Gandhi as an Environmentalist

Mahatma Gandhi

The Skeptical Environmentalist

E R R Y E LL IS M in d en P ic tu re s conflict—they deserve full scrutiny. With that in mind, the book The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press), by Bjørn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, should be a welcome audit. And yet it isn’t. As the book’s subtitle—Measuring the Real State of the World—indicates, Lomborg’s intentio...

Economic Thought of Gandhi

"I WOULD LIKE TO SAY TO THE DILIGENT READER OF MY WRITINGS AND to others who are interested in them that I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my search after Truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things. Old as I am in age, I have no feeling that I have ceased to grow inwardly or that my growth will stop at the dissolution of the flesh. What I am concern...

Environmentalist of the Poor

The Berkeley Nobel Laureate George Akerlof once remarked of his fellow economists that if you showed them something that worked in practice, they would not be satisfied unless it was also shown to work in theory. This insight explains much about the dismal science, including why, as late as 1980, the M I T economist Lester Thurow could magisterially write: “If you look at the countries that are...

Lessons learned from "the skeptical environmentalist": an environmental health perspective.

Few books about the environment have generated as much heated debate as Bjørn Lomborg's 'The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World', published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. A flavor of the controversy can be gleaned from a series of reviews and rebuttals published in 'Scientific American' (Rennie 2002). In general, most positive reviews appeared in the popul...