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

Thanks to habitat protection and targeted conservation efforts, many beloved species have been pulled from the brink of extinction, including albatrosses, condors, manatees, oryxes, pandas, rhinoceroses, Tasmanian devils, and tigers; according to the ecologist Stuart Pimm, the overall rate of extinctions has been reduced by 75 percent.³¹ Though many species remain in precarious straits, a number of ecologists and paleontologists believe that the claim that humans are causing a mass extinction like the Permian and Cretaceous is hyperbolic. As Brand notes, “No end of specific wildlife problems remain to be solved, but describing them too often as extinction crises has led to a general panic that nature is extremely fragile or already hopelessly broken. That is not remotely the case. Nature as a whole is exactly as robust as it ever was—maybe more so. . . . Working with that robustness is how conservation’s goals get reached.”³²

Other improvements are global in scope. The 1963 treaty banning atmospheric nuclear testing eliminated the most terrifying form of pollution of all, radioactive fallout, and proved that the world’s nations could agree on measures to protect the planet even in the absence of a world government. Global cooperation has dealt with several other challenges since. International treaties on the reduction of sulfur emissions and other forms of “long-range transboundary air pollution” signed in the 1980s and 1990s have helped to eliminate the scare of acid rain.³³ Thanks to the 1987 ban on chlorofluorocarbons ratified by 197 countries, the ozone layer is expected to heal by the middle of the 21st century.³⁴ These successes, as we will see, set the stage for the historic Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015.

Like all demonstrations of progress, reports on the improving state of the environment are often met with a combination of anger and illogic. The fact that many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is OK, that the environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit back and relax. For the cleaner environment we enjoy today we must thank the arguments, activism, legislation, regulations, treaties, and technological ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past.³⁵ We’ll need more of each to sustain the progress we’ve made, prevent reversals (particularly under the Trump presidency), and extend it to the wicked problems that still face us, such as the health of the oceans and, as we shall see, atmospheric greenhouse gases.

But for many reasons, it’s time to retire the morality play in which modern humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution, renounce technology, and return to an ascetic harmony with nature. Instead, we can treat environmental protection as a problem to be solved: how can people live safe, comfortable, and stimulating lives with the least possible pollution and loss of natural habitats? Far from licensing complacency, our progress so far at solving this problem emboldens us to strive for more. It also points to the forces that pushed this progress along.

One key is to decouple productivity from resources: to get more human benefit from less matter and energy. This puts a premium on density.³⁶ As agriculture becomes more intensive by growing crops that are bred or engineered to produce more protein, calories, and fiber with less land, water, and fertilizer, farmland is spared, and it can morph back to natural habitats. (Ecomodernists point out that organic farming, which needs far more land to produce a kilogram of food, is neither green nor sustainable.) As people move to cities, they not only free up land in the countryside but need fewer resources for commuting, building, and heating, because one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. As trees are harvested from dense plantations, which have five to ten times the yield of natural forests, forest land is spared, together with its feathered, furry, and scaly inhabitants.