How on earth can you be optimistic?

People ask me that. After all, the environment is crumbling. So they tell me. The planet is heating up like a teapot. We’re running out of...you name it. The poor grow more wretched. Discrimination abounds. War haunts us. Millions have no healthcare.

Surely, they tell me, my lenses cannot be so rose-colored that I cannot see these horrendous realities.

If they would listen, I would take stock for them.

I was born in 1942. When I was a kid most of our rivers ran green with gunk. Today most are clean and full of fish. When I was a kid the air of most cities reeked of pollution from factories. If you drove through cities like Gary, Indiana and Pittsburgh you could barely see the buildings through the smog. Cars spewed grey fog, trucks black fog. Walk or work in the city and you would sport a black fringed collar by noon. Today, our air is far far cleaner. And growing cleaner by the decade.

When I was a kid the poor were crammed into squalid tenements. With rats. And the fear of fire. And no air conditioners. And no washing machines or dryers. No cars. Little or no unemployment benefits. They would have swapped places with the poor of today and thought they’d gone to heaven.