Complete opposite in fact!

There is a global meeting for coral reef researchers held every four years, when I was an undergrad headed towards this field I went to the 2012 meeting. It was very depressing, all gloom and doom.

But the 2016 meeting was totally inspiring, there's so much being done and so much potential for intervention, now that we've moved the field past worrying about whether or not we might possibly achieve the RCP 2.6 scenario.

One plenary talk in particular talked about the concept of 'peak consumption' and the examples we've seen through the developed work already.

I'd suggest that your pessimism towards politics and the state of the world is badly outdated and no longer useful.

10 years ago when we didn't have a 24/7 media cycle telling us how awful everything is every second of the day, there might have been some percentage of the public who wasn't aware of those issues.

Today the pendulum has completely swung the other way, and what we really need are people who are able to temper that pessimism and inform the public that there are 'good news' stories happening all across the world and there is a realistic path forward.