FrontPageMagazine.com | Eli Lehrer | June 11, 2007
One hundred years after her birth in May of 1907, it’s difficult to underestimate Rachel Carson’s influence. Unfortunately, it’s all bad. That hasn’t stopped her from remaining an academic deity to the campus Left.
A wildlife bureaucrat by profession (she eventually became the chief publications editor for the Fish and Wildlife Service), Carson wrote what has become the seminal text of the environmental movement: 1962’s Silent Spring. The book, a gloomy, sometimes hysterical tract, argues that chemicals in the environment do enormous harm to humans and wildlife. The pesticide DDT gets singled out for particular blame and is indicted for destroying wildlife and causing enormous problems in humans. While DDT may harm certain types of wildlife, nobody has even come close to proving Carson’s claim that “one in four” people might die from chemically caused cancers, her strong implication that the most pesticides were first developed as a chemical weapons, or her new-age speculation that human bodies build up enormous stores of dangerous environmental toxins.
In the wake of the book, however, DDT faced a near-total worldwide ban. In the developed world, where alternatives were available, this ban had little consequence. For the world’s truly poor, the ban on DDT proved a disaster. As a result, deaths from mosquito-borne malaria and other diseases that the pesticide had controlled skyrocketed.
Millions, most of them children under five living in the underdeveloped world, have died as a result. Clearly, the book had a negative influence.
. . . more
What international ban? According to Wikipedia, “DDT has never been banned for use against malaria in the tropics. In many developing countries, spraying programs (especially using DDT) were stopped due to concerns over safety and environmental effects, as well as problems in administrative, managerial and financial implementation. Efforts were shifted from spraying to the use of bednets impregnated with insecticides. Furthermore, insects were becoming resistant to DDT at the time that its use was rolled back.”
Never trust a Neocon rag like Front Page Mag.
Rule Number One: If it comes from FrontPage it is usually horrendously, stupendously wrong. A little fact-checking just now found this to be the case once again.
First, Rachel Carson never advocated the complete banning of DDT. What she argued against was the overuse of DDT, which she said would diminish its effectiveness. In fact overuse of DDT in some areas did lead to emergence of new strains of mosquitos resistant to DDT, which made the task of controlling Malaria even more difficult.
In fact this is what Rachel Carson wrote in her book, Silent Spring, on page 266.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/05/this_week_in_the_unending_war.php
Second, only the agricultural use of DDT was banned, not it’s anti-malarial use. The web site of one DDT manufacturer boasts:
DDT still not banned for malaria control
The premise that Rachel Carson was such a fanatical environmentalist so obsessed with saving little birdies that she promoted changes in the law leading to the death of 800,000 children die from malaria is completely false and without basis in fact – in other words a huge LIE.
After reading this article, the only thing “murderous” is I can find is what it is trying to do to the truth. A little fact-checking, please.
Let’s look at the facts:
WHO gives indoor use of DDT a clean bill of health for controlling malaria
You can believe that Rachel Carson and the radical environmentalists didn’t want to see the complete ban of DDT if you want. It doesn’t matter anymore since they don’t hold sway over people more concerned about saving the lives of those who were dying of malaria.
Note in the WHO report this sentence however:
If this is not called a ban, what would you call it? Note too the timing: 1980 — the height of the anti-DDT fervency that ran from the late 1960’s forward.
I wouldn’t spend too much effort trying to rehabilitate Carson’s reputation. Her ideas have been thoroughly discredited.
Re DDT –
For a grownup’s discussion of DDT and malaria this is a good place to start: Bate
The theme in the DDT story is depressingly familiar to anyone who has mucked around in the global warming issue: namely, how exaggeration and mischaracterization in the service of an ideology produce disastrous public policy.
The 1972 edition of Silent Spring contained this publisher’s summary:
That from the publisher, mind you.
White American liberals are secure in their knowledge of Rachel Carson’s sainthood, mainly because they do not suffer from malaria. It might be instructive, though, to consider this plea from the Director General of Health Services in Uganda Give us DDT!
