As we approach Earth Day this Tuesday, it’s tempting to believe that the world is on the brink of environmental collapse. We are constantly inundated by dire predictions of climate catastrophe and warnings about the planet’s imminent destruction.

But this is misleading. Rather than spiraling into panic, we should take a moment to appreciate the remarkable progress we’ve made in improving the environment, and acknowledge that a key factor is prosperity.

When Earth Day was first marked 55 years ago, the world faced some grim environmental challenges.

The immigrants President Biden welcomed to the U.S. over the last four years were poorer and less educated than their predecessors, according to a new study being released Wednesday.

The number of newcomers who never advanced past high school is now larger than those with a bachelor’s degree, for the first time in more than a decade. And the median annual earnings of new immigrant men dropped to about $32,000 a year, down from more than $50,000 during the Trump administration, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.

Many low-income urban areas in the United States have a pressing need for trees. With about half as much tree canopy coverage as their affluent counterparts have, these areas face a host of risks, such as air pollution, poor water quality, and dangerously high heat.

But government tree-planting programs meant to close this gap can face resistance from the very communities they intend to help. The resistance, research shows, is tied not only to residents’ lack of means to maintain trees but also to distrust. 

The farm bill, which governs nutrition, agriculture, and conservation policy, is up for renewal again, and the negotiations in Congress have hit a familiar road block: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, an anti-hunger program used by millions of low-income Americans. House Republicans and Senate Democrats have introduced competing versions of the bill, and they differ significantly when it comes to the so-called nutrition title, which includes funding for SNAP.

A little shy of my teenage years, I made my first discoveries of the world outside the borders of my own country. The first of these came at Expo 67, a world fair hosted by Canada in French-speaking Montreal, where I experienced my first extended exposure to a language other than the English I had grown up with in the United States.

Each year, the U.S. Congress allocates over $400 million for food assistance to support more than 250,000 residents of Puerto Rico who are able-bodied adults without dependents, and are between the ages of 18 and 54. Notably, this financial assistance does not come with a work obligation. Congress does not apply this approach to any of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or even to Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Some of the country’s savviest economic trend predictors spend all day answering call-center phones. 

Operators at 211 emergency helplines raised alarm bells about a baby formula shortage ahead of the headlines about empty shelves. And they knew that families were defaulting on their mortgages before the subprime collapse in 2008.    

Authors of a new study on social mobility found rural children born in poverty gain higher incomes as adults compared to low-income urban children. But on some measures of income attainment, girls born in low-income households don’t benefit from the same rural advantage as boys.

Factors like community trust, social capital, and the rate of two-parent households help explain more upward social mobility, or positive change in one’s economic status, among rural children born into poverty, according to a 2023 study. 

Sen. Joe Manchin isn’t sharing any regrets about letting his party’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit lapse, even after a historic spike in youth poverty last year.

According to Census data released on Tuesday, the share of Americans under 18 living below the poverty line jumped from 5.2% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022 as the Biden administration’s bulked-up credit expired, the biggest annual increase on record.

Inflation-adjusted income fell and a key poverty measure rose sharply last year as the U.S. economy continued its rocky emergence from a once-in-a-century pandemic, the U.S. Census Bureau reported on Tuesday.