Don't be seduced by doomsday thinking.Earth Day began in 1970 as a call to arms against air and water pollution, species extinction, overpopulation, poverty, and other pressing human and environmental issues, the propensity has been to ring the alarm bells continuously to prevent public complacency, as if no progress has been made in 47 years.In fact, if you believe the hype of apocalyptic popularizers you might conclude that climate change, runaway overpopulation, poverty, hunger, and disease will ruin the Earth and leave humanity's only hope for survival on Mars.It's easy to think this way, given that newspapers, books, television shows and documentary films are built around drama and pessimistic thinking, from Al Gore's"Inconvenient Truth" toLeonardo DiCaprio's "Before The Flood."Even Bill Nye's new series on Netflix, which begins on Earth Day, is called "Bill Nye Saves The World." Bill is a good friend and I support his work.But does the whole world need saving'In point of fact, as one observer noted in 2016: "We're fortunate to be living in the most peaceful, most prosperous, most progressive era in human history. It's been decades since the last war between major powers. More people live in democracies. We're wealthier and healthier and better educated, with a global economy that has lifted up more than a billion people from extreme poverty."That observer was President Barack Obama, who added later that year that genetic engineering is leading to cures for diseases that have plagued humanity for centuries, that a young girl in a remote village with a smart phone has access to the entirety of human knowledge, and that those born today will be healthier, live longer and have more opportunities than anyone in history.There is no period in history when it would have been better to be alive than today.The air and water in our cities is the cleanest it's been in centuries. People in the West have so much food that for the first time in human history obesity has become an epidemic problem. Although the world's population is still increasing, the rate of growth is decreasing and the United Nations predicts that it will peak by 2050 and decline below where it is today by 2100.The wealthiest nations with the greatest food security have the lowest fertility rates, while the most food insecure countries have the highest fertility rates. This means once African nations make the transition from developing to developed countries'through democratic governance, free trade, access to birth control, and especially the education and economic empowerment of women'population and poverty will be solved there.The end of poverty' Yes.According to the economist Max Roser, in 1820 between 84 percent and 94 percent of the world's people lived in poverty or extreme poverty (defined by the UN as earning less than $2.50 a day and $1.25 a day respectively, in 2015 dollars). By 1981 the percentage had dropped to 52%, and by 2010 it was at slightly less than 20%.But the rate of poverty decline is accelerating, and at the current rate it will reach zero by around 2035. We will then enter the era of post-scarcity economics, sometimes called Trekonomics, after the science fictional world of Star Trek where everyone has all their basic needs met.This could also happen in our lifetime. According to the World Bank, the per capita GDP for the entire world nearly doubled between 2000 and 2015, from $5448 to $10,000. That is 17 times higher than in 1950 and 100 times higher than the way people lived for the first 99,000 years of our existence as a species, when economists estimate that the annual average income per person was the equivalent of $100 (all in 2015 U.S. dollars).The UC Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong has computed that the 19th century Industrial Revolution produced a 200 percent increase in per capita income over the previous century, the 20th century generated an 800 percent increase over the 19th, and that the 21st century could witness a 1600 percent increase over the 20th.If this happens it will mean that people this century will experience more wealth and prosperity than in all previous centuries combined. Inconceivable.What all this data tells us is that the world doesn't need saving. We are going to be okay. Therefore, we should follow the trend lines, not the headlines, and acknowledge the work that those first Earth Day celebrants began nearly half a century ago.We should be grateful for the blessings we have today, optimistic about the future, and continue to work toward a better tomorrow because none of this progress was inevitable. It was the result of people taking action to solve our most pressing problems. It is the reason our species was given the label sapiens. We are wise.Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. He is the author of "Why Darwin Matters," "The Believing Brain" and "The Moral Arc." His next book is"Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for Immortality, the Afterlife, and Utopia."SEE ALSO:Why now is the best time in human history to be an entrepreneurJoin the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: 8 scary facts about a world with 11 billion people
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