“The battle to feed humanity is over. In the course of the 1970s the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions – hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” This was the introduction to one of the most influential books on hunger, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb published in 1968. More than 3 million copies of the book have been sold.

Ehrlich runs down what he calls the “professional optimists”: “They say, for instance, that India in the next eight years can increase its agricultural output to feed some 120 million more people than they cannot after all feed today. To put such fantasy into perspective one need consider only …”, and Ehrlich presented a whole list of reasons why this could not be achieved. And sure enough, it turned out that the figure of 120 million did not hold water. Eight years later India produced enough food for 144 million more people. And since the population had grown by ‘only’ 104 million, this meant there was more food to go round.

From the same quarter Lester Brown, who later became president of the Worldwatch Institute, wrote in 1965 that “the food problem emerging in the less-developing regions may be one of the most nearly insoluble problems facing man over the next few decades.”

In 1992 a large-scale opinion poll Health of the Planet was carried out in many countries. The intention was to investigate people's attitudes to the environment and to what extent fears for the environment only manifest themselves in the rich countries. Many of those consulted expressed fears for the environment. In 16 out of the 24 countries involved in the survey, the environment was named as one of the three most important problems. In the vast majority of nations, both developing and industrialized, more than 50 percent of all people were concerned about problems with environment. But then the interviewees were asked for their opinion about the environment locally, nationally and globally. Their answers can be seen in Figure 10.

Notice that in the vast majority of countries surveyed, the impression of its citizens is that the global environment is in the worst shape, the national environment is a little better, and finally, their local environment is in the best shape of the three, although we can see some tangible, concrete problems in for example the transitional economies of Russia and Poland.

Rachel Carson, named by Time Magazine one of the 100 most influential people of the twentieth century, kick-started popular environmental awareness with her 1962 book Silent Spring. Here she told us how pesticides like DDT were spoiling the Earth, potentially leaving us with a silent spring, devoid of singing birds. In her vision of the future,

The shadow of death, the evil spell, was the onset of the chemical age: “For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.”

We are not overexploiting our renewable resources. Worldwatch Institute tells us that food scarcity is likely to be the first indication of environmental breakdown. However, as we have seen in chapter 9, food will in all likelihood continue to get cheaper and more available, while we will be able to feed still more and more people.

The forests have not been eradicated, and since World War II the global forest coverage has been almost constant. Although rainforests are still being cut at 0.5 percent a year and some countries have chosen to use their forest resources unwisely and shortsightedly, about 80 percent of the original rainforest is still intact.

Water is a plentiful and renewable resource, though it can be scarce, partly because it has not sooner been treated as a limited and valuable resource. In many places this has given rise to very wasteful water practices. Basically, the problem is a question of better management, where water pricing can secure a reasonable and entirely sufficient amount of water for all purposes.

Perhaps more surprising, there do not seem to be any serious problems with the nonrenewable resources, such as energy and raw materials. In general, we have found so much more of these resources that, despite large increases in consumption, the years of supply still remaining have been increasing and not decreasing, for both energy and raw materials.

We often hear that allergies are becoming much more common and that in some way or other this is linked to the fact that the environment is continually deteriorating. But how much do we know about allergies and asthma and their connections to our surroundings? On the whole it can be said that, despite considerable research efforts, we are unsure on several essential points as to what causes allergy and asthma and even whether they actually are becoming more common.

To be allergic means that one is hypersensitive to specific substances (allergens); that one gets a powerful immune reaction even at concentrations which do not bother other people. There are many kinds of allergies: hay fever, asthma, food allergies, nettle rash, anaphylactic shock and eczema. It is estimated that in Europe around 10-30 percent of people have some form of allergy, by far most common being hay fever and nickel allergy. In the US, about 35 percent describe themselves as being allergic, whereas official estimates run at about 18.5 percent. Allergy is the sixth leading cause of chronic disease in the US.

Globally, asthma is one of the most serious allergies. Just under 6 percent or 15 million Americans have it, whereas more than 30 percent or 18 million Britons have asthmatic symptoms. Asthma causes the air passages to narrow. Unlike chronic bronchitis, for example, this narrowing is generally temporary and stops either spontaneously or after treatment.

The idea for this book was born in a bookstore in Los Angeles in February 1997. I was standing leafing through Wired Magazine and read an interview with the American economist Julian Simon, from the University of Maryland. He maintained that much of our traditional knowledge about the environment is quite simply based on preconceptions and poor statistics. Our doomsday conceptions of the environment are not correct. Simon stressed that he only used official statistics, which everyone has access to and can use to check his claims.

I was provoked. I'm an old left-wing Greenpeace member and had for a long time been concerned about environmental questions. At the same time I teach statistics, and it should therefore be easy for me to check Simon's sources. Moreover, I always tell my students how statistics is one of science's best ways to check whether our venerable social beliefs stand up to scrutiny or turn out to be myths. Yet, I had never really questioned my own belief in an ever deteriorating environment – and here was Simon, telling me to put my beliefs under the statistical microscope.

About 71 percent of the Earth is covered by the salt water of the oceans. Lakes constitute scarcely half a percent of the surface of the Earth. Half of these are freshwater lakes, and the rivers in turn constitute only 0.2 percent of the area of freshwater lakes.

Obviously, coastal waters, rivers and lakes are far more important to people than the oceans – primarily because we live much closer to them – but it still illustrates how enormous the oceans are in comparison to the bodies of water we are used to dealing with.