You’re hell bent on slandering Rachel Carson despite a mountain of contradictory evidence. The woman never called for banning DDT and said in her own book that no responsible person should ignore insect-borne disease – but you refuse to acknowlege this.
Rachel Carson warned that to overuse DDT would lead to the devolpment of resistance to DDT in mosqitoes that would make malaria harder to combat, and she was correct, but you refuse to acknowlege that as well.
DDT was banned for agricultural and outdoor use, but the careful and appropriate indoor use of DDT was not banned. However you dishonestly present the agricultural and outdoor ban as a complete ban which it was not. Many countries continued to distribute mosquito netting treated with DDT.
During the entire time governments cut back on DDT there were other chemical agents available for use to combat disease carrying insects. Even now the World Health Organization urges that DDT be limited to indoor use. There is no inconsistency between indoor use of DDT and Ms. Carson’s recommendation that DDT’s excessive outdoor use be curbed.
In those areas that saw an increase in cases of malaria, there were multiple factors at work contributing to the rise, besides pesticide use, such as changes in land use that provided new mosquito habitat, and the movement of people into new, high-risk areas. So to infer a direct causality between a decline in the use of DDT and the rise of malaria deaths is incorrect and omits the influence of other explanatory variables. Again, the evolution of DDT resistant strains of mosquitoes resulting from overuse of DDT, was one of those explanatory variables.
The bigest lie of all in this dishonest presentation of the facts is the promotion of a false dichotomy, the insistence that we have to choose between protecting the environment or protecting human life, as if was an either-or proposition. It’s not. Human beings are part of the environment, and what hurts it, ultimately hurts us.
Rachel Carson became the symbol of a radical movement to ban DDT, some of it based on the faulty research in her book, and some of it based on the save the planet moral fervor we see emerging every decade or so in different manifestations (Erlichian population control, global warming).
So when you say there was no ban, sure, in a strict legal sense, you are correct. If you mean however, that no misinformed moral fervor existed that effectively banned DDT in the third world, you are incorrect. Read the WHO report again. They admit as much.
Look, good motives don’t justify bad ideas. Carson’s legacy is mixed. That’s the fact.
So when you write:
… In this case Dean, the “protecting the environment” rationale led to loss of life — fed by the moral fervor of radical environmentalists. You can see why some of us look at the global warming fervor (in the Al Gore, “We are the World!”, variety) with a bit more sobriety.
The implication that challenging global warming data (the way Gore and company package it) shows reckless disregard for the enviroment and thus human life is a moral charge drawn from the well of that fervor. If Carson’s disciples had listened more to science, malaria would be less wide-spread in the Third World today.
The Cancerous Legacy Of Rachel Carson
Dennis T. Avery
CHURCHVILLE, VA—Six women in one of my neighbor families have breast cancer. Statistically, only one woman in eleven will contract it. The family told the local newspaper that it must be the pesticides sprayed by nearby farmers.
This is the cancerous legacy of Rachel Carson. She set people against their neighbors, their own food needs and the preservation of wildlands.
As we approach the 40th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s famous book, Silent Spring, we know that this brilliant writer and marine biologist did us a terrible disservice. She went beyond science to make predictions about the awful risks she believed would be found in the use of modern pesticides—and she was wrong.
My neighboring cancer-beset family rejects the idea of a genetic linkage in their cancers, though research shows an important genetic factor in breast and ovarian cancer.
They prefer to blame farmers, though science shows no linkage between cancer and today’s pesticides. The only pesticide ever approved for U.S. farm use that is proven to cause cancer in humans was a ‘natural’ pesticide (a highly toxic mixture of lead and arsenic) which was displaced by much safer synthetic pesticides 40 years ago.
The family also rejects the uncomforting laws of probability, which say that some families and communities will get more than their “fair share” of cancers—some of them much more.
The cancer-stricken family, in its grief and anger, is attacking its neighbors—farmers who help produce the safest, most abundant food supply in history, even as their high yields preserve millions of acres of bird and wildlife habitat from the plow.
