One of the basic necessities for human welfare is, of course, life itself. Life expectancy is therefore an essential aspect of any welfare measure. However, living longer does not necessarily mean living better, if that extra time is simply spent suffering more. It is therefore also important to consider whether we live healthier lives and spend less time being ill.

The main point of this chapter is to show how our lives and our health have improved dramatically over the past couple of hundred years. We live longer, and we are more healthy. This is one of the great miracles of our civilization.

Life expectancy

Until around the year 1400, human life expectancy was amazingly short – a newborn child could on average only expect to live 20–30 years. This was mainly due to the fact that infant mortality was incredibly high. Only every other child survived beyond its fifth birthday.

For the early part of human history we have little or no precise statistics to rely on, so the figures must be based on the examination of skeletons and on mathematical population growth models.

We lose something in the region of 40,000 species every year, 109 a day. One species will be extinct before you have finished reading this chapter.

This was what we were told 22 years ago when Norman Myers first published his book The Sinking Ark in 1979. The message was relayed to the world at large in the official US environment report Global 2000. After this it became part of our shared consciousness: Former US vice-president Al Gore repeats the figure of 40,000 species in his Earth in the Balance, the popular science magazine Discover tells us that half the species we know today will be extinct within the next 100 years, and the famous Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson points out that we are losing between 27,000 and 100,000 species a year. Not to be outdone, professor Paul Ehrlich even estimated in 1981 that we lose some 250,000 species every year, with half of the Earth's species gone by the year 2000 and all gone by 2010–25.

Although these assertions of massive extinction of species have been repeated everywhere you look, they simply do not equate with the available evidence.

In this chapter we shall look at the state of human welfare. First, of course, we have to define what the term implies. Welfare is obviously not a discussion confined to money, but one about the whole human's potential to develop.

According to the UN, “the real objective of development should be to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives. Though this may appear to be a simple truth, it is often forgotten in the immediate concern with the accumulation of commodities and wealth.” But how do we measure human welfare? There are many ways of investigating to what extent mankind has been given better surroundings in which their lives can unfold.

The UN introduced the so-called Human Development Index for this very purpose. The index attempts to elucidate what kind of surroundings people have in which to make a good life for themselves. The intention is to measure how long people can expect to live, how much knowledge they can acquire, and how high a living standard they can achieve. In practical terms it measures life expectancy, the proportion of illiterates, school attendance in years, and income. The World Bank endeavors in a similar way to evaluate people’s quality of life on the basis of life expectancy, malnutrition, access to clean water and sanitation, illiteracy and energy consumption

The concern about running out of resources applies not only to energy but also to the vast number of other non-renewable resources that we use today. And the arguments are eerily similar to the arguments in the chapter on energy.

Actually, we have always worried about running out of resources. In antiquity grave concerns were voiced about running out of copper and tin. And the best-seller Limits to Growth from 1972 picked up on the old worry, claiming that we would run out of most resources. Gold would run out in 1981, silver and mercury in 1985, and zinc in 1990. But, of course, this hasn't happened yet.

The pessimists bet on resources running out – and lost

Although economists have long acknowledged that the fear of running out of resources is erroneous, it had an almost magical grip on intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s. Even today most discussions seem to be played out against a backdrop of arguments pointing back to the logic of Limits to Growth.

Frustrated with the incessant claims that the Earth would run out of oil, food and raw materials, the economist Julian Simon in 1980 challenged the established beliefs with a bet. He offered to bet $10,000 that any given raw material – to be picked by his opponents – would have dropped in price at least one year later.

Acid rain was the great horror of the 1980s. We saw the sick and dying trees on the TV news and were told that acid rain was killing our forests. Looking at publications from the 1980s one will see that they did not spare their readers when it came to descriptions. Acid rain was the “invisible plague” which was creating an “ecological Hiroshima.” The UN Brundtland report stated flat out that “in Europe, acid precipitation kills forests.” Several present-day ecology books repeat the charge.

A popular book published in 1989 with the title Acid Rain: Threats to Life told us:

Throughout this book I have tried to present all the facts, to give us a rounded feel of the real state of the world, and I have tried to compare and contrast it to our current understanding, stemming from the recurrent incantations of the Litany. In this concluding chapter I want to sum up the problems and consequences of our biased view of the world. However, I will also allow myself to be more free to point out what I think are the great remaining challenges for humanity.

