I began my climate activist journey after Hurricane Harvey decimated my hometown of Houston, Texas. At the time, I was working at a social services agency and witnessed firsthand the devastation this disaster wrought on our community, and more specifically on already marginalized groups — Black and brown and low-income families — in our community. The relationship between social justice and climate change became crystal clear to me, as did the complex history of a small percent of humanity, and our outsized impact in causing the climate crisis.
I decided I wanted to study environmental sociology and earth science in college, and got involved in climate education and grassroots organizing. I even ended up taking my school to court over its fossil fuel investments.
But all of this work that I was so passionate about was draining me. I felt like I was swimming against the tide, exerting myself to a point where passion waned and depression sank in.
On my hours-long scroll through social media one day, I saw a friend post about “Good News Friday” — positive climate stories that weren’t getting attention in the media. Hooked by the idea that organizers somewhere were celebrating the fruits of their hard labor, I latched on.
Nearly three years later, I maintain a weekly newsletter that collects positive environmental stories and shares them with a community of more than 60,000 people. This exercise has helped me re-cultivate my passions for activism and improve my mental wellbeing overall.
That work became the seed for my new book Climate Optimism: Celebrating Systemic Change Around the World. The result of those three years of data collection, the book provides insight into what I have found to be the most promising systemic solutions to the most harrowing systemic crisis of our time.
“It’s a tough time to be alive,” said someone, probably, on Twitter fifteen minutes ago; and someone in March of 2020, just as COVID-19 was breaking out worldwide; not to mention someone living through the Black Plague, recording their thoughts on stretched goat skin.
Whenever I find myself lamenting the abysmal state of our world, I try to picture what my life would look like if I was born eighty-eight years earlier, in 1930. I would be born into the Great Depression, perhaps in a shantytown alongside other destitute families. Sustainability is an integral part of the culture, but by way of necessity and frugality rather than stewardship. As a Brown person, life is even more difficult, with the continuous threat of racial violence and deportation. Just as things start to pick up, they head downward.
At the age of ten, war is on the horizon. My undeveloped brain cannot wrap my head around why America would be threatened by countries so far away, but I acknowledge that perhaps President Roosevelt knows something I don’t. So I bid my father goodbye, as he is recruited for the draft. In 1941, the Second World War breaks out. Talk about tough luck.
And what if I was born in the Stone Age—forced to migrate from temporary home to temporary home in a frigid ice-age environment? Sounds horrid. Of course, I’m comparing this to the only reality I know. As I write this, I’m sitting in my ergonomic chair with my double monitor and Spotify “Music for Writing” playlist humming in the background, so it is no wonder I’d prefer my comfortable reality to that of someone living in 10,000 BC. This comparison seems like an easy exercise. And yet, when we look at the rhetoric surrounding us, few people find hope in how far humanity has come.
Instead, we tend to reflect on the “good old times,” an invocation to a bygone, imprecise time when things were presumably easier. Positive memory bias, also known as rose-tinted glasses, engulfs our personal and collective memories, making the past seem inherently better than the present—especially in times of stress.
This bias makes it easier to amplify any negatives we face in the present, while minimizing the positives. It’s easier to claim that the world is getting worse and that humans are getting worse with it. And it’s even easier to do so on social media, where this short-sighted negativity spreads like wildfire.
Perhaps you infrequently put on a pair of rose-tinted glasses, preferring to stick with polarized UV-protected lenses instead. These safeguard you from the false belief that things in the past were necessarily better than those of the present and allow you to fix your focus on the here and now. But you still might be vulnerable to the idea that the here and now is fundamentally different and unique than any other time in history—the unprecedented bias.
In the last few years, the term “unprecedented” has become a bread-and-butter staple in conversations—rising through the dictionary ranks for the title of People’s Choice 2020 Word of the Year by Dictionary.com. And in 2020, our collective vernacular deployed the word in attempts to explain everything from the pandemic to police brutality to attacks on the Capitol building of the largest democracy in the world. Despite the word’s connotation implying a once-in-a- blue-moon use case, it is a term that has never gone out of style.
Usage of the word was first documented in 1795 and has been increasing ever since, according to an analysis done with a Google-powered textual analysis tool. Things have always seemed insurmountable, once-in-a-lifetime, and extraordinary.
Simply understanding how humanity has collectively experienced and interpreted events of our past helps us to better understand the ostensibly unassailable challenges of our present. And with knowledge of where we have been, we can better understand how we have improved and how we can use learnings from our past to shape our future.