In fact, most of the local farms mostly raise beef and dairy cattle on grass pastures and hay, with very little pesticide use. Of course an external cancer cause would affect more than one family and farm families, as a group, have lower cancer rates than other members of the population.
Rachel Carson said that many of the pesticides then in use by farmers would be proven to cause cancer in humans. None of them have. The Environmental Protection Agency keeps talking about “likely human carcinogens.” They’ve now even included one of the organic pesticides, pyrethrum, in this category. But the label simply means the compound causes tumors in laboratory rats at ultra-high doses. The dose makes the poison. The National Research Council and the National Cancer Institute agree that Ms. Carson was wrong and the pesticide residues are safe.
Link
May 25, 2007
Rachel Carson and the Deaths of Millions
By J.R. Dunn
At times it seems that there are more sites honoring Rachel Carson than Josef Stalin at his peak. There’s an environmental advocacy institute (at Chatham University, her alma mater), a state office building in Harrisburg, several research institutions, a number of schools (no less than eight, by my count), and here in Pittsburgh, we got this bridge.
The bridge in question, once known as the 9th Street Bridge, was renamed the Rachel Carson Bridge late last year at the request of Esther L. Barazzone, president of Chatham University. It’s one of three downtown suspension bridges crossing the Allegheny. Together they’re known as the “Three Sisters”. The other two are named for Roberto Clemente and Andy Warhol, respectively. (Andy probably wouldn’t have minded the “sisters” appellation, but as for Roberto… I wouldn’t care to speculate.)
The renaming resolution was a piece of political boilerplate passed unanimously by the Allegheny County Council with no debate or publicity. According to Eileen Watt, who sponsored the motion, the Council was looking to honor a woman who was a native of Pittsburgh. (Which is not quite the case, Carson having been raised in Springdale, twenty miles north.) Very little mention was made concerning Carson’s actual accomplishments, something for which the Council may come to feel grateful.
Because Carson’s accomplishments are effectively wrapped up in Silent Spring, a book hailed as “one of the five most influential of the 20th century” (Modern Library) and “One of the hundred most significant of the past millennium” (Life Magazine), but one which many view as one of those books, like Das Kapital and Mein Kampf, that we’d very much like to somehow see unwritten.
In 1958 Carson received a letter from her close friend Olga Huckins, which told a strange and alarming story. A short time previously, Huckins’ bird sanctuary north of Cape Cod had been sprayed for insects, leading to a mass die-off of birds. The pesticide implicated was DDT.
Carson looked into it, her alarm deepening she discovered several similar incidents involving fish and birds. Originally set on treating the subject in an article, she instead embarked on a book-length project, spending over four years on the manuscript that became Silent Spring.
Silent Spring was published in September 1962 to immediate and near-universal acclaim. It was a strange time in American history – the public had only recently endured scares over radioactive fallout from nuclear testing and a horrifying incident involving the pregnancy drug thalidomide, which led to gross birth defects. Silent Spring rode this wave of paranoia as if designed for it.
Along with a thirty-week run on The New York Times bestseller list, the book was discussed in the Senate, debated by Congressional committees, analyzed by the presidential Science Advisory Committee and widely covered on television. All of which was a deep pity, because Silent Spring was an extremely dishonest and flawed piece of work.
Carson’s book was rife with omissions, misrepresentations, and errors. She neglected to mention that the spraying of Huckin’s bird sanctuary was accompanied by fuel oil, which would have harmed the birds in and of itself. The fact that DDT had eliminated malaria in the northern hemisphere went unnoted. The threat of cancer (Carson herself had been diagnosed with breast cancer while at work on the book) was overemphasized — to put it mildly — on no scientific basis.
more
The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial Fiday on the Democratic debt to radical environmentalists:
Green Goodies: It’s payback time for another left-leaning lobby.
Fr. Hans writes: “Rachel Carson became the symbol of a radical movement to ban DDT, some of it based on the faulty research in her book . . . ”
From the American Scholar magazine, 2005, Vol. 74, Issue 3: “Early studies also indicated that DDT might be a carcinogen in humans, particularly with regard to breast cancer. (The compound concentrates in fatty tissue.) Subsequent studies did not bear out the cancer link.”
