Humans love to complain. They complain about doing too much work or having to pay too much. It isn't surprising to hear that humans are complaining again. This time, however, the matter is much larger: life. We humans claim that our lives our getting worse, that we are up to our heads in pollution, and that the world is slowly dying.

It's easy to see where we get this information. We are told these statistics everyday about how we'll soon be out of trees or that the pollution we generate is getting substantially worse. Most of these claims, however, are made just to scare us.

That's right. I said that these people scare us into believing that the world will soon be coming to an end. Why, you ask? Because it's all to help their cause. Let's think about this: all of these commercials (whether for pollution or forestry) are made soley to produce money. If these people told us that our forests are fine, we won't donate any money to that particular cause. If they tell us otherwise, we break out our wallets like there is a sale at Old Navy.

So, what are the real facts? Well, I'm glad to tell you that many of the statistics used for these commercials are nearly completely false. Let's tackle pollutionn first. Everyone knows the pictures of the cities with the cloud of smog surrounding them. Lately, the government has been shelling out big bucks to lower the pollution level. The infamous Exxon Mobil, the company that has settled many lawsuits pertaining to pollution, is now number 86 of the top 100 polluting energy companies (1 being the highest)(www.nrdc.org). That improvement is one of the reasons that America is a cleaner place.

On to forests. Everybody hears that the trees in this country are slowly diminishing. That really is not the case at all. In fact, we have more trees now than we did in 1920. In 1920, there were 735 million acres of forests, and today there are 749 million acres of forests (Dep. of Agriculture). How can this be? Well, when we became anxious about the possibility of wiping out the forests, we started planted more trees than we cut. It makes sense that 7% of those trees are planted by man. However, trees are trees, and we have plenty of them.

Life is fantastic, even though everyone thinks that it isn't. They always claim that they never have enough time to do anything. This is not true. Let's think back to the early 1900's. The men would work back-breaking hours on the farms while the women would do equally as much work at home. Today, though, we have cars to take us to work. Once we are there, we can ride an elevator to our floor. When in the office, a computer can do things that would normally take even more work. So, why are they complaing?

It turns out that it isn't that these people have less time; it's just that they have more things that they can do. With more opportunity, they feel like they can't possibly do all of it, thus making it seem like there is less time to do anything.

So, as you can see, life is not as bad as anybody says. We have more time to do things, and, well, we can breath easier. Frankly, it's just an easier time to live in. It's a wonderful life, andthat's definitely something to tip your hat at.