The Skeptical Environmentalist: Tantangan Terbuka Kepada Para Aktivis Lingkungan

Awicaksono

Judul buku: The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World
Penulis: Bjørn Lomborg
Penerbit: Cambridge University Press
Tahun terbitan: 2001
Tebal buku: 496hal
ISBN: 0521010683

The Skeptical Environmentalist melempar tantangan secara luas kepada siapa saja yang meyakini bahwa keadaan lingkungan hidup saat ini terus bertambah buruk. Penulis, yang pernah menjadi anggota Greenpeace, sangat kritis terhadap bagaimana organisasi-organisasi lingkungan secara selektif, dan bahkan mungkin menyesatkan, dalam menggunakan bukti-bukti ilmiah untuk advokasi dan kampanye-kampanyenya. Menggunakan informasi statistik yang tersedia dari berbagai lembaga internasional yang terkenal, secara sistematik Bjørn Lomborg mengkaji sederet masalah utama lingkungan hidup yang selama ini terus menjadi pokok berita di media-media dunia.

Argumen-argumennya ia paparkan secara non-teknis, menggunakan bahasa yang mudah dipahami dan secara hati-hati didukung oleh sekitar 2500 catatan kaki yang memungkinkan pembaca memeriksa sendiri kesahihannya. Menyimpulkan bahwa terdapat lebih banyak alasan untuk optimis daripada bersikap pesimistik, Bjørn Lomborg menekankan perlunya melakukan prioritasi secara jernih dan dingin atas sumberdaya-sumberdaya yang tersedia untuk menangani masalah-masalah yang kongkret, bukan masalah yang dibayangkan (imagined problems). The Skeptical Environmentalist menawarkan pembaca sebuah latihan intelektual yang menyediakan pandangan korektif yang bermanfaat bagi berbagai peringatan organisasi-organisasi advokasi lingkungan hidup yang bergaung lewat media-media terkemuka.

Sebagian komentar tentang buku ini dapat dibaca pada sampul belakang bukunya,

‘When Lomborg concludes that ‘ … the loss of the world’s rainforests, of fertile agricultural land, the ozone layer and of the climate balance are terrible …’ I agree. But we also need debate, and this book provides us with that in generous amounts. If you, like I do, belong to the people who dare to think the world is making some progress, but always with mistakes to be corrected, this book makes important reading.’ -- Professor Lars Kristoferson, Secretary General, WWF Sweden

‘The Skeptical Environmentalist should be read by every environmentalist, so that the appalling errors of fact the environmental movement has made in the past are not repeated. A brilliant and powerful book.’ -- Matt Ridley, author of Genome

‘This is one of the most valuable books on public policy - not merely on environmental policy - to have been written for the intelligent reader in the past ten years … The Skeptical Environmentalist is a triumph.’ --The Economist

Namun, buku ini bukannya tanpa kritik. Beberapa tokoh pemikir yang selama ini bekerja menyadarkan publik dan para politikus tentang buruknya mutu lingkungan hidup global mengomentari buku ini:

E.O. Wilson, ahli biologi terkemuka -- dua kali memenangkan penghargaan Pulitzer, penemu ratusan spesies baru, serta satu dari ilmuwan besar yang masih hidup -- merespon analisis Lomborg tentang kepunahan spesies:

My greatest regret about the Lomborg scam is the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that has to be expended to combat it in the media. We will always have contrarians like Lomborg whose sallies are characterized by willful ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication with genuine experts, and destructive campaigning to attract the attention of the media rather than scientists. They are the parasite load on scholars who earn success through the slow process of peer review and approval. The question is: How much load should be tolerated before a response is necessary? Lomborg is evidently over the threshold.

Stephen H. Schneider, satu dari beberapa ilmuwan iklim terkemuka dari Amerika Serikat, merespon analisis Lomborg tentang perubahan iklim:

It would take several pages to document how Lomborg lines up his citations to diminish the seriousness of climate effects while ignoring most literature that would stress the seriousness. (For that kind of documentation, see a review by my colleagues and me in the forthcoming January 2002 issue of Scientific American or Stuart Pimm and Jeff Harvey's review in the Nov. 8, 2001 issue of Nature.) Lomborg does acknowledge an aggregate $5 trillion benefit of controlling and minimizing climate change, but then contrasts this to an estimated cost of controlling global warming of "from $3 to $33 trillion."

Note that Lomborg offers a wide-ranging estimate for how much it would cost to control climate change but only one figure for how much the climate change itself would cost us. In reality, the cost of climate change itself is generally considered -- by the very economists whom Lomborg quotes for costs of control -- to be much more uncertain than the cost of controlling climate change. In other words, this putative statistician quotes a range of costs when convenient but not a range of benefits when inconvenient. Neither does he tell us, as any assessor should -- let alone a statistician writing a popular book! -- that these are very crude estimates grounded in subjective assumptions at every stage. To imply that the costs are empirically determined is to completely misunderstand the situation, or misrepresent Bayesian statistics (subjective) as frequentist probabilities (objective).

Norman Myers, seorang Honorary Visiting Fellow di Universitas Oxford, anggota U.S. National Academy of the Sciences, dan penerima beberapa penghargaan lingkungan hidup, mengomentari analisis Lomborg tentang keanekaragaman spesies:

Lomborg is equally sloppy in his analyses of the utilitarian benefits of species and their genetic resources -- for example, "aspirin from willow trees, heart medicine from foxgloves." It is simply not true, as Lomborg claims, that, "Most of this medicine is now produced synthetically." In several instances, scientists have tried for decades to synthesize plant-derived alkaloids and other biocompounds in the laboratory, investing huge amounts of money in the effort, to little or no avail. Yet Lomborg goes on to assert, "But so long as we do not even have any practical means of analyzing even a fraction of those plants already known to us, this cannot be used as a general argument for the protection of all species, for example in the rain forest." He might check with the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., where scientists have demonstrated that certain families of plants appear to be sound bets for medical breakthroughs.

Serta beberapa komentar lain, seperti Lester R. Brown (ahli kependudukan), Emily Matthews (ahli kehutanan), Al Hammond (ahli statistik lingkungan), Devra Davis (ahli kesehatan lingkungan), David Nemtzow (ahli enerji), serta Kahtyn Schulz (editor politik GRIST), yang dapat dibaca di GRIST Magazine: environmental news & commentary edisi khusus yang benar-benar khusus diterbitkan untuk merespons The Skeptical Environmentalist-nya Bjørn Lomborg.