| Environmentalists said our planet was doomed to die. Now one man says they are wrong. "Everyone knows the planet is in bad shape," thundered a magazine article last year. Species are being driven to die out at record rates, and the rivers are so poisonous that fish are floating on the surface, dead. But there's a growing belief that what everyone takes for granted is wrong: things are actually getting better. A new book is about to overturn our most basic assumptions about the world's environment. Rivers, seas, rain and the atmosphere are all getting cleaner. The total amount of forests in the world is not declining. The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg, professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, is an attack on the misleading claims of environmental groups, and the "bad news" culture that makes people believe everything is getting worse. Now the attacks are increasingly coming from left-wing environmentalists such as Lomborg, a former member of Greenpeace. The accusation is that, although the environment is improving, green groups-with profits of hundreds of mil-lions of pounds a year - are using scare tactics(谋略)to gain donations. Lomborg's book doesn't deny global warming - probably the biggest environmental threat - but destroys almost every other environmental claim with many official statistics. The Worldwatch Institute claims that "deforestation(沙漠化) has been accelerating over the last 30 years". But Lomborg says that is simply rubbish. Since the dawn of agriculture the world has lost about 20 per cent of its forest cover, but in recent decades the forest area'sdepletinghas come to a stop. According to UN figures, the area of forests has remained almost steady, at about 30 per cent of total land area, since the 1940s. Forests in countries such as the US, the UK and Canada have actually been expanding over the past 40 years. Despite all the warnings the Amazon rainforest has only shrunk by about 15 per cent. Nor are all our species dying out. Some campaigners claim that 50 per cent of all species will have died out within 50 years. But other studies show only 0.08 per cent of species are dying out each year. Conservation efforts have been successful. Whales are no longer threatened and the bald eagle is off the endangered list. Environmental groups claim that many of the improvements are the results of the success of their campaigns. Stephen Tindale, director of Greenpeace UK, said, "There are important examples, such as acid rain and ozone, where things aren't as bad as predicted, and that's because behavior has changed." | 
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