Fortunately, it's not true. And in an extraordinary new book, out this month from Cambridge University Press, Danish social scientist Bjorn Lomborg shows us just how false it is.

Lomborg's book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," is sure to spark furious debate. For it presents compelling evidence that, while problems remain to be addressed, the environment is actually in good shape and getting better. Celebration, not despair, is in order.

Lomborg is not the sort of guy you'd expect to write a book condemning the excesses of the environmental movement. He's a former dues-paying member of Greenpeace, a vegetarian and a self-described man of the Left. More importantly, however, he's a meticulous social scientist. He wrote "The Skeptical Environmentalist" because he worries that exaggerated fears about the environment are leading us to make policy choices that may prove harmful to future generations.

"The Skeptical Environmentalist" dissects what Lomborg calls "the Litany": the environmental myths we hear so often that we do not demand evidence of their truth. These include the following:

- Natural resources are running out.

- The population is growing, leaving less and less to eat.

- Species are rapidly becoming extinct, while forests and fish stocks are dwindling.

- Air and water pollution present a serious and growing threat to human health.

Lomborg demolishes all these claims, drawing on statistics from a wide variety of official sources. ("The Skeptical Environmentalist" is exhaustively documented, and includes almost 3,000 footnotes.) In the process, he provides numerous examples of the way that the Worldwatch Institute, Greenpeace and similar organizations manipulate statistics, or generalize from very limited studies, in order to make the state of the environment appear far worse than it is.

Here's the reality, says Lomborg:

We will not run out of nonrenewable resources like oil, natural gas and zinc. Available reserves of these materials are actually greater today than they were 30 years ago, when the Club of Rome published its alarmist report, "The Limits to Growth."

The rate of world population growth is declining, having peaked in the early 1960s. Today, thanks to improved agricultural technology, people in developing countries are better nourished than ever, and this trend is almost certain to continue.

Species loss is likely to be a tiny fraction of what some environmental groups claim: not a 50 percent loss in the next generation, but about 0.7 percent over the next 50 years. Likewise, the rain forest is not seriously threatened; total forest loss in the Amazon since the arrival of man has only been about 14 percent.

In the developed world, air pollution is not a new problem getting worse, but an old problem getting better. In London, for example, air is cleaner today than at any time since 1585.

One of today's most widely discussed environmental issues, of course, is global warming. Here, too, Lomborg demonstrates that environmental groups have exaggerated potential problems, while proposing costly and unworkable solutions. The much-heralded Kyoto Protocol, for example, would attempt to mitigate temperature increases (likely to be smaller than most environmental groups project) by radically cutting fossil fuel use. Yet Kyoto's effect on climate change would almost certainly be minuscule. Its cost, however, would be exorbitant. For the United States alone, the price tag would exceed the cost of solving the world's most pressing health problem -- providing universal access to clean drinking water and sanitation. If the sum in question were spent this way, it would prevent 2 million deaths and 500 million serious illnesses every year.

Why have we swallowed the Litany so uncritically? According to Lomborg, the problem is twofold. First, while research on the environment is generally scientifically sound, we usually hear about it from environmental advocacy groups. These groups have a powerful incentive to "spin" the truth: The worse they can make environmental conditions appear, the better their chances of achieving their policy agenda. The media exacerbate this problem. Their penchant for bad news and sensationalism feeds into the "doomsday" mentality that makes Americans vulnerable to environmental fearmongering.

If American citizens are to make wise decisions about the environment, we need accurate information about the nature and extent of environmental problems. In addition, we need to recognize that we cannot "solve" all such problems. Our first task should be to set wise priorities, so that we use our finite resources to address serious, rather than phantom problems.

In the process, we must stop uncritically accepting the claims of environmental groups, and examine them with a healthy dose of skepticism. In the past, we've tended to take these claims at face value, because we think of environmental groups as selflessly motivated crusaders, out to save the world from the rest of us. In truth, however, they're just lobbyists like any other.

-- Katherine Kersten is a senior fellow of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.