What you call “faulty research” was the state of research at that time.
Question: had you been a researcher at that time, and you knew that this chemical concentrates in fatty tissue, that it could be fed to infants in breast milk, and you knew that millions of pounds of it was being used in agriculture (at one point over 200 million pounds per year), what would you have recommended? Would you have said “no problem, we’ll just keep using this stuff, and if long-term studies show that it causes cancer or other disease, we’ll stop using it then.” Or would you have said “we need to take a step back and consider how we’re using this stuff and think about alternatives.”
JBL’s article from J. R. Dunn: “She neglected to mention that the spraying of Huckin’s bird sanctuary was accompanied by fuel oil . . . ”
The right wing always likes to present things like this as if they were scandals. Yes, she “neglected to mention.”
What J. R. Dunn neglected to mention is that DDT is not soluble in water, but is soluble in oil. So dissolving DDT in oil so that it could be sprayed is how it was used. This is why all the tests and experiments with DDT at that time involved dissolving it in oil of some kind. The results of the early DDT studies by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are here:
http://www.fws.gov/contaminants/Info/DDTNews.html#8221945
As you can see, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was researching the environmental effects of DDT 17 years before the publication of Silent Spring.
Jim said,
“The right wing always likes to present things like this as if they were scandals. Yes, she “neglected to mention.”
Well, even if we put the best construction on Rachel Carson’s work, doesn’t it speak to our limited insight into the environment? Should we take pause at the unintended consequenses of applying such insight big, fast, and as the result of political cheerleading?
Augie writes: “Well, even if we put the best construction on Rachel Carson’s work, doesn’t it speak to our limited insight into the environment? Should we take pause at the unintended consequenses of applying such insight big, fast, and as the result of political cheerleading?”
Sure. I agree completely. We do have limited insight. But as I pointed out, the federal Fish and Wildlife service had been doing research into the environmental effects of DDT for years before Carson wrote her book. So it’s not like she got a wild hair one day and invented this concern out of thin air. One of her main concerns, that an overuse of DDT could lead to DDT-resistant insects was correct, and in fact was already starting to happen when she wrote the book.
More importantly, doesn’t our limited insight into the environment argue for a more conservative (in the sense of cautious) approach to such issues.? In other words, before we put hundreds of millions of pounds of a persistent chemical that accumulates in body fat into the environment, shouldn’t we do the research first?
Many of these effects do not become known for years, such as lead in paint and the effects of tobacco use. The effects of radiation were not known for a long time. (I once saw a documentary on the end of the war in the pacific, and one idea that was discussed was clearing invasion routes into Japan through the use of atomic bombs, and then sending American soldiers into Japan through the areas that had thus been cleared. Looking back, sending troops into radioactive zones was not exactly the best idea, but at the time it seemed reasonable.)
Given our limited knowledge, and the fact that health risks can take a long time to become apparent, a truly conservative approach would be to tread lightly and think very carefully before we engage in these large-scale interventions with the hope of improving the environment.
Note 11.
So? The United States is studying global warming too. This hardly justifies the Kyoto Protocols.
False dichotomy. Criticizing activist fervor regarding the environment (thinking global warming) is not the same thing as advocating the rape and pillage of the environment. We need some sobriety surrounding these questions and running off to ban DDT without proper research (or pushing through draconian measures like the Kyoto Protocols), as well as painting critics of the fervor as Huns and Barbarians does not do the discussion justice.
I wish the environmentalist activists did indeed “think about alternatives” regarding DDT. A few million people would have been spared a brutal death. There’s no telling the catastrophic economic effects the Kyoto Protocals would impose, and thankfully we have some sober-minded politicians (and increasingly rare specie) refusing to play along with the activist agenda. I’ll give them the credit, not the fevered activists.
Fr. Hans writes: “We need some sobriety surrounding these questions . . .”
