A Review of Bjorn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist: You Might Be Surprised What I Say

Distressingly uninformed about the workings of the natural world. That was how I described Lomborg's book to a conservative friend recently. We were discussing global warming and he recommended the book. I first read it four or five years ago, and I felt it seriously lacking.

I decided to take another look at the book, however. Perhaps, I thought, a more mature perspective would reveal things previously unnoticed.

Can't Argue With That

I scanned first the table of contents. Lomborg has a large section devoted to what he calls "The Litany," that is, the list of environmental ills that environmentalists say we inflict on the planet. "Why do we hear so much bad news" is the title of one chapter.

Another large part of the book is devoted to proving that humanity is better off now than ever before. Some, like Derrick Jensen, would say this is all a matter of perspective, but I won't argue with it. I've read Bucky Fuller recently, after all, and I believe that most of the hunger, plague and
suffering that goes on is a result of incompetence and greed rather than lack of resources. (What I believe might be far from the truth, but I won't quibble with Lomborg on this issue.)

Another two chapters are devoted to energy scarcity and other resource scarcity. Not quite environmental issues, as I define them, so again, I won't quibble.

The Forest for the Trees

I began to see what's wrong with Lomborg's thesis when I turned to the chapter on forests. Lomborg argues that "most scenarios show a constant or even somewhat increasing forest area till 2100."

He's right. But he misses the point.

The problem is in the definition of forests. In the notes, Lomborg tells us that he considers any area with regular tree trunks to be forest. That makes sense if you want a big picture, but it leaves a lot of wiggle room. For example, this includes tree plantations as forest - that is, acres and acres of the same type of tree, cultivated expressly for the purpose of harvesting the lumber. This is not, in itself, a bad thing - it reduces logging stress on wild forests - but it is hardly an example of a healthy forest ecosystem.

Likewise, this definition includes land that is sparsely developed, partially logged or otherwise exploited - aka fragmented habitat. Again, it's not healthy forest. Many forest dwelling species (the cerulean warbler, for example) require a certain amount of pristine forest to survive. A simple road through the forest means that that land is unsuitable for them.

As a side note, anyone who's interested in forest ecosystems should read John Luoma's The Hidden Forest. It's a five.

First Impressions

I next turned to the chapter on waste, where Lomborg sets up what seemed at first glance to be a straw man: are environmentalists claiming we will run out of space for all our garbage? After all, Isaac Asimov said "almost all the existing landfills are reaching their maximum capacity, and we are running out of places to put new ones."

Lomborg quickly puts the (possible) straw man to rest. We will not run out of space. If we take all the waste that Americans will generate from 2001 to 2100 and put it in one place, piled to 100 feet, we will only require a square 18 miles on a side - about .0009 percent of the total land area of the US. Nothing to worry about, obviously.

But a moment's reflection reveals that this is indeed a straw man. What Asimov was talking about was not all the land in the US. He was talking about the available land - that is, land that is close enough to population centers to be economical but not so close that odors make city life even more unpleasant, land that could not more profitably be used for housing or other purposes, not too close to water sources that could be polluted or highways where visitors will see and smell the mess.

With a little further reflection you might realize that waste management problems go beyond simply where to put it. What about the waste that doesn't make it to the landfill? What about toxic waste, household chemicals improperly disposed of, batteries and electronic components?

And what about the rest of the world? Lomborg puts economic development above all else as the cure for environmental problems. So what happens to that square, 18 miles to a side, when it is not just 300 million Americans but a few billion Gujarati, Bangladeshi, Indonesian and Pakistani and Chinese and Arab and African people who create 4.5 pounds of trash per day?

I Don't Mind if the Apples Have Spots

The chapter on cancer and chemicals further demonstrate Lomborg's blind spot. In this chapter, he debunks the notion that humans consume enough pesticides to develop cancer. If we take into account the aging world population (the older you get the more likely you are to develop cancer) and the smoking epidemic, we find that cancer rates have actually gone down since 1950. Furthermore, if we stopped using pesticides, many more humans would die from lack of food than will die from cancer if we do nothing about pesticides. Not a bad argument - I was almost ready to go spray Roundup in my little organic garden (just kidding).

Again, Lomborg is right - but again he misses the mark. He makes absolutely no mention of the effects of pesticides on the natural world. What about the insects that pollinate the crops? Domestic honey bee populations have suffered a massive die off over the past 15 years. What about the birds that eat the insects that ingest the pesticide - birds that are already stressed from atmospheric deposition of mercury (thank you king coal) and loss of habitat? What about the fish swimming in the water that catches the runoff? And what about the nonagricultural pesticides - all the goddamn golf courses and yards?

A Pleasant Warming

I next turned to the (extensive) chapter on global warming. I was a little surprised to see that Lomborg doesn't question the human causes of global warming. The beginning of the chapter was actually a good overview of the science of global warming. Sadly, Lomborg is more concerned, as usual, with the economic effects rather than the environmental effects.

I disagree with Lomborg's discussion of solutions. And I find his analysis to be sadly lacking in knowledge, even acknowledgement of the havoc that global warming will wreak in the natural world.

