The Skeptical Environmentalist. (Books in Brief).

The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Bjom Lomborg (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 515 pages, paperback, $28.00.

By now everyone knows, or thinks that they know, that humanity is destroying the environment. We are running out of fresh water; agricultural crops have reached the limits of productivity; the forests are being clear-cut; the human population is exploding; the ozone hole threatens everyone with cancer; and mankind's use of fossil fuels has pumped the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases causing runaway global warming. This is what everyone thinks they know. This is what Danish political scientist and statistician Bjorn Lomborg thought he knew too. That is until he read a Wired magazine interview of Julian Simon in which the late University of Maryland economist argued that environmental doomsday predictions were incorrect and based on faulty statistics.

Simon's statements provoked Lomborg into investigating the economist's claims. A self-described "old left-wing Greenpeace member," Lomborg and some of his best students gathered to examine several sets of environmental data that Simon said suggested environmental conditions were improving. Much to their surprise, they found that Simon's claims held up under scrutiny. The group concluded that "the air in the developed world is becoming less, not more, polluted; people in the developing countries are not starving more, but less, and so on."

From this beginning in the fall of 1997, Lomborg proceeded to examine thoroughly the state of the world's environment. The resulting book, The Skeptical Enviromnentalist, is notable not just for exhaustively using data and rigorously adhering to sound methodology but because the evidence it presents flies in the face of all the doom and gloom spread about by the environmental orthodoxy. So much so that, while making an appearance at an Oxford book store, Lomborg took a pie in the face from one Mark Lynas, a radical environmentalist angered by the book's conclusions.

Lomborg reached those conclusions after closely examining several indicators of the environment's health. Among the areas reviewed by the author is human welfare. It may seem strange to find information usually confined to economics discussed in a book on the environment. But Lomborg focuses on economic indicators stemming directly from human interaction with nature. For instance, the author probes statistics relating to food supply and how it relates to human population.

Much like the 18th-century economist Thomas Malthus, most environmentalists today believe that, agriculturally, humanity is consuming more than it is ...