Green with Ideology

The hidden agenda behind the "scientific" attacks on Bjørn Lomborg's controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Ronald Bailey from the May 2002 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

Finally, Thomas Lovejoy critiqued Lomborg's biodiversity chapter. Lovejoy was U.S. director of the World Wildlife Fund for more than a decade and is now the chief biodiversity adviser to the World Bank; he's been a biodiversity alarmist for a long time. At a 1979 symposium at Brigham Young University, he announced that he had made "an estimate of extinctions that will take place between now and the end of the century. Attempting to be conservative wherever possible, I still came up with a reduction of global diversity between one-seventh and one-fifth." If Lovejoy had been right, between 15 and 20 percent of all species alive two decades ago would be extinct right now. No one believes that anywhere near that many extinctions have occurred.

In his review, Lovejoy simply ignores the many overblown assertions (including his own) during the past two decades that 40,000 -- or 100,000 or even 250,000 -- species are going extinct each year and that as many as half of all species on Earth would be extinct by the year 2000. Yet he declares that the biologist Norman Myers, who first offered the 40,000 figure, "deserves credit for being the first to say that the number [of species going extinct] was large," even though Myers "did not specify the method of arriving at his estimate." Lovejoy is essentially commending Myers for making up a number to get public attention.

Lovejoy notes that today environmentalists no longer give out a number of species going extinct and that instead "current estimates are usually given in terms of the in-creases over normal extinction rates....That science does not know the total number of species does not prevent an estimation of extinction rates." These estimated extinction rates are derived from the species/area curve relation that predicts that if 90 percent of a habitat is cut down, half of the species living there will go extinct. As Lomborg points out, biologists who have tried to count species in three areas that have undergone such dramatic conversions in habitats -- Eastern North America, Brazil's Atlantic Coast forests, and Puerto Rico -- have not found that the species/area curve relation holds. In other words, the extinction rates of known species are far lower than predicted by theory.

Today the general estimate is that the rate of extinctions is between 100 and 1,000 times the "natural" rate. Lomborg points out in an endnote that "it is worth contemplating how most green organizations today have stopped talking about percentages and started talking about multiples of natural extinctions, although the latter is much less informative. It seems probable that this shift is due in no small respect to the latter sounding more ominous." Lovejoy dismisses this observation as "cynical." Given Lovejoy's easy acceptance of Myers' alarmist claims two decades ago, he should know cynicism when he sees it. Tellingly, Lovejoy does not actually question Lomborg's estimate that some 0.7 percent of species will disappear over the next 50 years if current trends continue. In fact, the rates of species extinction cited by Lovejoy and others are consistent with Lomborg's estimate. The disappearance of 0.7 percent of species is lamentable, but it is a far cry from the extinction of half the world's species.

In a final nasty twist, Scientific American threatened to sue Lomborg for copyright infringement if he did not take down from his Web site, www.lomborg.com, his discussion of its critiques, in which, for easy reference, he interpolated his responses in the text of the reviews. Evidently, Scientific American is not interested in dialogue and peer review of its own work.

Tottering Greens

Ideological environmentalists have simple-mindedly applied concepts from zoology and biology to human societies to create a kind of theory of political ecology. But this theory has failed. Not one of its major predictions has come true: There have been no global famines, no cancer epidemics, no massive resource depletion. The ideologues have been proven wrong because they fail to understand that the economic processes in which human beings engage are radically different from the ecological processes that govern other creatures. Human beings not only consume resources but make new resources with their fertile minds. People do not simply use up resources the way a herd of zebra would; they create new recipes to use resources in ever more effective ways. Coal, tin, fresh water, forests, and so forth may all be limited, but the ideas for extending and improving their uses are not.

"You cannot go to any corner of the globe and not find some degree of environmental awareness and some amount of environmental politics," declared Christopher Flavin, now head of the Worldwatch Institute, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 10 years ago. Environmentalism, Flavin concluded, is the "most powerful political ideal today."

Since that Earth Summit, Flavin's brand of environmentalism has indeed grown more powerful. The Kyoto treaty seeks to control projected man-made global warming. The Biosafety Protocol, which regulates international trade in genetically enhanced crops, has been negotiated and adopted. Sweeping plans to reorganize the world's economy along environmentalist lines are being developed and actively pursued.

But at the moment of its political ascendancy, it is environmentalism, not modern civilization, that is tottering. As more critics -- demographers, epidemiologists, toxicologists, climatologists, economists, and, yes, statisticians -- point ever more insistently at the yawning gap between the doomsayers' claims and scientific and economic reality, the ideologues are becoming ever more frantic to deny the growing contradictions.

Their variety of environmentalism is merely the latest totalizing ideology to arise in the West over the past two centuries. Like communism before it, it wants to claim the mantle of objective science to justify its political programs, because in the post-Enlightenment world science is the final arbiter of what is true. But as all totalists eventually discover, an ideology's failure to correspond to reality is ultimately fatal.