Great, I’m all in favor of that. Let’s be sober. Go back to the late 1940s. What you know about DDT is that it kills bugs, bugs become resistent to it eventually, it persists in the environment, and accumulates in animal and human fat. Beyond that, you have no idea what the human health or environmental effects might be. How many millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions tons of this chemical would you like to introduce into the environment?
Fr. Hans: ” . . . running off to ban DDT without proper research . . .”
What proper research was done to show that large-scale use of DDT was safe in the first place? I’m all ears.
In other words it seems to me that you’re saying that if we find something that kills bugs, we should just use it whether or not we know about any possible health effects. What’s your principle here? Spray and pray — that this stuff doesn’t have bad effects that you never considered? If you want to do spray and pray, please do that where you live, not where I live.
Fr. Hans: “I wish the environmentalist activists did indeed “think about alternatives” regarding DDT.”
There are alternatives, less broad-spectrum, but more expensive.
Fr. Hans: “A few million people would have been spared a brutal death.”
There are basically two uses of DDT: agricultural and vector control. When did Rachel Carson say that it shouldn’t be used for vector control? And what modern country uses it in agriculture?
In the 40s and 50s nobody knew whether DDT caused cancer or not. So we get back to the Clint Eastwood theory of large-scale introduction of unstudied pesticides: Do you feel lucky? Well do you?
Note 15. Jim writes:
Read my post again. What I said was that the anti-DDT movement of the sixties forward was environmentalism run amok; the same self-righteous, save the world, fervor we’ve seen with Erlich’s neo-Malthusian population control theory, and presently global warning.
Then I added that labelling the critics of the fervor as rapers and pillagers of the environment doesn’t advance the discussion.
Somewhere sobriety has to prevail. Bad ideas are not justified by (ostensibly) good motives.
Day of Reckoning for DDT Foes?
Last week’s announcement that the World Health Organization lifted its nearly 30-year ban on the insecticide DDT is perhaps the most promising development in global public health since… well, 1943 when DDT was first used to combat insect-borne diseases like typhus and malaria.
Overlooked in all the hoopla over the announcement, however, is the terrible toll in human lives (tens of millions dead — mostly pregnant women and children under the age of 5), illness (billions sickened) and poverty (more than $1 trillion dollars in lost GDP in sub-Saharan Africa alone) caused by the tragic, decades-long ban.
Much of this human catastrophe was preventable, so why did it happen? Who is responsible? Should the individuals and activist groups who caused the DDT ban be held accountable in some way?
Rachel Carson kicked-off DDT hysteria with her pseudo-scientific 1962 book, “Silent Spring.” Carson materially misrepresented DDT science in order to advance her anti-pesticide agenda. Today she is hailed as having launched the global environmental movement. A Pennsylvania state office building, Maryland elementary school, Pittsburgh bridge and a Maryland state park are named for her. The Smithsonian Institution commemorates her work against DDT. She was even honored with a 1981 U.S. postage stamp. Next year will be the 100th anniversary of her birth. Many celebrations are being planned.
It’s quite a tribute for someone who was so dead wrong. At the very least, her name should be removed from public property and there should be no government-sponsored honors of Carson.
The Audubon Society was a leader in the attack on DDT, including falsely accusing DDT defenders (who subsequently won a libel suit) of lying. Not wanting to jeopardize its non-profit tax status, the Audubon Society formed the Environmental Defense Fund (now simply known as Environmental Defense) in 1967 to spearhead its anti-DDT efforts. Today the National Audubon Society takes in more than $100 million per year and has assets worth more than $200 million. Environmental Defense takes in more than $65 million per year with a net worth exceeding $73 million.
In a February 25, 1971, media release, the president of the Sierra Club stated that his organization wanted “a ban, not just a curb” on DDT, “even in the tropical countries where DDT has kept malaria under control.” Today the Sierra Club rakes in more than $90 million per year and has more than $50 million in assets.
[ … ]
Business are often held liable and forced to pay monetary damages for defective products and false statements. Why shouldn’t the National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense, Sierra Club and other anti-DDT activist groups be held liable for the harm caused by their recklessly defective activism?
