Getting Better

King's College London's Leif Wenar had a terrific, brief essay in the New York Times last week asking "Is Humanity Getting Better?" (Recalling, naturally, Charles Kenny's Getting Better, Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, and a number of other melioristic perspectives.)

The whole thing is great, with observations focusing on the decline in violence but also including long-run progress on education, health, and technology. This bit struck me:

Our new crises of invention are so challenging because the bads are so tightly bound with the goods. Breaking the world’s slave chains was a moral triumph; breaking the world’s supply chains is not an option. Climate change is a crisis of invention. So many more people, living longer, eating better, traveling more to see the world and one another — is it not poignant that these human goods are engendering a mortal danger?

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Mark Lynas continues his invaluable thread on the facts, controversies, and dangerous rumors surrounding the Zika virus.

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Over 1,400 scientists signed an open letter in support of the American Society of Plant Biologists' position in favor of genetic modification (GM) research and technology deployment.

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This Human Progress piece by Chelsea German and Marian L. Tupy, on why capitalism isn't "starving humanity," references Jesse Ausubel's 2015 article in the Breakthrough Journal on how modernization allows for the return of nature.

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Will Davis at the American Nuclear Society has a fantastic post on where/why nuclear costs have risen over the decades, featuring recent Breakthrough research:

[Breakthrough's Jessica] Lovering tells us that she found two major surprises when researching the global, historic costs of nuclear energy. First was that every country experienced lowering costs in the early years of nuclear plant construction. Second was that South Korea continues to experience reducing costs, even now. She attributes South Korea’s continued cost reduction in part to the focus on standardized (in fact, duplicate) nuclear plants being built at various locations. (This was realized and implemented in the US, in the SNUPPS program and also in Duke Power’s ‘Project 81′ program.)

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Over at Future Tense, Arizona State's Brad Allenby argues that we shouldn't rush to formalize the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch. 'An Ecomodernist Manifesto' coauthor Erle Ellis made a similar argument in an interview last month, suggesting that it might be too early to understand, let alone perfeclty describe, humanity's impact on Earth. Allenby seems to agree with that, and takes the argument a step further:

Indeed, our planet is today increasingly populated by complex adaptive systems that integrate human and natural components. And as humans increasingly integrate with the technology around them, and as the evolution of that technology continues to accelerate, it is questionable that what we will have in 50 or 100 years will still be anything like “anthro.” We are trying to tie geologic time to a windstorm.

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The excellent journal Issues in Science & Technology is featuring a great retrospective by Andy Revkin on his decades as an environmental journalist. Revkin continues to be an indispensible voice in the environmental discourse, and I found it fascinating to read him retrace his path.

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At National Review, Robert Bryce covers the new Save Diablo Canyon campaign being spearheaded by 'Manifesto' coauthor Michael Shellenberger:

To be sure, the clash between the New Guard Greens and the Old Guard involves technology and the belief that technological advances are essential in the effort to help bring people out of poverty. Technological progress is a fundamental tenet of ecomodernism.