against, say, industry subsidies and defense spending? Media coverage Influential UK newsweekly The Economist supported Lomborg's views, publishing an advance essay by Lomborg in which he detailed his "litany", and following up with a highly favorable review and supportive coverage. It stated that "This is one of the most valuable books on public policy—not merely environmental policy—to have been written for the intelligent general reader in the past ten years...The Skeptical Environmentalist is a triumph." Chris Lavers gave a mixed review in The Guardian, saying Lomborg "is clearly committed to rubbishing the views of hand-picked environmentalists, frequently the very silly ones such as Ehrlich, whom professionals have been ignoring for decades" and criticising his framing of deforestation. In a BBC column from August 23, 2001, veteran BBC environmental correspondent Alex Kirby wrote: I am neither a statistician nor a scientist, and I lack the skill to judge Lomborg's reworkings of the statistics of conventional wisdom. But I am worried that on virtually every topic he touches, he reaches conclusions radically different from almost everybody else. That seems to suggest that most scientists are wrong, short-sighted, naïve, interested only in securing research funds, or deliberately dancing to the campaigners' tune. Most I know are honest, intelligent and competent. So it beggars belief to suppose that Professor Lomborg is the only one in step, every single time. Kirby's first concern was not with the extensive research and statistical analysis, but the conclusions drawn from them: What really riles me about his book is that it is so damnably reasonable. In the rational world that Bjørn Lomborg thinks we all inhabit, we would manage problems sensibly, one by one. But the real world is messier, more unpredictable—and more impatient. Legal scholar David Shoenbrod was one of the defenders of Lomborg. In March 2003, the New York Law School Law Review published an examination of the critical reviews of Skeptical Environmentalist from the Scientific American, Nature and Science magazines by Shoenbrod and then-Senior Law Student Christi Wilson of New York Law School. The authors defend Lomborg, say that the book is "largely free from factual errors", and characterise the scientific community's response to the book as a "disingenuous attack", using legal arguments that a court should accept Lomborg as a credible expert witness in the field of statistics, given that his testimony would be appropriately restricted to his area of expertise. Reception of media