I Bring You Glad Tidings

It's Turtles On the Way Up

A Green sea turtle in Hawaii (Wikimedia Commons)

I've found that nothing makes a boat full of divers or snorkelers happier than seeing a lot of turtles.

Okay, fine. Seeing a whale shark makes them happier. Or a giant sunfish. Or a pod of curious dolphins who let the humans swim with them. But those sightings are rare in most places. Of the creatures that you're reasonably likely to see at most recreational dive sites, turtles are mood booster number one because of their deep, effortless chill. If they don't lift your spirits, I honestly don't know what the hell is wrong with you.

Sea turtles are well outside the normal purview of this blog, so, why am I bringing them up? To spread holiday cheer with the news that their numbers are skyrocketing around the world's oceans.

I learned about the turtle boom from a post at Human Progress post that referenced this paper, in which a team consolidated available data about turtle populations over time. The results are astonishing. Human Progress:

Researchers led by Professor Graeme Hays of Deakin University in Melbourne this year compiled 61 datasets of nesting locations from around the world. They found just five sites where populations were declining. In 28, they were increasing — often dramatically.

Cabo Verde’s Sal Island, off the northwest coast of Africa, the number of loggerhead nests has increased to 35,000 in 2020 from 500 in 2008 — a 70-fold improvement. In Diego Garcia, a British territory in the Indian Ocean leased to a US naval base, a drone survey in 2021 found the highest densities of hawksbills anywhere on the planet.

In the Gulf of Mexico, the Kemp’s ridley — a breadboard-sized reptile that’s considered the most endangered sea turtle — has gone from 702 nests in 1985 to 17,000 in 2022. An analysis in 2023 discovered as many as 150,000 green turtle nests on three uninhabited reefs in the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia, an area that had previously been overlooked.

The news isn't all good. The populations of leatherbacks—soft-shelled dinosaurs that can weigh more than half a ton¹—are declining at some sites, for example. But the overall news about sea turtles leaves nature lovers feeling like Scrooge on Christmas morning, giddy with happiness that it’s not too late.

Of course, it is too late for many species. The passenger pigeon, the thylacine and even bigger Antipodean marsupial predators, Steller’s Sea Cow, mastadons and mammoths, the moa and the dodo: the list of human-caused extinctions is long enough for a shroud, and its last entries haven’t been written yet.

But we’ve learned how to conserve the living things we share the planet with, and we’ve gotten rich enough to care about doing so. So the bison of North America and Europe and most of the whales of the world’s oceans have been brought back from the brink. Elephant populations in both Southern and Eastern Africa are growing. Same with wolves, jaguar, and cougar. And some severely overfished species are coming back; with the Pacific Bluefin tune, for example, “the stock is recovering faster than anticipated, and met the initial rebuilding target, 5 years ahead of the 2024 deadline.”

Yes, there are important caveats. Yes, we need to be doing more conservation. But — and this is the point I want to stress this Christmas Day — yes, there is also good news. There is in fact progress. If you want to learn more about it, follow Human Progress and the Roots of Progress. Read Jesse Ausubel’s revelatory 2015 essay “The Return of Nature,” Hannah Ritchie’s great new book Not the End of the World, my own More from Less, and Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist, which started getting lots of us to think that not everything about our relationship with our planet might be as bad as we’d been led to believe.² Identify the areas that you care about, then spend time looking at their trends at the aptly named website Our World in Data.³ A lot of those trends will be heading in the right direction now.

"Yeah, but global warming is going to overturn all of these gains and kill everything," is not an argument. It's instead an example of pessimism as a reflex and despair as a perverse kind of virtue signaling. It’s also shoddy thinking, as it’s not supported by any good evidence. Human-caused global warming is real and bad and we’re not doing enough to slow it down. But it’s not going to kill everything.

I know, from previous experience sharing good news about us and our planet, that I’m going to get some blowback from this post. After More from Less came out I was honestly surprised at how many people were openly hostile to such news. I was going to skip writing about the turtles, but then I remembered the advice in Jack Gilbert’s blessing of a poem “A Brief for the Defense:”

We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

I’d rather praise all the folk who are helping to bring back the turtles and so much other life on Earth.

Happy Holidays, all.

1. I’ve still never seen one. I think I would dematerialize with happiness if I did.

2. Please don’t @ me about how Lomborg was censured by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty for The Skeptical Environmentalist until you read up about the whole affair. Many Danish scientists called for the DCSD to be disbanded over its muddled handling of Lomborg’s work.

3. Where Hannah Ritchie works!