“There is 2.24 million more square kilometers of forestland than 35 years ago”
How can this be true when our rate of deforestation is accelerating? The state of deforestation is nothing to celebrate, it’s horrific as far as I understand it.
“By most metrics we’re better off than the 90’s”
Except for economic metrics and people’s material well being??
According to this link the rate of deforestation is decreasing. But still, they say there is less forest now than there was in 1990.
"Since 1990, it is estimated that 420 million hectares of forest have been lost through conversion to other land uses, although the rate of deforestation has decreased over the past three decades.
Between 2015 and 2020, the rate of deforestation was estimated at 10 million hectares per year, down from 16 million hectares per year in the 1990s. The area of primary forest worldwide has decreased by over 80 million hectares since 1990."
Based on our current understanding of fungally dominated soils, restoring temperate forests will do far more per acre for atmospheric carbon levels than restoring the same acreage of tropical rainforest.
Which we also need to do soon because the longer you wait, the wider the band around the Tropics where fungally dominated ecosystems cannot thrive.
Not that we shouldn't have people working to slow tropical deforestation, but we can't and shouldn't put all our eggs in that basket.
Actually I just didn't share data because I forgot the name of the author who has best spoken to this critique, but I dug him up and it's Jason Hickel. He responded directly to Steven Pinker's rosy optimism about the world, in particular pointing out that our bar for what is extreme poverty is a made up number that is too low. If you use a more reasonable measure for extreme poverty, the situation looks a little different. It has improved in some areas and expanded in others. Notably, people like Pinker use their argument to say basically that capitalism is good. But Hickel points out that most of the gains were in China, where the economic system that led to all this growth was a very mixed system of capitalism combined with heavy state control. So under no circumstances can we conclude that free market capitalism is the main driver of reductions in extreme poverty.
India, Indonesia, Vietnam and other have also seen massive reduction in extreme poverty after adapting a capitalistic market system. All of them are different socially and politically but the free market impact is real.
Replying to myself since I can no longer edit, but with so many questions I finally dug up the author who I was trying to think of as a source to go against this kind of rosy picture of the status quo. It's Jason Hickel and he has written a critique of Steven Pinker's optimism.
Where Pinker looks at some arbitrarily defined numbers to decide that extreme poverty has gone down, and capitalism is the reason, Hickel criticizes those poverty numbers for being artificially low due to a poor selection of the poverty line, and points out that most of the reduction in poverty happened in china, where the system Steven Pinker argues for is not being used.
Finally anyone who is paying attention to the economics of people in just the USA for example must know that real wages in the USA have been stagnant for the average person since 1980, while living costs continue to rise. So the average person is NOT better off than they were in the 1990's, they are actually worse off.
People like Bill Gates LOVE Steve Pinker because Pinker provides an excuse to say the status quo is fine and everything is great. But in reality time is not a linear path towards nirvana, and real people are currently stuck working Uber and Door Dash to try to survive while in the 1990's they could have had a steady job. I'm struck by this notion that in the 1990's the janitorial staff at Apple were Apple employees who got treated with respect, but now they are contractors working for a company Apple has hired. So things are great for the engineers at Apple but in the 90's success for those people also meant success for the janitors. But we have managed to break that off so those people no longer get to see the gains that others see. We are stratifying the world more.
How can this be true when our rate of deforestation is accelerating? The state of deforestation is nothing to celebrate, it’s horrific as far as I understand it.
“By most metrics we’re better off than the 90’s”
Except for economic metrics and people’s material well being??
This sounds like Steven Pinker stuff.