energy that is equivalent to having
150 servants. Even the average Indian uses the equivalent energy of 15
servants.
·
In
the last 200 years, human life has vastly improved for most of the world in
non-material ways such as in ordinary human freedoms (political, religious and
economic), in liberal democracy, in less racial or gender discrimination and in
a vast range of human rights.
Julian Simon summed up the
evidence this way: “The material conditions of life will continue to improve,
in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most
of humanity will be at or above today’s Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people
will continue to think and to say that the conditions of life are getting
worse.”
Simon is dead right about the
persistence of pessimism. The irony is that at the very time humanity has been taking
the greatest leap forward in human well-being, more people are hell bent on
preaching doom and gloom or eagerly believing it than ever before. It makes no
difference that the predictions of the doom merchants keep falling like nine
pins. Whole books have been written
cataloguing the failed environmental predictions of the pessimists, but they go
straight on preaching new forms of doom and gloom. This is not a disease of the
developing world where conditions are often quite grim compared to the developed
world. Environmental pessimism happens to be a disease of the developed world
where people have never had it so good.
As Kenyan archaeologist Richard Leakey quipped, “You have to be well fed
to be a conservationist,” and as Norman Borlung adds,
“reflecting an affluent standard of living.” What they
mean is that worrying about the environment happens to be a luxury of a society
rich enough to afford it.