"A Conversation With 'The Skeptical Environmentalist'"
by Brian Saint-Paul - April 2, 2004
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
Bjørn Lomborg is an associate professor of statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. In 1998, he published four articles offering a statistician's look at the environment in the leading Danish newspaper. His findings initiated a massive debate throughout the European environmentalist community. He later expanded his articles into the 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Since its publication, The Skeptical Environmentalist has been translated into numerous languages and has resulted in a wholesale reappraisal of the environmental crisis.
Dr. Lomborg sat down with Crisis Editor Brian Saint-Paul.
Saint-Paul: Did you have an interest in environmentalism before looking into the issues that became the material for your book?
Lomborg: Yes, but only in the youthful activist kind of way. I was a member of Greenpeace and worried about the fate of the world. Though I wasn't out in a rubber boat, protesting, it was one of those constant concerns that I had.
Much later, when I was teaching my statistics students, I would always tell them to check out the claims of various groups. You really have to check the data yourself, because there are a lot of myths out there. I never thought about it relative to the environment, until I read a 1997 interview with Julian Simon in Wired magazine. He was a professor of economics who claimed that things were actually improving environmentally. My immediate reaction was to dismiss it as right-wing American propaganda. And I would have left it there if he hadn't challenged his critics to check the data. This annoyed me because it's what I always tell my students.
So, I thought I'd take up his challenge. I like to have my students doing intellectually stimulating things, so I thought this would be a fun thing to do. We all bought the book in the fall of 1997, and sat down to go through the numbers. We were absolutely sure that he was wrong, and we were going to have fun proving it. However, we discovered, week after week, that a lot of what he said was actually true.
In your book, you mention what you refer to as the "environmental litany." What is this?
It's the idea that everything is getting worse. That air pollution is getting worse, that there's not enough food, that we're despoiling the soil, that we're creating a world where things are going to hell and that – in the long term – we won't be able to sustain ourselves.
This is the common belief.
Definitely. And I document this with numerous quotes from a lot of different people. While this is how the issues are generally portrayed, it's wrong and it's not helping anyone understand them better. In reality, things are moving in the right direction. It's not getting worse and worse.
