Bjorn Lomborg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge UP) and associate professor at the department of political science, University of Aarhus, Denmark. This polemic is a response to a three-part serial in The Guardian, 15, 16 & 17 August, 2001 (and on the Guardian website). The serial was specially commissioned by The Guardian and the above response relates to the serial and not his published book

Hi Bjorn Lomborg, how's it going there? Good, it seems by your attack on the gloom and doom merchants in the English newspaper The Guardian.

So life's not so bad for us humans and the old Earth is in fine shape. Great to hear. I wonder if you are into music as well as the environment. There's a song by Newcastle band Jack the Lad written in the mid-1970s with lyrics that go:

Personally I like their romantic idealism, that the world and human societies are not what they used to be. But that was a big thing in the 1970s wasn't it? We didn't know then what we know now and, as you rightly point out, our science and technology was relatively primitive compared to what we have achieved since. Having acknowledged this, surely you would not refute some facts vis:

Since 1950 world population has doubled, the global economy has nearly quintupled, demand for grain has tripled, seafood consumption has more than quadrupled, water use has tripled, demand for beef and mutton has tripled, firewood demand has tripled, lumber has doubled, paper use has increased six-fold, and fossil fuel use has nearly quadrupled.

In the decade immediately after 1972, when the first Earth Day was held, the planet lost 200 million hectares of trees, deserts expanded by 120 million hectares and farmers lost 480 million tons of topsoil. Humans now control two-fifths of the plant growth that captures the energy on which everything in the biosphere depends.

The killing, buying and selling of wildlife (animals, plants and their derivatives) is believed to be worth up to $100 billion annually. The world's timber trade alone is annually worth $40 billion, international fisheries $12b and clandestine wildlife traffic $5b.

The impact of this industrialisation has been just as severe on humanity. Zoologist Theo Colborn estimates that as many as 500 measurable chemicals – those found in thousands of modern products – are now present in our bodies, even in the bodies of Eskimos in Arctic regions where there is no polluting industry. These synthetic chemicals are threatening the fertility, intelligence and survival of humanity by mimicking the hormones that regulate development. This hormonal damage, many scientists insist, is the cause of the 50% drop in the human male sperm count since 1940, the two-fold increase in breast cancer among women since 1960, the three-fold increase in testicular cancer and two-fold increase in prostate cancer since the 1940s, the phenomenal rise in endometriosis (a disease virtually unknown outside the 20th century – which now affects five million American women) and the increasing number of children born with abnormalities. Cancer alone is beginning to reach terrifying proportions.

After they had the property in hand, Based on exposure data, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a World Health Organisation body based in Lyon, France, agree that millions of workers are exposed to occupational carcinogens. IARC and WHO research shows that the cancer rate in industrialised nations is higher than in countries with little or no polluting industry. A team of researchers have confirmed that half of cancers occur among people living in industrialised nations. The WHO have noted that at least 80 percent of all cancer is attributable to environmental influences, which biologist and cancer researcher Sandra Steingraber calls a "stunning statistic". It's all the more stunning because it is not new, as Steingraber discovered. "Cancers of all types and all causes display even under already existing conditions, all the characteristics of an epidemic in slow motion," wrote W. C. Hueper and W.D. Conway, two senior scientists at the National Cancer Institute in the USA, in 1964.

The reason for this epidemic? "Increasing contamination of the human environment with chemical and physical carcinogens and with chemicals supporting and potentiating their action."

These depressing paragraphs are extracted from one of my books, a work in progress called 'Ecology & Being'. It's called that, you see, because I actually happen to think this is a social rather than an ecological issue. It is not the availability of the planet's resources humans depend on for their continued survival, it is their use and distribution, that is the real issue.

Like many of the environmentalists you criticise you do not appear to see the social reality – which is a surprise to me because The Guardian tells us you are a political scientist. The planet's resources may be plentiful and may seem inexhaustible and our technology and science may be capable of ensuring that the high-consumerist and lavishly-materialistic lifestyles we aspire to attain continues but that is not the issue. People do not live in a theoretic world defined by words, we live in a world defined by the daily struggle to survive – and that means working long hours to provide sustenance and shelter, leisure and pleasure, companionship and love.

You fail to mention any of these necessities in your polemic. Instead, like the environmentalists you are so quick to dismiss, you select an isolated position. Methinks, you have no more interest in solving the problems all of humanity face than a capitalist has of embracing socialism. It is easy to sit in an ivory tower or on the high steps of a moral ground built by the blood, sweat and tears of slaves who work to live. Isn't it? We all need to work to live in the modern world. We can't, I'm sure you will agree, go back to living in caves – now mostly bulldozed by civilisation mind you – venturing out to kill animals for protein or gather seeds and roots and tubers and leaves from a forest undisturbed by human action – because all our forests are now managed wildernesses, woodlands and fields.

I want to ask you why you wrote this attack on environmentalists and environmentalism, you know, what your purpose is? You see I think your argument is cleverly presented, but it is a badly structured, albeit elegantly written, polemic and as an academic you should know better than to write a series of essays that you yourself would reject if they were written by a student because they are selective and flawed. But they are clever, I'll give you that. My problem is that you appear to be using contemporary arguments to refute historical ones. Naughty that.

