Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

The supply of food, too, has grown exponentially (as we saw in chapter 7), even though no single method of growing it has ever been sustainable. In The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis, the geographer Ruth DeFries describes the sequence as “ratchet-hatchet-pivot.” People discover a way of growing more food, and the population ratchets upward. The method fails to keep up with the demand or develops unpleasant side effects, and the hatchet falls. People then pivot to a new method. At various times, farmers have pivoted to slash-and-burn horticulture, night soil (a euphemism for human feces), crop rotation, guano, saltpeter, ground-up bison bones, chemical fertilizer, hybrid crops, pesticides, and the Green Revolution.²⁰ Future pivots may include genetically modified organisms, hydroponics, aeroponics, urban vertical farms, robotic harvesting, meat cultured in vitro, artificial intelligence algorithms fed by GPS and biosensors, the recovery of energy and fertilizer from sewage, aquaculture with fish that eat tofu instead of other fish, and who knows what else—as long as people are allowed to indulge their ingenuity.²¹ Though water is one resource that people will never pivot away from, farmers could save massive amounts if they switched to Israeli-style precision farming. And if the world develops abundant carbon-free energy sources (a topic we will explore later), it could get what it needs by desalinating seawater.²²

Not only have the disasters prophesied by 1970s greenism failed to take place, but improvements that it deemed impossible have taken place. As the world has gotten richer and crested the environmental curve, nature has begun to rebound.²³ Pope Francis’s “immense pile of filth” is the vision of someone who has woken up thinking it’s 1965, the era of belching smokestacks, waterfalls of sewage, rivers catching fire, and jokes about New Yorkers not liking to breathe air they can’t see. Figure 10-3 shows that since 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency was established, the United States has slashed its emissions of five air pollutants by almost two-thirds. Over the same period, the population grew by more than 40 percent, and those people drove twice as many miles and became two and a half times richer. Energy use has leveled off, and even carbon dioxide emissions have turned a corner, a point to which we will return. The declines don’t just reflect an offshoring of heavy industry to the developing world, because the bulk of energy use and emissions comes from transportation, heating, and electricity generation, which cannot be outsourced. Rather, they mainly reflect gains in efficiency and emission control. These diverging curves refute both the orthodox Green claim that only degrowth can curb pollution and the orthodox right-wing claim that environmental protection must sabotage economic growth and people’s standard of living.

Figure 10-3: Pollution, energy, and growth, US, 1970–2015

Sources: US Environmental Protection Agency 2016, based on the following sources. GDP: Bureau of Economic Analysis. Vehicle miles traveled: Federal Highway Administration. Population: US Census Bureau. Energy Consumption: US Department of Energy. CO2: US Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report. Emissions (carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen, particulate matter smaller than 10 micrometers, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds): EPA, https://www.epa.gov/air-emissions-inventories/air-pollutant-emissions-trends-data.

Many of the improvements can be seen with the naked eye. Cities are less often shrouded in purple-brown haze, and London no longer has the fog—actually coal smoke—that was immortalized in Impressionist paintings, gothic novels, the Gershwin song, and the brand of raincoats. Urban waterways that had been left for dead—including Puget Sound, Chesapeake Bay, Boston Harbor, Lake Erie, and the Hudson, Potomac, Chicago, Charles, Seine, Rhine, and Thames rivers (the last described by Disraeli as “a Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors”)—have been recolonized by fish, birds, marine mammals, and sometimes swimmers. Suburbanites are seeing wolves, foxes, bears, bobcats, badgers, deer, ospreys, wild turkeys, and bald eagles. As agriculture becomes more efficient (chapter 7), farmland returns to temperate forest, as any hiker knows who has stumbled upon a stone wall incongruously running through a New England woodland. Though tropical forests are still, alarmingly, being cut down, between the middle of the 20th century and the turn of the 21st the rate fell by two-thirds (figure 10-4).²⁴ Deforestation of the world’s largest tropical forest, the Amazon, peaked in 1995, and from 2004 to 2013 the rate fell by four-fifths.²⁵