Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind... Romans 12:2
The Skeptical Environmentalist
by Bjorn Lomborg
Cambridge University Press, 2001
515 pages
Reviewed by Winston Ewert
The ozone hole is posing an ever greater threat. More and more greenhouse gases are pumped into the atmosphere every year. Cancer rates are exploding. Everybody knows that the earth is going to pot, and unless we start making some serious changes, our planet will become an uninhabitable desert racked by disease.
Actually, not everyone agrees ...
In an number of books, including Scarcity or Abundance? A Debate on the Environment, Julian Simon argued that environmental problems were not growing, rather "the material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely." A Danish teacher of statistics by the name of Bjorn Lomborg read this statement and decided to assign his students the task of proving Simon wrong. They tried but failed to counter the arguments of Simon.
Lomborg, a member of Greenpeace, decided to take on the assignment of disproving Simon himself. A few years later he came out with his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which Lomborg astounded his supporters by agreeing with Simon. Predictably, he has been kicked out of Greenpeace, and his opponents have claimed his book was ill-researched despite its eighty-one pages of notes and almost seventy pages of bibliography.
Of course, numbers never speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted by a human being. At one time our local hockey team, the Vancouver Canucks, had won two of their last three games against one of the top teams in the NHL. From this statistic one might think they were doing pretty well. However, it would be equally true to say that they had won two of their last twenty games against this same team. This additional evidence paints an utterly different picture, even though both statements are equally true at the same time.
Throughout his book Lomborg examines the statistics that environmentalists use to make claims that we are heading downhill. Using the same data he demonstrates how, in general, not only are things not going downhill, they are on an upward trend!
In the year 1950, just over two hundred thousand people died of cancer in the U.S.A. More than two-and-a-half times more people died of cancer in 1998. The immediate conclusion is that cancer rates are rapidly rising. However, in 1950 there were an estimated two-and-a-half billion people in the world; today that figure is around six billion. It makes sense that more people will die of cancer today, given a bigger population. However, accounting for the increased population still leaves an increase of thirty-three percent. But Lomborg is not done yet; we have managed to prevent many illnesses from killing people at a younger age and as a result there are more old people alive today, then there would have been in 1950. Additionally, many more people smoke today. If cancer statistics are further adjusted for age and smoking, we see a definite falling pattern. Adjusted cancer rates, far from dramatically increasing, are decreasing.
Lomborg also addresses the subject of pesticides. Without pesticides, crop-killing pests would devour a great portion of many crops. The pesticides poison these pests so that more food can be grown. However, humans also ingest the poison whenever they eat from a crop that was sprayed. Every time we eat pesticides there is a chance that it will cause cancer. However, it is shown that tobacco, obesity, and other personal choices account for seventy-five percent of cancer deaths. The fact is, compared to other cancer-causing factors, the risk from pesticides is extremely small.
In order to determine whether or not a particular chemical causes cancer, it is fed to rats. These rats could be given amounts that would reasonably be ingested by a human being. However, with such small amounts only a very small difference would be detectable between rats who were fed poison, and rats who were not. This difference would be statistically unimportant because it could be completely random. In order to get around this problem in the laboratory, the rats are given very high doses. However, to do this they have to make an assumption: half as much pesticide is half as harmful. This is not necessarily true. It some cases it has been demonstrated that under a certain threshold level there are no malleable effects. In other words, the amount of pesticide a human is exposed to is likely so small that it will not be harmful at all.
Based on various statistics, we can estimate that twenty people die every year from pesticides. Should pesticides be eliminated or drastically reduced? Outlawing pesticides would cause increased crop damage. The price of these crops such as fruits and vegetables would rise to account for the increased costs of farming, and higher prices would result in less being eaten. And given that fruits and vegetables are very good cancer preventives, many more people would die of cancer as a result of banning pesticides than would be saved. While an estimated twenty people die from pesticide-induced cancer every year, outlawing pesticides would cost twenty billion dollars and an estimated twenty-six thousand deaths annually.
Many times Lomborg shows that the world is not as it seems. Even when deaths are caused by substances such as pesticides, it is important to see that the cure could be worse then the disease. Lomborg stresses prioritization. Yes, we should be concerned about people dying from pesticides, but more concern should be given to personal choices that result in cancer because they cause far more deaths. Contrary to popular claims, the environment is not hurtling its way into a barren wasteland; rather, the human condition is constantly improving. Lomborg, being a non-Christian, does not see the reason behind this. The root of this improvement is the gospel, which frees men to live according to God's laws—including His law of "Thou shalt not steal"—which is the basis for producing wealth and improving the environment. Apart from a conversion to the gospel, the earth would inevitably be destroyed.
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