You argue that we should not worry about a shortage of oil because there is plenty more under our continents and seas – we just haven't extracted it yet, but when we need it we will look for it and take it out. It's a bit like our pantries or presses or larders or fridges, you say. We buy enough food to last us for a few days but when it runs out we don't starve, you say, we simply go to the supermarket to buy more food. Obviously it goes without saying that we have already paid for our oil or gas or electricity with which we cook our food and we have already purchased fridges to store it in or ovens to cook it in, and we have a place to do that like a home of some kind.

Really Bjorn! is that why one in six of the people who now inhabit this planet live in poverty and don't know where their next meal is going to come from? I'm sure they'd love to know that if they want food they can buy it – with what? The payment from a polemical argument written in The Guardian. Well yeah, if you are a professor in a university with a nice salary and a nice home and nice money to pay for all these things that are not running out. And we're not talking about the underdeveloped, third, other world here, we're talking about the same western world you live in.

Did you know that 1 in 8 people who live in the US live in poverty and only go into supermarkets to steal – because they need to live? The US is a developed capitalist world rich in the resources you say are not running out, so why are so many Americans not benefiting from them? Would it have anything to do with the way we control our societies? I suspect it might. But if the resources we depend on run out it won't be the odd academic or environmentalist who suffers – unless they are killed by a desperado (like in the days of the colonialisations of the so-called new worlds) – it will be the majority of humanity who will die because the military will, in their pathetic ignorance, kill anyone who tries to access the remaining limited resources.

Mind you I know a lot of people - you would probably call them anarchists and communists and terrorists – who are looking forward to a war between authority and anarchy, or to be more precise between the rich and the poor or the have and have-nots, between the dispossessed and the contented.

Bit like yourself, I don't see that environmental apocalypse anymore than I see a day or a year or a decade when us intelligent humans allow our species to become extinct. There's plenty of us – and we would be more plenty if it wasn't for wars and famine and plague – so why worry, some of us will survive, because you know some of us possess genes that somehow managed to evolve out of a slime to become aware enough of our environment to know that there is such a thing as a carrying capacity and such a thing as a finite universe.

Let me add a personal note to this. I don't go to the supermarket every three days. I go once a month and that is only to buy luxuries. There's a good reason for this. It's because I have a little bit of land, not much, a large garden you might say. It's also because I buy the food I can't grow in bulk because I've somehow managed to learn how to cook with raw ingredients – something most of the western world has forgotten to do, otherwise there wouldn't be so many cookery programmes on tv and loads of cookery books in our public libraries – and I grow the rest in my large garden.

It's hard work. The aphids and the snails and the slugs and the caterpillars keep eating everything I grow but somehow I manage to survive on what they leave me. I have what you might call a forest garden. I sowed lots of seeds and let them get on with it, and I find I can pick some chard or spinach or basil and sage or courgette and tomato or carrot and potato or dandelion and nettle when I need something to eat, and you know, despite all the so-called pests in the garden, there's actually plenty of it.

I don't use things like pesticides so I have to evict the three million snails that invade every morning and the five million caterpillars and the ten billion aphids – in the end I had to sign a contract with the ladybirds, you know to eat the aphids. It's not fair. What's worse all the domestic cats in the area seem to come into the garden to use it as a toilet. That would be okay if they knew what they are doing but they shit in one bit and dig up another, usually with a sapling in it. I've probably lost more young plants to domestic cats than I have to anything else. The shagging frog is a lazy bastard, just lounges about in the sun all day. And I don't know what the birds are eating. Mind you I'd be unhappy if they ate all the worms, given that they are good workers with the soil.

Jesus, you know - and excuse the blasphemy, there's a serious amount of activity going on in my garden and there's not much extinction going on.

Mind you, mine's the only place in the street that this is going on from what I can gather. The rest of the people go to the supermarket. Some ask if they can have a bit of Swiss Chard. Now hold on I'm growing this stuff for myself you know and for the wildlife. It seems that all the local wildlife, insects, flies, birds, amphibians have migrated to my garden. Now I'm sure they are aplenty in everyone else's garden but if I did a scientific study – like the one you have just done – I think, and I'm only theorising mind you, I'd find the majority of species are actually in my garden. I'm sure there's a few near-extinct species in there as well. I suppose the frog and the lizard nearly qualify there.

But it isn't my garden any more than this is my planet. I just happen to live here but I know that there are certain rules of nature that I should follow. I see that everytime I look at this little piece of bio-diversity. I may have had a little bit to do with setting it up but it exists the way the planet would exist if us nice humans didn't do so much harm to it. Yet despite our destructive ways all the rest of the species do what they can to find food and shelter so they can survive and reproduce.

And if that is what you are trying to say, that us clever humans will somehow keep surviving and keep reproducing and keep using the planet's resources I suggest you need to pack in political science and start reading archaeology, anthropology, botany, ecology, ethnology – you know all those academic disciplines that concern themselves with the issues you are writing about.

Because you haven't got a clue what you are talking about.

You have simplified your world with your prognostications that there's plenty of resources for humanity to exploit and I've simplified the world I see around me with this letter, but it's okay for us Bjorn we've got time to write our polemics because our bellies are full and we have a shelter over our heads.

Not everyone is so fortunate - not least the species known as homo sapiens sapiens.

- Robert Allen

---

| Back| Feature Archive Index | Human Arrogance|

---