On the global level, it seems obvious to me that the major problems remain with hunger and poverty. Although we have witnessed great improvements both in feeding ever more people, ever better, and bringing ever more people out of poverty, and although these positive trends are likely to continue into the future, there still remain some 800 million hungry people and some 1.2 billion poor people in this world. In terms of securing a long-term improvement of the environmental quality of the developing world, securing growth so as to lift these people out of hunger and poverty is of the utmost importance, since our historical experience tells us that only when we are sufficiently rich can we start to think about, worry about and deal with environmental problems.

In Part II we saw that by and large all measurable indicators of human welfare show improvement. Indeed, it is difficult to contest these indicators. But maybe we are living on borrowed time.

This is the typical objection we hear from organizations such as Worldwatch Institute:

In other words, it may be true that things have been going well. But actually, things have been going too well. This development cannot continue. The natural foundations will collapse. With an oft-repeated metaphor, we are told: “Just as a continuously growing cancer eventually destroys its life-support systems by destroying its host, a continuously expanding global economy is slowly destroying its host – the Earth's ecosystem.”

Professor Ehrlich reiterates the same basic idea: economists are fond of pointing out that GDP and food availability per capita grow and grow. “But there is a fatal flaw in this argument: it is roughly equivalent to bragging about one’s ability to write a bigger check each month, while paying no attention to the balance in the account.”

When we think of air pollution, what immediately comes to mind is smoke and car exhaust fumes – outdoor pollution. But although this is dangerous, at a global level indoor pollution actually poses a far greater health risk. The latest estimate from WHO, as depicted in Figure 100, shows that indoor air pollution costs about 14 times more deaths than outdoor air pollution. Moreover, both in developing and developed urban areas, the death toll from it is far greater. In total, indoor air pollution is estimated to cost 2.8 million lives each year.

Indoor air pollution in the developing world

Indoor pollution is especially a problem in the Third World. Here, about 3.5 billion people – more than half the population of the globe – depend on traditional fuels such as firewood, charcoal, dried dung and agricultural wastes to cook and heat their homes. These fuels all develop far more soot, particles, carbon monoxide and toxic chemicals than more modern fuels such as gas and kerosene.

When particles and carbon monoxide in particular are released in large quantities in small homes, they subject the residents to far higher contamination levels than they would meet in even the most highly polluted city.

We will soon run out of oil. Again.

As E magazine wrote in July 2000:

We have heard it all before. And we probably haven't heard it for the last time. But the argument seems not to be based on the facts. There are good reasons to believe that we will not have dramatic price increases, and that we will actually be able to handle our future energy needs.

We are a civilization built on energy

Each and every one of our actions demands energy. Our own body supplies energy equivalent to a 100 watt bulb, but already early in history man attempted to gain control over more energy, primarily through the use of animals and slaves. Not long after we also learned through technical prowess to use nature's energy: sails for ships as well as wind and water mills. Nevertheless, it was only with Watts’ invention of the steam engine in 1769 that it became possible for man to produce large amounts of energy on demand.

Climate change and especially global warming has become the overriding environmental concern since the 1990s. Most discussions about the environment end up pointing out that, despite all other indicators that may show us doing better and better, we still have to change our current lifestyle dramatically because our way of life is now changing the climate and causing global warming.

In the words of the President's Council on Sustainable Development: “The risk of accelerated climate change in the next century has emerged as one of the most important issues we will face as we seek to achieve our sustainable development goals.” In their 2000 edition, Worldwatch Institute concludes that stabilizing the climate along with stabilizing the population growth are the two “overriding challenges facing our global civilization as the new century begins.” Likewise, UNDP sees global warming as one of the two crises that nudge humanity ever closer to “the outer limits of what earth can stand.” Global warming is, according to former President Clinton, “one of the two or three major issues facing the world over the next 30 years.” Head of the George W. Bush EPA, Christine Todd Whitman, has called global warming “one of the greatest environmental challenges we face, if not the greatest.” And the opening remark on their homepage proclaims that “Greenpeace has identified global climate change as one of the greatest threats to the planet.”