Melting ice caps, ocean dead zones, desertification. It seems like all the environmental news is bad. Are we making any progress on the environmental front? Are there any reports of the environment improving?
Well, I believe regulations from recent decades have resulted in the cleanup of a lot of the pollution in lakes and rivers around the country, and a good bit of air pollution as well.
Also, the ozone layer seems to not be doing as badly recently, IIRC.
Bald eagles have been removed from the endangered species list:
Most developed countries are doing fairly well when it comes to “run of the mill” pollution, like ozone, particulate matter, sulfur oxides, and so on. If you were around 30-35 years ago, the situation was pretty dire, at least in the US, and in many other industrialized countries. Air and water pollution legislation has made tremendous differences in improving air and water quality. That doesn’t mean that there is still plenty of room for improvement, but progress has been made. I would say that the best news is that a pretty strong majority of people younger than 35 or so consider environmental improvement and protection to be a fundamental part of how we do things.
(Edit - meant to preview rather than post :smack: )
The issues you point out are those that are multinational, longer term, and often invisible to the average person, so they are much harder to deal with. Climate change is one of the areas where there hasn’t been much progress, but people tend not to want to make fundamental changes based on theories. Only now that we’re really starting to see the impacts of climate change are we seeing people start to take this much more seriously.
In addition to the bald eagles, eastern pacific gray whales have also been removed from the endangered species list. Brown pelican populations and the populations of many raptors have recovered from the effects of DDT. Northern elephant seals have recovered from about 100 individuals to about 100,000 in the last century. Fur seals have returned to parts of their range from which they had been extirpated by hunting. Marine protected areas are being created in many parts of the world (some of them will even have enforcement!) Reduction of the ozone hole, thanks to the Montreal Protocol of the 1980s, will continue until it’s pretty much intact by 2025-2050. A recent paper I read now claims that fisheries management science is up to the task of managing sustainable fisheries, although fisheries management politics has yet to catch up. Emissions of highly noxious pollutants are way down since the 1970s, with a few pesky exceptions. Hybrid and electric vehicle technology makes transport-related pollution far easier to control by increasing gas milage and concentrating pollution to large facilities where it is more easily scrubbed. Carbon sequestration technology has reached the demonstration stage, and may soon be applicable on large scales. The growth of the organic food movement has allowed many food producers to reduce or eliminate entirely the amount of pesticides and herbicides they spray into the environment.
There’s good news out there, but it doesn’t always make the front page. 
I think that lots of species have rebounded as noted above. When I was a child in Louisiana in the 1970’s, the native alligator population was in big trouble and they were very rare to the casual observer in the wild. Conservation efforts have brought them back almost to pest status in parts of Louisiana and Florida. You can hunt them, farm them, and eat them now (ummm alligator…)
The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is shrinking since the ban on CFCs took effect, albeit erratically.
This is a joke, right? Most of the environemental news is indisputably good and improving. Certainly the best it has been since the inception of agricultural, and I coudl make a very good argument that it is the best it has been for the past 30, 000 years. Pollution is decreasing, deforestation is decreasing, afforestation and reforestation is increasing and so forth. In fact it is hard to think of any broad point on which the environmental news is not geting better. That is not to say that there aren’t narrow specific ways or specific places where things are getting worse, but it is in no way incorrect to say that all the news is bad for all the world. In fact most of the news is very good for most of the world.
I suggest you read this article to get some idea of the real state of the ‘environmental news’ rather than relying on what may be more sensationalist sources.
They’ve actually been upgraded from “endangered” to “delicious.”
Wild turkeys and Canada geese are much more plentiful than they used to be. (In the latter case, it’s a mixed blessing.)
Black bears are becoming more common.
White-tailed deer are plentiful to the point of being pests, after having become rare in many areas by the 1930s. (I was reading an old county history from rural north Georgia in the 1930s, and the author was going on wistfully about how deer used to roam in these parts.)
I’m not sure of the specifics, but I think there have recently been tremendous increases in the amount of the Eastern US that is forested. I may be mistaken, but I believe it may equal or even be higher than pre-Columbian coverage.
Not sure if this is necessarily a definite pro or con in terms of environment writ large, but it runs counter to the perception that we are paving paradise…
Graph here shows significant increase in NE US forests.
When European settlers first came to the US it was customary to wipe the land clean of trees for farming. And since they knew little about land reuse once the nutrients in the soil were used up they’d just wipe out another forest to create a new field.
Since advances in farming we use a lot less land, individual crops produce more, crops are rotated so land can be reused, etc. etc.
Much of the land wiped clean by early settlers has now been reclaimed by nature and forests regrown.
Smaller data point, but there was a good bit on the beaches in kenosha WI. They used to be closed all the time due to bacteria. It is now classified as a “Blue Wave Beach”
video here:
http://wpt.org/inwisconsin/greatlakes/index.cfm
(scoll down about half way, look for “Blue Wave Beach”
Brian
Same thing happened with Metro Beach in the Detoit area. A few years ago, it seemed like it was closed more days than it was open. They eventually found the source of the bacteria (sewage runoff from somewhere-or-other), and the beach has been fine ever since.
I presume that as the dire “rising of water levels, melting of ice caps, global warming” events ensue, that it will mean that areas that were once too cold or covered with snow to cultivate or to live in will eventually be open to habitation. Nature is not bad nor good. Often, when there are changes in one place that people consider to be bad, there are, someplace, related changes that people can consider to be good. And vice versa.
Do you have a source for that? I’d be a little surprised if forestation is actually increasing in any area of the world.
Between the mid 1800s and about 1950, huge amounts of New England did reforest, as farmers abandoned New England farms to move west (and cut down trees or plow up prairie there), but the reforestation is now pretty much done, and forest is now decreasing in New England, as it’s cleared for roads, stores, etc.
Which isn’t to say there isn’t good news:
– the ozone hole is on its way to recovery;
– air quality in the developed world is dramatically better than 40 years ago (smog, particulates and lead are way, way down, most toxics are down too). I have an article from LIFE magazine in the early 1970s about a New Jersey high school football team that had to be taken to the ER because the smog was so bad during their practice. That doesn’t happen in NJ anymore.
–water quality in the developed world is mostly much better, as attested by all the posts about beaches now being safe for swimming. Add famously polluted Boston Harbor (“love that dirty water”) to the list of places now mostly OK for swimming.
– many toxics have been reduced or eliminated from the environment and food. Bald Eagles wouldn’t be here if DDT hadn’t been eliminated. We’re not throwing PCBs or asbestos dust around. A major victory (though still work to do at cleanup) is eliminating lead paint, which perhaps saved generations of children from retardation.
– recycling has made huge progress
– there have been some steps towards cleaner energy and conservation.
There isn’t much scientific evidence for the DDT claim. There weren’t any clear cut studies that showed a significant link between DDT and thinning, especially in predators (Rachel Carson doesn’t count unless you ask the EPA), and DDT isn’t neccesarily a “toxic”. Furthermore, DDT tended to be used in vast quantities. These days, we would likely see a much more streamlined and precision use of DDT.
Regulations preventing nest destruction, hunting, and mass poisoning of the (once considered vermin) bald eagle had far more to do with the resurgence of the species than the scientifically questionable DDT ban.
Only in Europe. Over the short-term, at least.
I disagree, but I don’t want to derail the OP’s perfectly good thread by discussing it here. Let’s move over to Great Debates and discuss it here.
Again, I disagree - but you may mean “toxic” as different from toxic, so let’s discuss it in Great Debates.