Simon Déjà Vu

An academic with supposedly impeccable "green" credentials has created a stir with his about-to-be-published book in which major environmental concerns are dismissed as grossly exaggerated.

Danish statistics professor Bjørn Lomborg's tract is a revival of the late Julian Simon's discredited debunking of the environmental movement. As such, it has brought many of the Simon disciples gleefully out of the woodwork to needle the environmental community.

Simon was a University of Maryland economist who generated controversy with his Cornucopian view of environmental conditions. No matter how misleading and/or deeply in scientific disrepute, Simon's "all's right with the world" outlook served as a messianic rallying cry for critics of the national environmental movement in the 1980s' and 90s'.

Since former Greenpeace member Lomborg is using his book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist", to regurgitate Simon's simplistic contrarian views, he seems destined to experience the same widespread scientific repudiation as his predecessor.

The Danish professor contends that despite the environmental movement's assertions, natural resources are not being severely depleted. In fact, environmentalists maintain that while some resources are being severely drained, others aren't -- at least not yet.

Lomborg denounces environmental activists as "doomsdayers". In fact, the environmental community is optimistic that a bright future is in the wings as long as a better job is done of integrating recycling and renewable resources into our daily existence.

Following in the footsteps of Simon, Lomborg chooses to ignore that prices do not necessarily reflect the degree of abundance of a resource. The cost of resources that are dangerously winding down may remain stable or even decrease and availability may increase due to an artificial glut manipulated by suppliers trying to squeeze out the last ounce of profit from a situation about to implode. For example, fishermen may return from an outing with a huge harvest of a species they have totally depleted by sweeping the ocean clean in one last massive effort.

Lomborg disputes that as a result of population growth, human beings will have less food to eat. Indeed, he maintains that fewer people in the world are dying of famine today than in the past. Again, in some parts of the world, Lomborg's rosy view is on target; in other areas, it is not.

The Danish professor's claim that food production has increased on a per capita basis is not accurate across the board. According to data from the U.S. Agriculture Department, global per capita grain production has steadily slipped over the past five years. Moreover, per capita availability of fresh water has declined in the past three decades due to aquifer depletion and diversion of irrigation water to non-farm uses. If this trend should continue, the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute warns that it could translate into falling food production per person throughout the world. One should also note that some recent increases in food production have been achieved in unsustainable fashion -- that is by overworking fertile fields and putting marginal acreage under the plough.

Yes, fewer people are starving. But this does not address widespread global malnutrition in which individuals receive insufficient nourishment to support full physical and mental development as well as a strong immune system to resist fatal diseases.

The Danish statistician challenges the validity of the high rate of species extinction claimed by many in the environmental community, and in doing so, misses the point. While the loss of species is difficult to document with any exactitude, it is clear that human induced-habitat destruction is causing the rate of extinction to accelerate. The author also undermines his case by essentially ignoring the loss of insects and plants in his estimated species extinction count.

Although Lomborg denies pushing any ideological agenda, his attacks against the environmental movement smack of Simon rhetoric. The Dane excoriates national environmental organizations for using scare tactics in order to build membership. But the truth is that these organizations' numbers have only snowballed when public officials of Simon's ideological persuasion have briefly managed to acquire positions of power on the national scene.

Lomborg is a statistician who needs an overlay of ecology and political expertise to produce a multi-dimensional portrait of the state of the environment. As it stands, he leaves us with a narrow simplistic picture of an extremely complex world.

@Copyright 2001, Edward Flattau