blomborg3

Two lies on page 257 (and in reference information on p. 410 and 476) that serve to defame Edward O. Wilson and Paul Ehrlich

this page was created by me, Jeff Opal, on 9-SEP-2003, and was last updated on 9-FEB-2004

Page 257 of TSE has a truly amazing claim about E.O Wilson and Paul Ehrlich. This is the actual text:

A 1993 article in Science on the cost of biodiversity reported that "scientific luminaries such as Edward O. Wilson of Harvard and Paul Ehrlich of Stanford" were endorsing the principles behind the Wildlands Project, a hugely ambitious plan to protect biodiversity in North America, which called for "a network of wilderness reserves, human buffer zones, and wildlife corridors stretching across huge tracts of land" amounting to as much as half of the continent. In the words of the Science article the long-term goal of the project amounted to "no less than the transformation of America from a place where 4.7% of the land is wilderness to an archipelago of human-inhabited islands surrounded by natural areas." Inevitably, the implementation of such a scheme would involve mass movements of people. 2089
Why sign the biodiversity convention? Why save the rainforest? Why require millions of Americans to move to city islands with severely restricted access to neighboring countryside? The answer has always been: in order to save 40,000 species from becoming extinct every year. 2090

Investigating these claims was became difficult when I was misled by a "mistake" (done on purpose, I believe) in the source information Lomborg gave for endnotes 2089 and 2090. These two endnotes read:

2089. Mann and Plummer 1993.
2090. One of the Wildlands Project participants exactly pointed out that, while it may seem "nuts," "it is more or less where the science is pointing to"
(Mann and Plummer 1993:1868).

The corresponding entry in the bibliography reads this way:

Mann, Charles C. and Mark L. Plummer 1993 "The high cost of biodiversity." Science 260:1,868-71.

Notice that the page numbers are written inconsistently. In endnote 2090 the page number 1,868 is written with no comma, whereas in the bibliography entry it has a comma. Strange! I was temporarily misled into thinking that the bibliography entry was pointing to a library volume with number "260:1" (part 1 of a series of several volumes numbered 260).
    As a result of my confusion I wasted around 10 minutes looking for the article at pages 868-71 of volume 260. Those 4 pages are for the May 14 issue (Science, by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is a weekly). When I found pages 868-71, and saw that these four pages are two advertisements and two pages of the table of contents (for machines for processing samples in test tubes), I mistakenly concluded that Lomborg had given a phony bibliography entry, for an article that didn't exist.
    Fortunately, however, I noticed the inconsistency in how the number 1868 was written in these two places, and realized that I should look at page 1,868 instead of page 868. When I did this I found the article.
    I found two serious differences between what Lomborg says is in this article and what actually is in the article.
    These are the two differences, which I've ranked in order of severity, starting with the worst:

1-- The article makes no mention at all of the estimate of 40,000 species lost per year. I strongly suspected that Lomborg was lying about that, and the article proved me correct. The article gives no estimate at all for species loss. The author (someone obviously hostile to environmentalists) only mentions claims about specific species that might be lost. E.g., the last paragraph below mentions a three species.
       Hence, Lomborg's claim on page 257, that this estimate is the reason given for why the biodiversity convention should be signed, why the rainforest must be saved, and why the entire population of the North American continent must be moved, isn't supported at all by this article that he cited as a source.

from page 410:

from page 476:

2-- Notice: the "participant" quoted in endnote 2090 wasn't described as a participant in the article. Lomborg lied about that. I think this casts legitimate doubt about his claim that he was once a Greenpeace activist. That is, if he is willing to lie about someone else's level of involvement, misportraying a critic as having been a participant at a meeting they actually didn't attend, wouldn't he be willing to lie about himself, exaggerating his own level of prior activism?
Lomborg also cut out words from the quote that would have raised reader-suspicion. Lomborg surely concluded that readers would suspect that the person quoted wasn't a participant if he was quoted as using the label "the Wildlands Project".

The whole notion may seem wildly im-practical -- the musings, perhaps, of a handful of radical activists. Yet the principles behind the Wildlands Project have garnered endorsements from such scientific luminaries as Edward O. Wilson of Harvard, Paul Ehrlich of Stanford (who describes himself as an "ethusiastic supporter"), and Michael Soule of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is one of the project's founders. In their view this approach is the logical culmination of ideas about reserve design that have already influenced land-use plans from the Pacific Northwest, where these ideas are being used in the design of a web of spotted owl reserves, to Florida, where parts of an early regional Wildlands Project have found their way into the state's land acquisition proposals. "In some ways the Wildlands Project seems nuts," says one prominent ecologist, who asked for anonymity because he hadn't had time to consider the proposal carefully. "But then you think about it, and it is more or less where the science is pointing to.
The science is pointing in this direction largely because of a growing conviction among conservation biologists and other scientists that native species, especially big carnivores such as wolves, grizzly bears, and mountain lions, need enormous amounts of space to survive. Giving animals that space can be viewed as the logical extension of laws such as the Endangered Species Act, which mandates that biodiversity must be saved no matter what the cost.

from page 1868:

    Note: the article on pages 1868-71 has no bibliography attached to it. The authors quote around 15 different people, but only once did they mention a source publication (and not a publication where the quote could be found...only a publication authored by the person being quoted).
     The article hence has little credibility with me. It appears to be written by two persons wishing to make the Wildlands Project appear as crazy as they can make it appear.
     These words from the article clearly reveal hostility and a desire to distort (and thereby discredit) persons associated with the project:

"We wanted to make conservation pro-active, rather than reactive," says project director David Johns, a political scientist at Portland State University. "We're always in the business of saying no to people -- no you can't develop, no you can't log -- which makes it seem as if we have no positive vision. Now we can say, here on the basis of sound, peer-reviewed science is what we think is necessary to keep ecological processes going or prevent a mass extinction event." (In fact, the Wildlands Project has not yet been peer reviewed.)

What are the words in the parentheses doing there? Did the man quoted say that the Wildlands Project had been peer reviewed? No, he merely said that it has peer-reviewed science behind it. The words "In fact..." are especially egregious. These words clearly are intended to imply that what follows the words "In fact" somehow refutes something in the quote. But this clearly isn't true.
Also: how can a "project" be "peer reviewed"? This doesn't make sense. A paper can be reviewed, whereas a "project" can't be because it is many more things than just papers. E.g., the "Manhattan Project" was hundreds of people with a goal of making a nuclear bomb.

Note: in a e-mail to me Jeff Harvey (PhD-ed entomologist and author for Nature) told me that the Wildlands Project has never included any recommendation that people be moved.