Oil pollution in the oceans

On the subject of ocean pollution, it is traditional to quote Thor Heyerdahl. In 1947 he traversed the Pacific on his Kon Tiki expedition, without catching sight of people, ships or rubbish for weeks. On his second expedition in 1970, on the other hand, when he crossed the Atlantic with his boat the Ra II, he saw “far more oil lumps than fish.” Heyerdahl concluded: “It became clear to all of us that mankind really was in the process of polluting its most vital well-spring, our planet's indispensable filtration plant, the ocean.”

There is a resource which we often take for granted but which increasingly has been touted as a harbinger of future trouble. Water.

Ever more people live on Earth and they use ever more water. Our water consumption has almost quadrupled since 1940. The obvious argument runs that “this cannot go on.” This has caused government agencies to worry that “a threatening water crisis awaits just around the corner.” The UN environmental report GEO 2000 claims that the water shortage constitutes a “full-scale emergency,” where “the world water cycle seems unlikely to be able to cope with the demands that will be made of it in the coming decades. Severe water shortages already hamper development in many parts of the world, and the situation is deteriorating.”

The same basic argument is invoked when WWF states that “freshwater is essential to human health, agriculture, industry, and natural ecosystems, but is now running scarce in many regions of the world.” Population Reports states unequivocally that “freshwater is emerging as one of the most critical natural resource issues facing humanity.” Environmental discussions are replete with buzz words like “water crisis” and “time bomb: water shortages,” and Time magazine summarizes the global water outlook with the title “Wells running dry.”

What kind of state is the world really in?

Optimists proclaim the end of history with the best of all possible worlds at hand, whereas pessimists see a world in decline and find doomsday lurking around the corner. Getting the state of the world right is important because it defines humanity's problems and shows us where our actions are most needed. At the same time, it is also a scorecard for our civilization – have we done well with our abilities, and is this a world we want to leave for our children?

This book is the work of a skeptical environmentalist. Environmentalist, because I – like most others – care for our Earth and care for the future health and wellbeing of its succeeding generations. Skeptical, because I care enough to want us not just to act on the myths of both optimists and pessimists. Instead, we need to use the best available information to join others in the common goal of making a better tomorrow.

Thus, this book attempts to measure the real state of the world. Of course, it is not possible to write a book (or even lots and lots of books for that matter) which measures the entire state of the world. Nor is this my intention. Instead, I wish to gauge the most important characteristics of our state of the world – the fundamentals. And these should be assessed not on myths but on the best available facts. Hence, the real state of the world.

We often worry about all the waste piling up, wondering where it all can go. We feel that the “throwaway society” and its industrial foundation is undermining the environment. This fear is perhaps expressed most clearly by former vice president Al Gore, who is disturbed by “the floodtide of garbage spilling out of our cities and factories.” “As landfills overflow, incinerators foul the air, and neighboring communities and states attempt to dump their overflow problems on us,” we are now finally realizing that we are “running out of ways to dispose of our waste in a manner that keeps it out of either sight or mind.” The problem is that we have assumed “there would always be a hole wide enough and deep enough to take care of all our trash. But like so many other assumptions about the earth's infinite capacity to absorb the impact of human civilization, this one too was wrong.” Equally, Isaac Asimov in his environmental book tells us that “almost all the existing landfills are reaching their maximum capacity, and we are running out of places to put new ones.”

It is true that waste generation does increase with GDP. The richer we get the more garbage we produce. This can be seen from the World Bank’s analysis of waste per capita in relation to income, shown in Figure 113. The question is, of course, whether this is actually a problem. We may believe that garbage production is spiraling out of control and that landfill garbage is piling up to the extent that soon there will be room for no more, but that is simply not the case.

We have experienced fantastic progress in all important areas of human activity. We have never lived longer – life expectancy has more than doubled during the past hundred years – and the improvement has been even more pronounced in the developing world. Infant mortality has fallen drastically. As recently as 1950 one in five infants died in the developing countries, whereas only one in 18 dies today – this is the same proportion as in the industrialized world just 50 years ago. We are taller and healthier and get fewer infections. There are far more of us, not because we have “started breeding like rabbits, but because we have stopped dying like flies.

At the same time we have more to eat. The proportion of people starving in the world has fallen from 35 percent in 1970 to 18 percent today and is expected to fall further to 12 percent by the year 2010. More than 2 billion more people get enough to eat and the average calorie intake in the developing world has increased by 38 percent.

Incomes in both industrialized and developing nations have at the same time tripled over the past 50 years and poverty incidence has decreased. The distribution of wealth between the world's richest and poorest has decreased slightly and it is likely to be reduced dramatically over the century.

A glossary and some basic taxonomy on all of the species used in this book have been provided, as an appendix, for those readers who want to go a step further. The bibliography is also in the appendix and includes all the text references as well as those only in the taxonomy section of the appendix; this should provide a good literature base for further study.

A variety of applications have been shown here, such as:

• Climatic (including sea-level)

• Pollution impact, monitoring, mitigation

• Seismic activity “fingerprints”

• Sediment transport phenomena (tracers)

• Storm activity tracers

• Paleoproductivity indicators

• Classification and characterisation of estuaries

• Freshwater–marine transitions

There are also remarks on several other subjects. Biostratigraphy, which is the most widely known of all microfossil applications, has been excluded as it was felt that it has been already documented in great detail elsewhere; the type of applications discussed in this book represent the future of micropaleontology and will likely be the most often used in the coming decades.

It is clear that there are almost as many applications for microfossils as there are environmental problems. The authors have discussed a few examples derived from their own experience, but new types of problems arise almost daily. The readers of this book should consider these examples as just that – examples – whereas the techniques discussed in the book can be applied to any type of problem that may be encountered in aquatic environments.