Indeed, looking back through history there's no shortage of reasons for pessimism - Mother Nature certainly left a lot of work for us to do ourselves. But if you're claiming that there isn't also plenty of reasons in history for optimism, you should maybe consider looking through a different lens.
At the risk of sounding glib, this style of thinking sounds a bit too much like the proverbial "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!" I mean seriously, while lots of people are drawing attention to these old issues with a modern twist, has anything really been tried to fix them? Perhaps it's going to take some time to get our act together at the political level, but is there anything stopping communities like this from putting on our thinking caps and seeing if we can come up with some new and useful ideas?
At the risk of sounding glib, this style of thinking sounds a bit too much like the proverbial "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!" I mean seriously, while lots of people are drawing attention to these old issues with a modern twist, has anything really been tried to fix them? Perhaps it's going to take some time to get our act together at the political level, but is there anything stopping communities like this from putting on our thinking caps and seeing if we can come up with some new and useful ideas?