Land war: an ecological optimist vs. his critics.

Bjorn Lomborg is a mild-mannered Danish statistics professor who believes in environmental protection laws, votes on the political left, avoids eating meat, and thinks that governments should redistribute wealth. In college, he belonged to Green-peace. And the left-wing environmental movement hates him with a passion.

This hatred stems from Lomborg's new book, an occasionally turgid, 515-page Cambridge University Press tome called The Skeptical Environmentalist. It's rare that a book so modest in many of its central contentions and so rife with the trappings of careful scholarship creates such an intellectual firestorm. When TAE called Lester Brown, the president ...