If the world is going to hell, why are humans doing so well? (Commentary on Bioscience paper by Scientific American)

In this article we have tried to tease out why while ecosystem services are declining globally, human well-being is increasing. Here is the abstract for the paper "Environmentalists have argued that ecological degradation will lead to declines in the well-being of people dependent on ecosystem services. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment paradoxically found that human well-being has increased despite large global declines in most ecosystem services. We assess four explanations of these divergent trends: (1) We have measured well-being incorrectly; (2) well-being is dependent on food services, which are increasing, and not on other services that are declining; (3) technology has decoupled well-being from nature; (4) time lags may lead to future declines in well-being. Our findings discount the first hypothesis, but elements of the remaining three appear plausible. Although ecologists have convincingly documented ecological decline, science does not adequately understand the implications of this decline for human well-being. Untangling how human well-being has increased as ecosystem conditions decline is critical to guiding future management of ecosystem services; we propose four research areas to help achieve this goal."

See Scientific American for interesting commentary http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=if-the-world-is-going-to-hell-why-a-2010-09-01