If you ask a Minnesota student about the environment, you’re likely to hear about crises, collapses, and catastrophes. The truth is that the environment has been steadily improving and that human life is overwhelmingly better with modern energy, spurred by innovation.
Worry about the Earth’s environment is pervasive among Americans and young people writ large. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 73 percent of Americans said “climate news has made them feel sad about what’s happening to the Earth,” 56 percent felt “anxious about the future,” and 34 percent felt “guilty” that they “are not doing more to address climate change.” A 2021 EdWeek Research Center survey found that 37 percent of teenagers feel anxious when they think about climate change, more than a third feel afraid, and 30 percent feel helpless.
Here are some facts that young people should know about the environment:
- U.S. air quality has improved dramatically since the 1970s. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that concentrations of air pollutants have declined significantly since 1990, with carbon monoxide down 79%, nitrogen dioxide down 62%, sulfur dioxide down 92% (a component to acid rain), and lead down 87% from 2010.
- U.S. waterways are largely improving in condition. The 2018-2019 National Rivers and Streams Assessment, conducted by the EPA, found that compared with the 2013-2014 survey, river and stream miles in “good condition” increased from 25 percent to 35 percent, with a 13-percentage point decline in the number of river and stream miles exceeding EPA benchmarks for illness-causing bacteria. There were no statistically significant changes in nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations nationally — two nutrients prominent in fertilizers. 99 percent of river and stream miles were not found to be acidic.
- Forest coverage in the U.S. has been stable or growing for decades thanks to technological advances in agriculture and forest management. The U.S. Forest Service’s inventory suggests that total forest land has remained stable since 1910, at about 766 million acres in 2012, and 765 million acres in 2017, despite a tripling of human population in the U.S. since then. Proactive wildfire management, through mechanical thinning and prescribed burns, are reducing the intensity of wildfires while enabling sustainable timber harvesting.
- Species are bouncing back from the brink of extinction thanks to voluntary partnerships and stewardship. While only three percent of species listed under the Endangered Species Act have recovered to the point of being removed from the list, voluntary partnerships and stewardship has helped steward species to stable populations and avoid being listed in the first place. Conserving the red-cockaded woodpecker, which lives in pine forests in the southeastern U.S., has led to more than 400 private landowners today conserving 2.5 million acres of habitat under the ESA. Conservation of the greater sage-grouse, in the Western U.S., has seen a total of $1.5 billion in voluntary investments between 2005 and 2020. The Fish and Wildlife Service decided against listing the species under the ESA in 2015 thanks to the success of these efforts.
- Severe weather events, like hurricanes, are showing no trend in frequency. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concludes that “it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases have caused a change in past Atlantic basin hurricane activity that is outside the range of natural variability.” The following figure by Klotzbach et al suggests that the overall trend of continental U.S. landfalling hurricanes has remained flat (or, insignificantly declined) from 1900 to 2017. Property damage has only increased because more people are living in coastal regions; normalizing the trends for population growth shows no significant trend in property damage losses, either.
- Energy sources like coal, natural gas, and oil have lifted billions out of poverty and led to economic prosperity. Global life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900, while about 90 percent of people have access to electricity today compared with 74 percent in 1990. The world can feed more people higher-quality foods with less land area thanks to improvements in farming practices, like synthetic fertilizers. Prosperity gives people the time and means to care about, and do something about, the environment.
Minnesota’s children are taught to fear human impact, but not to appreciate human progress. It’s time to set the record straight.