Although many would argue that it is not useful to understand suffering and current events through relativism, I think doing so is underutilized and much needed in today’s day and age—when nihilism stemming from fear of the state of our world is rampant and rhetoric around the end of times is equally pervasive.
To overcome the human tendency of embellishing the past and viewing the present as exceptional, it is helpful to look at history through a statistician’s lens.
In my lifetime, and likely yours, much of the world has experienced a relatively constant era of growth under the liberal world order and globalization. Despite the flaws of globalization, a non-exhaustive list of which includes the deterioration of environmental and labor rights, widened inequality gaps, and the creation of the outrageous billionaire class, it has indisputably contributed to a decrease in poverty, increase in access to goods and services, and lifesaving and changing innovations.
◊ Extreme Poverty: The percentage of people worldwide who live in extreme poverty shrank from around 37 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015.
◊ Life Expectancy: Life expectancy has increased by more than six years between 2000 and 2019—from 66.8 years in 2000 to 73.4 years in 2019.
◊ Literacy Rates: In the last sixty-five years, the global literacy rate has increased from 42 percent in 1960 to 86 percent in 2015.
◊ Infant Mortality Rate: Globally, the infant mortality rate has decreased from an estimated rate of sixty-five deaths per thousand live births in 1990 to twenty-nine deaths per thousand live births in 2018.
◊ Better Access to Water: Across Low- and Middle- Income Countries (LMICs), access to improved water overall increased between 2000 and 2017. For piped water, the safest water facility type, access increased from 40.0 percent to 50.3 percent. Access to sewer or septic sanitation and improved sanitation overall also increased across all LMICs during the study period. For sewer or septic sanitation, access was 46·3 percent in 2017, compared with 28.7 percent in 2000.
◊ Access to Electricity: In 1990, around 71 percent of the world’s population had access to electricity; this has increased to 87 percent in 2016.
◊ Death Rates from Air Pollution: Since 1990, global death rates from air pollution have nearly halved.
◊ Democratic Governance: At the end of 2017, 96 out of 167 countries with populations of at least 500,000 (57 percent) were democracies of some kind, and only 21 (13 percent) were autocracies. The remaining 28 percent were pseudo-democracies with elements of both democracies and authoritarian states. The share of democracies has been on an upward trend and is just shy of its post–World War II record (58 percent).
The Legatum Prosperity Index, which tracks prosperity across the globe through open economies, empowered people, and inclusive societies is a testament to this. 2019 marked the highest level of global prosperity ever. Even during a global pandemic, in the following years of 2020 and 2021, Global Prosperity levels plateaued. The connection between these metrics of prosperity and globalization is apparent. Globalization necessitates exchanging ideas, goods, and services that contribute to open economies, more empowered people, and societies with a greater acceptance and tolerance.
To be clear, the same prosperity opportunities have not been accrued to everyone equally. The people and descendants of people Western civilizations like the United States were built on—Indigenous peoples, Enslaved peoples, and other minority communities—have been continually oppressed under systems disguised as justice (e.g., the criminal justice system). Likewise, communities in the Global South have been continually exploited under systems disguised as aid (e.g., much of the international aid system). The lasting impacts of these systemic injustices are apparent in the unabating levels of income inequality. Even amid the rife inequalities that plague our world, when we look at the statistics and growth trends (which we will get into soon), it is clear that by many accounts, things are better than they ever have been.
Perhaps it might be more accurate if we rephrase it to, “It’s a tough time to be optimistic.” But if we look at the statistics on the climate crisis, it is also clear that this behemoth problem threatens to upend this era of prosperity in a way that nothing has ever done before. By some estimates, climate change could spur the greatest refugee crisis in history—with an estimate of 25 billion people being displaced by climate-related events in the next three decades; incite one of the biggest economic downfalls—costing the world $178 trillion over the next fifty years; and cause a large-scale public health crisis— with medical professionals from across the world coming together to say that climate change might be the biggest threat to public health.
The Department of Defense has called climate change a great “threat multiplier” due to its capacity to weave into and amplify every single crisis, making each one worse while simultaneously getting worse itself. This phenomenon should make us worried about the state of our planet, but we cannot allow it to debilitate us. Because of the magnitude of the threat climate change poses to humanity, my message of climate optimism is occasionally met with disdain and criticism.
I get it. It is hard to be optimistic when it feels like the world is falling apart, being ripped open at the seams by the very people who have promised to protect it. Let me be clear: climate optimism is not the expectation of a salvaged planet. Instead, it is the proclamation of hope for a healthier and more just planet and the pursuit of actions aligned with what needs to be done to get there.
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