Our Ecological Report Card

When you’ve got a goal in mind – say, for instance, the restoration of your planet’s life-support system – somebody’s gotta drop you a report card from time to time. Looks like the United Nations Environment Programme is handing them out this year, as they’ve compiled a TON of data sets from various environmental indicators and churned out several excellent infographics, like the one posted below.

If you need to zoom-in for a closer look, go here.

I won’t try to pick apart the data – you can see the results for yourself – but I can’t help but notice that while it seems our ozone troubles may be behind us (thanks, Montreal Protocol!), we’re lagging hard in the forests, oceans and atmosphere departments. Progress in legislation and renewable energy development is moving along swimmingly, evidently, which triggers this question: if we’re doing so well in those departments, why are the Himalayas losing snowpack while a trash “continent” bobs around in the Pacific?

But, hey, you might say: the effects of current legislation won’t be felt in ecological terms for decades to come, and didn’t the Copenhagen folks agree on that REDD thing??

Yeah, they did. I think. But the point is that I don’t think we should be too quick to pat ourselves on the back for our stellar achievements in “governance” when deforestation rates, carbon emission rates and ocean acidification rates are climbing faster than my blood pressure when that new Lady Gaga song comes on.

But enough nitpicking. I really intended this post to highlight the power of visualizations (like the one above) to tell stories about otherwise non-human friendly datasets. It’s a cool field that’s grabbed my interest of late, especially for use in telling data-driven stories. With the natural world changing rapidly in response to our activities, I think data is what we’ll be swimming in in the 2010’s. Pictures beat numbers anyday, in my opinion, so I’m planning on making a few of my own visualizations in the near future. Stay tuned for those.

So there’s our report card. Let’s see if we can pull the move I pioneered in grade school and intercept it from the mailman before physics and chemistry have a look and send us to bed with no dinner and a bad case of climate change.