International Journal of Epidemiology 2002;31:1077
© International Epidemiological Association 2002
Book Review |
The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Bjørn Lomborg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 515, £47.50 (HB) ISBN: 0-521-80447-7; £17.95 (PB) ISBN: 0-521-01068-3.
According to Bjørn Lomborg’s book The Skeptical Environmentalist, because of ‘the Litany’, delivered by the media, politicians, and ‘in conversations at work and at the kitchen table’, we all believe that the environment is in bad shape, when in fact we live longer, healthier, and better than ever before, and the environment is, and will be, just fine. Lomborg presents himself as a former member of Greenpeace who has become enlightened about the real, more upbeat state of the world through the work of the late economist Julian Simon and his own re-analysis of official data. An Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, Lomborg has published on game theory and computer simulations but admits to having no environmental expertise. Individuals with such expertise have written detailed critiques of the substance of the book.1–5 As these reviewers note, Lomborg’s spin on global environmental issues is flawed by apparent limitations in the depth of the author’s understanding of them. Although he has done an impressive survey it is undermined by omissions, a failure to cite leading authority, and dubious analyses. Relative superficiality is not uncommon in books written for a general audience, particularly ones that seek to cover so much information, but in this instance the author announced that his book delivers ‘the best possible and least myth-based knowledge’ (supported by an impressive-looking 2930 endnotes and more than 70 pages of references); a claim that was eagerly accepted by the press6 (neatly refuting Lomborg’s position that the media spout environmentalist propaganda, by the way). What is problematic about The Skeptical Environmentalist is the way Lomborg so misrepresents current environmental science and policy, because the book is more of a critique of a purported movement (expressed in ‘the Litany‘) than it is the forward-looking, original environmental policy analysis it pretends to be.
Although presented as a kind of green manifesto, ‘the Litany’ is expressly ‘not due to primary research in the environmental field; this generally appears to be professionally competent and well balanced’. Rather, it is a strawman that comes from diverse sources including public opinion polls, decades-old publications such as Silent Spring,7 advocacy group websites, and popular magazines. Particular scrutiny is accorded work by Lester Brown, former editor of the Worldwatch Institute’s annual publication The State of the World,8 and Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University. Often, Lomborg resorts to ‘many people’ and similar constructions in his quest to set up environmentalist dogma and then prove it wrong. He seems driven by a belief that environmentalists rule the world or have exclusive access to those who do. But one need only consider the environmental and energy policies of the sitting US president and vice president to realize that there must be more than one environmental litany going around. Similarly, although Lomborg has suggestions about how a world not in the grips of the Litany should be run (his answer, for the most part: let the market and global economic development do it), he might be interested to know that some of his recommended approaches have been tried, with varying degrees of success. For example, he says, ‘As regards pesticides, we should ... ask how much damage they actually do [to health] and how much it would cost to avoid their use.’ In the US such a risk-balancing process has been part of the law for decades; recent amendments supported by agriculture and industry were needed to make the law more protective of health.
Because his stated preference is to look at global trends and evaluate changes over time on scales of decades or centuries, the ‘truth’ Lomborg reveals is often rosier than that discerned in smaller scale and more complex analyses of more practical value (e.g. ‘A lot still needs to be done to improve conditions in Africa, not only in the context of AIDS prevention but also for food availability and economic production.... But the important thing is to stress that more than 85 percent of all the world’s inhabitants can expect to live for at least 60 years—more than twice as long as people were expected to live on average just a hundred years ago.’). In this way, Lomborg often presents matters no one actually disputes as if they were controversial, but misses related, longer-term, global issues (e.g. food is cheaper and more plentiful, but at what environmental cost for the future?3).
Lomborg takes pains to highlight projections that have turned out to be off-the-mark and risks that have proved overestimated, and in general criticizes the precautionary principle, suggesting environmentalists use it to trump other social priorities. Of course, further research clarifies uncertainties about risk—in both directions. Many of the public health and environmental successes he touts as proof of a better world would not have happened if intervention had been delayed pending scientific certainty (an example being the removal of lead from gasoline in the US, which required a visionary judge and indisputable before-and-after data on declining blood lead levels).
Beyond focussing on the biggest and simplest picture and abusing hindsight, Lomborg’s optimistic conclusions are often premised on defining away chunks of the problem at hand. For example, he declines to consider water pollution or access-limiting lack of infrastructure as components of freshwater availability. Similarly, he estimates that ‘86–96% of all social benefits’ from US environmental protection programmes ‘stem from the regulation of air pollution’, and declares that of all regulated and unregulated air pollutants only the six criteria air pollutants are ‘important’, and that of these particulate matter (PM) is ‘by far the most important’. Then, collapsing these lines of thought, he concludes that PM is ‘by far the most important pollutant of all’ (i.e. in any medium), and thus it becomes ‘unambiguously clear‘: ‘Our most substantial pollution problem has been drastically reduced.’ This analysis reduces public policy to a shell game.
It would be a pleasure to read a book that, to quote Lomborg, ‘give[s] a description of the approaches to [environmental] problems, as the experts themselves have presented them in relevant books and journals, and ... examine[s] the different subject-areas from such a perspective as allows us to evaluate their importance in the overall social prioritization’. Unfortunately, this is not that book.
References
1 Schneider S, Holdren JP, Bongaarts J, Lovejoy T. Misleading math about the earth (Essays). Scientific American 2000;286(1):59–70.
2 Wilson EO, Schneider SH, Myers N et al. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark: a skeptical look at The Skeptical Environmentalist (essays). www.gristmagazine.com/grist/books/lomborg121201.asp. Accessed 19 March 2002.
3 McMichael AJ, Bjorn Lomborg. The Sceptical Environmentalist. Global Change and Human Health 2001;2(2).
4 Grubb M. Relying on manna from heaven? Science 2001;294:1285–87.
5 Pimm S, Harvey J. No need to worry about the future. Nature 2001; 414:149–50.
6 Baker R. The Lomborg file: when the press is lured by a contrarian’s tale. Columbia Journalism Review Mar/April 2002.
7 Carson R. Silent Spring. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1962.
8 Worldwatch Institute. State of the World 2002: Special World Summit Edition. Washington, DC. Linda Starke (ed.). New York, NY: WW Norton & Co., 2002.
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