A prime example of what I'm talking about is the Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic in British Columbia, and the Southern Pine Beetle in the Southeastern US. One direct cause of the infestation, which devastated forests and cost logging economies millions of dollars, was global warming: a series of warm winters allowed more of the pine beetles to survive and reproduce. But another cause was loss of biodiversity and poor forest management. This provided a favorable environment for the beetle - normally a valuable part of the ecosystem - to devastate the forests.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

His lack of knowledge about the natural world is where Lomborg's blind spot is most dangerous. He cannot evaluate something if he can't put a dollar sign on it. Indeed, it seems that if he can't assign a value, it doesn't exist for him. This is only natural, I suppose, when an associate professor of statistics ventures into biology.

His discussion of the value of biodiversity exemplifies his perspective. He asks why we even need worry about biodiversity, then answers himself: aesthetic value, perhaps, or because we might get medicines from plants. He mentions studies that have attempted to put a dollar value on biodiversity only to dismiss them: "...such estimates have been criticized largely because many of the ecosystem services have no market...several analyses show that the human value of the final species of plants or animals for medicine is extremely low ...." As a last example, he offers the importance of genetic diversity for the survival of agricultural crops - but this is not a problem for him because we have stored genetic information about a variety of crops (I wonder who holds the patent on that information, and how much they charge?).

Lomborg has a myopic tunnel vision. Everything of value has already been accounted for in his world, and a thing is worth saving only if it produces wealth.

I'm not talking about hippy dippy communion with nature here. I'm talking about a lichen that fixes nitrogen for old growth trees, an insect that helps logs decay, a mouse that spreads the spores of fungi through the forest, and the fungi that maintain the pH of the soil so the trees can take in nutrients. Put a dollar value on this: as a bird flies north on its spring migration, it stops to eat the fruit of a certain species of tree. To the tree, this bird is life itself - as the bird flies to its summer home, it spreads the seeds and helps the tree move northward in the face of global warming.

It was only in the 1990's that foresters seriously began to study the value of biodiversity to forest health. Lomborg's view is dangerously old fashioned - a view that sees trees simply as board feet and rivers as simply a recreational opportunity.

When we ignore biodiversity, we open ourselves up to unforeseen consequences with real human and economic costs - pine beetle epidemics, forest fires, desertification. Lomborg does a good job of assessing the obvious human costs of environmental destruction: human cancer rates from chemicals, for example, or property damage from flooding and weather events from global warming. But there is no discussion of the effect of pesticides on the natural world, no discussion of global warming's effect on biodiversity. Lomborg doesn't even mention the threat of invasive species.

So What's the Real State of the Planet?

I can't disagree with Lomborg when he says "the environment and economic prosperity are not opposing concepts, but rather complementary entities: without adequate environmental protection, growth is undermined, but environmental protection is unaffordable without growth." Much of the environmental devastation in the third world could be prevented with better infrastructure, if people didn't have to burn wood for fuel, if they didn't have to shit in a stream, if they knew farming and grazing techniques that didn't turn the land to desert.

Lomborg says: "When we are to assess the state of the world, we need to do so through a comparison....Basically the choice of comparison is crucial. It is my argument that the comparison should be with how it was before." Well, how was it before?

When the white man first came to America, a man could fire a shot into a flock of birds flying overhead and be almost guaranteed to bring one down. Flocks of passenger pigeons could darken the sky for days as they flew by. It was said that settlers couldn't lower an oar into a body of water without striking a fish. Some people fancied they might be able to cross a river by walking on the backs of the teeming salmon. If you wanted fish for dinner, you had only to lower a bucket into the river and pull it back out. Buffalo herds covered the plains from horizon to horizon. A squirrel could, some said, cross the entire continent without touching the ground, simply leaping from branch to branch.

This is how it was before, but Lomborg doesn't mention this 'before.' He sticks to the real hard data that he has available - after all, no one kept records about the forests of the New World in 1492. They thought the forests were inexhaustible. So we get good solid, verifiable data from Lomborg: forests area has stayed the same since 1950. It's just never mentioned that this is long after the majority of North America and Europe had been logged.

What would happen if people all over the world did what we did: logged entire continents, dammed all the rivers, and hunted any animal they wanted to extinction?

I imagine all we have to do is wait, and we will see soon enough.


All the same, I can't dismiss this book or tell people not to read it. As Lomborg says, we must "focus our attention on the most important problems and only to the extent warranted by the facts....we need to focus on the fundamentals and we need to look at realities, not myths." (p. 5) While his idea of realities and fundamentals differs radically from mine, the book is still worth reading. I was going to give it a 3, but:

Various experts in the fields of climatology, biology, energy and population policy gave Lomborg a much less generous review in Scientific American. If you read the book, you need to read those reviews. In fact, I read these reviews after writing the one above, and I'm feeling much less charitable than I did while writing. Among the charges: Lomborg uses many secondary and media sources, rather than the scholarly literature. He omits facts when they are inconvenient, and misquotes scientists to make his own points.

After reading these reviews, I give the book a 2. Read with caution, keep a few grains of salt on hand and a questioning mind.

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• ecology