It was, of course, then-Environmental Protection Agency administrator William Ruckelshaus who actually banned DDT after ignoring an EPA administrative law judge’s ruling that there was no evidence indicating that DDT posed any sort of threat to human health or the environment. Ruckleshaus never attended any of the agency’s hearings on DDT. He didn’t read the hearing transcripts and refused to explain his decision.
. . . more
Father: By quoting the The Fox News (Number 17) article you are simply rehashing the same untrue statements that you already know to be false.
The WHO (World Health Organization) only lifted the ban on the indoor use of DDT, but Fox would have it’s readers believe that a total ban was being lifted.
Fox attributes a “terrible toll in human lives (tens of millions dead — mostly pregnant women and children”. This is despite the fact that there were many other explanatory variables for the increase in malaria cases. One of those variables was the evolution of new strains of DDT resistant mosquitoes resulting from prior overuse of DDT.
Lastly Fox News, citing an administrative law judges decision, wants to leave its readers with the clear impression that there is “no evidence indicating that DDT posed any sort of threat to human health or the environment.”
In fact, high levels of DDT are harmful to humans, while even short-term exposure to DDT has been shown to damage reproduction in animals. The US Department of Health and Human Services has determined that DDT is reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.
The web site for Agency for Toxic Subtances and Disease Registry, a branch of the US Department of Health and Human Services provides this information:
1.5 How can DDT, DDE, and DDD affect my health?
So when we “deconstruct” all this information what do we have?
We have an example of one of those complex public policy issue in which decsion makers are faced with strong pros and cons, that is strong competeing arguments for seemingly opposing courses of action. As often happens, sometimes leaders first lean too heavily towards one viewpoint, and then after a serious setback, swing towards the other viewpoint. Eventaully, through trial and error, the proper course of action becomes evident.
This is, in fact, what happened in third world countries afflicted with malaria. First, they used too much DDT. Then the development of resistannt strains of mosquitoes and reports of the environmental dangers of DDT caused them to cut back too much. However the cost of alternative insecticides was much higher than the cost of DDT, and human migration into rainforest s led to new increases in mosquito habitat and cases of malaria. So they took another look at DDT weighed the scientific evidence and decided the indoor use of DDT was safe.
Certainly some decision makers did err too much on the side of caution in deciding to prohibit any use of DDT, but out of ignorance, and not because they were in the thrall of environmentalism
This is a far cry from the p sensationalized and hysterical picture painted by Fox and FrontPage that would have readers believe that environmentaists promoted a false “dogma” which made them insensitive to the human toll of malaria or other insect borne diseases.
Fr. Hans posts: “Day of Reckoning for DDT Foes?”
This is an interesting article, not for its content, which contains the usual exaggerations and misrepresentations, but for its author.
Steven Milloy, the author of this piece, earns money from corporations that have a “science problem” by attacking the science. He has been a registered lobbyist for the chemical industry and also has been a consultant and advocate for the tobacco industry. For example, in recent years
Like all good propagandists he mixes legitimate critiques of science with disinformation and absolute falsehoods. He was a paid player in the tobacco industry’s attack on the science behind the dangers of secondhand smoke, attacking the science and claiming that secondhand tobacco smoke was harmless.
In a previous post in this thread (#8) JBL posted an article (by a right wing author, of course) asserting that, “The National Research Council and the National Cancer Institute agree that Ms. Carson was wrong and the pesticide residues are safe.”
Of course, this is not what the National Cancer Institute said.
http://www.ufscc.ufl.edu/Patient/cancernews.aspx
?section=cancernews&id=37668
This certainly expands the meaning of “safe.” Of course, being a member of the reality-based community, I hope that more research is done to confirm or refine or refute the results of this study. Unlike others in this venue, I do not consider any single study to be “proof,” whether or not the results agree with my ideology.
But I digress. If, as JBL does, we’re going to take seriously the opinions of the National Cancer Institute, let’s look at what they have to say about secondhand smoke:
http://www.cancer.gov/templates/doc.aspx?
viewid=3770DA1D-1C3A-4A1C-905F-944140049158
The article goes on to document many other health problems caused by secondhand smoke.
