The Real State of our Environment Today

Jackie Fraser, Executive Director, AgCare

How is the state of our environment today? Are we improving the way we look after our planet, or are we on a fast path to its destruction?

If you believe most of what you read and hear, you'd be inclined to think it's the latter. We are bombarded daily with messages of doom and gloom. Recently, a special edition of Maclean's took a look into the next 100 years, predicting that by 2075 nature would be a mere memory.
Wow, what a depressing vision of the future.

I firmly disagree. I think we are continually improving our environmental impact as knowledge, technology, and financial resources allow, and I think this trend will continue at an even faster pace in the future. It was so refreshing to hear from someone else who shares this more optimistic outlook at the recent Crop Life Canada conference.

Bjorn Lombourg is an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. In 1998, he published the Skeptical Environmentalist Measuring the Real State of the World, which concluded that although the state of the world is not perfect, "things are getting better and better over time.

Lombourg's overall message is that in order to make good decisions, we need good, accurate information. There is only one bag of money available to spend on solving problems, and we need to prioritize our issues to ensure that we are making wise spending decisions. Instead of throwing money at problems that mayor may not be as bad as interest groups claim, we should evaluate all global issues and determine where we can get the biggest bang for our buck.

Considering his audience, Lombourg spent some of his time discussing pesticide use, highlighting the section of his book titled "Our Chemical Fears".

We are continually bombarded with messages from interest groups who claim that pesticide use causes cancer, which has led to a "cancer epidemic". Lombourg soundly debunks this myth by evaluating numerous studies on cancer trends and causes. Of course the actual number of cancer cases is on the rise because our population is growing and aging. But once the rates are adjusted for population, age, and the effects of smoking, he shows that cancer rates are actually on the decline. In short, there is no "cancer epidemic".

Lombourg then sifts through many studies to determine what does, in fact, cause cancer. In one of the largest studies on the causes of cancer in the US, Sir Richard Doll and Richard Peto found that diet (too much fat, not enough fruit and vegetables) was the leading cause of cancer at 35%, followed by tobacco at 30%, and infections at 10%. Pollution (includes air, water, and food contamination, with air pollution being the leading cause of pollution-related cancers) was found to cause 2% of all cancers. The conclusion: virtually no one dies of cancer caused by pesticides.

This study and many others have demonstrated that 75% of cancer risk is determined by lifestyle and personal choices (diet, tobacco use, alcohol, sexual habits, sun exposure, etc.). I checked the Canadian Cancer Society website to see if these stats were relevant to Canadians and they are nearly identical. Fear of cancer abounds in Western society, yet instead of teaching people how to reduce 75% of their risk, we waste time and resources blaming insignificant causes like pesticide use.

Back to the fact that there is only one bag of money, how should we spend it to reduce cancer risk - by banning pesticide use or promoting greater consumption of fruit and vegetables?

Lombourg addresses this question with a cost / benefit analysis of banning pesticides. He estimates that if we banned pesticides, we would perhaps reduce cancer deaths by twenty per year in the US (of a total 560,000 cancer deaths per year). In the US alone, banning pesticides would cost $20 billion per year. We would require more land to be brought into production (out of natural habitat and marginal areas) and Lombourg estimates that the increased cost of fruit and vegetables would lead to a 5-15% decrease in consumption, which would result in 26,000 more cancer deaths per year.

Does it make sense to spend $20 billion per year to ban pesticides with the outcome being 25,980 more cancer deaths per year?

In Skeptical Environmentalist, Lombourg goes through a large list of environmental issues, debunking myths and striving for logical solutions. Concluding his talk, he re-stated that things are getting better and better in the world. This doesn't mean there are no problems, but we need to prioritize our focus.

The key is to have good information in order to make sound decisions.