8 reasons you shouldn't worry about the environment

CNBC reports nearly 50% of the world's young people experience "climate change anxiety" almost every day. The eco-anxious will find much comfort and hope in Matt Ridley's article, Against Environmental Pessimism. 👇👇👇

Starving world? Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist, wrote in 1968: "in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death." Instead, famine deaths have fallen from millions to thousands. This happened despite the world's population more than doubling since then.

Prosperity is good for the environment. Ridley writes, "Forests are still being cut down in poor countries, but they are expanding in rich ones." Countries start reforesting once they hit $5k per capita income. Forest cover in China has increased from 16% to 22% since 1990.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the globe is greening. The increasing Co2 levels in the atmosphere have created a "carbon river" that feeds forest regeneration. Since 1990, a green cover "twice the size of the United States" has been added to the planet.

The oceans recover. There were less than 5,000 humpback whales in 1960s - today "there are at least 80,000." Oil spills have gone down by 80% since the 1980s due to "double-hulled tankers and GPS navigation." King penguins & fur seals, once rare, now number in millions.

Worried about overfishing? Close to 50% of "our seafood now comes from farmed fish and shrimp." Wild fish are still caught to feed farmed animals, but edible lab food might soon render this practice obsolete.

Invasive species. Not everything is trending in the right direction. Invasive species, for instance, continue to drive native island species to extinction. The brown tree snake alone has "caused the extinction of 12 bird species on Guam."

Nevertheless, progress is "not only possible, but likely." New Zealand for example, has successfully removed invasive species from nearby islands through poisoned rat bait. Now they plan to remove all invasive "mammalian predators by 2050" from the mainland.

Ridley says some shy away from reporting positive news about the environment as they believe it will lull people into complacency. But Ridley says success and positive stories will instead encourage us to take on bigger challenges.

Bottom line. Many experts have predicted doom in the past - and been proven wrong. Matt Ridley argues that we should instead be optimistic about the environment's future, and presents compelling evidence to back his case.