But the author of your article, in spite of the known research, said that there’s no risk of secondhand smoke. In other words, he’s guilty of exactly the same thing that he accuses Carson of. In fact, he’s more guilty since he’s in the pocket of the tobacco industry, aided and abetted by all of his right-wing pals who spread his disinformation for him. (If Rachel Carson is a member of a “murderous church,” of what church is Steven Milloy a member?)
But for the right wing, having a paid tobacco consultant and chemical industry lobbyist criticize Rachel Carson is all in a day’s work. Nobody even bats an eye. To me, on a ‘bizarre scale’ of 1 to 10, that scores an 11.
I’m thinking for an encore maybe you can post an article by a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan criticizing Jesse Jackson. And why not? As long it discredits “the left,” who cares what the source is?
So Dean S., any comment to the article by Dr. Sam Zaramba? It was in the Wall Street Journal link in Tom C’s note 5? Zaramba said,
“Although Uganda’s National Environmental Management Authority has approved DDT for malaria control, Western environmentalists continue to undermine our efforts and discourage G-8 governments from supporting us. The EU has acknowledged our right to use DDT, but some consumer and agricultural groups repeat myths and lies about the chemical. They should instead help us use it strictly to control malaria.
Wouldn’t surprise me if the “consumer and agricultural groups” were treating DDT the way you’ve been treating global warming.
I agree that the Rachel Carson critics often overstate the degree to which she is personally culpable for the needless malaria deaths. The title of the article on which this thread is based is needlessly inflammatory.
Jim Holman’s approach to her defense has been one of “all the facts were not known, so it is better to err on the side of caution”. I don’t agree with that take on things, but for the sake of argument, let’s concede the point. So, now I have two questions:
1) Why is she due adulation? Isn’t it strange that someone who writes a book (filled with bad science) and warms of dangers that don’t come true, and in fact contributes to wrong-headed approaches to a problem should be put on such a pedestal. (As in the case of Paul Ehrlich, only in the weird world of environmentalism can someone win praises for constantly being wrong.) Why are generations of kids told that she was a great scientist and a hero? The publisher’s note on her book says that she “sounded the alarm”. Why is that good if it was the wrong alarm?
It does no good to fall back on the claim that she “advocated moderate use” and “warned against insects developing resistance”. These were hardly novel concepts, and she was not the only one who spoke of them. In fact, the scientific world was developing an accurate understanding of these issues before and while she wrote the book.
So, why are we required to lionize Rachel Carson?
2) Why has it taken 30 years for the WHO to authorize the commonsense use of this chemical that was proven to save lives long ago?
Persons on the left rarely understand that it takes a large multi-national chemical company like Dupont or Monsanto to undertake complex efforts like supply of a pesticide to remote corners of the world. They have the resources to do the research on optimum usage, to send application experts to the countries that are purchasing it, to ensure uninterrupted distribution, to monitor results and adjust strategies, etc. The real effect of the ban in the US and most other developed countries was to put manufacture in the hands of small foreign firms that could not mount such an effort. That is part reason why efforts were fitful and scattered for so many years.
And it was definitely the anti-chemical climate engendered by the environmentalists that kept responsible multi-nationals from attempting re-entry into the market.
Jim Holman – Chemical companies are not evil and neither are lobbyists for chemical companies. Also, the carcinogenic studies you cite are so far divorced from real-life ingestion scenarios that they are essentially worthless. But even if there is a small, statistical risk, that must be weighed against the huge risk of malaria in the countries in question. The residents of those countries understand this. Comfortable Americans who are worried about a 3 part per million theoretical cancer risk usually don’t understand this.
Tom C writes: “Jim Holman’s approach to her defense has been one of “all the facts were not known, so it is better to err on the side of caution”. I don’t agree with that take on things . . . ”
Ok, what is your take on things? Go back 50 years. Here’s this white substance. We know that it is a broad spectrum insecticide. We know that it persists in the environment and accumulates in body fat. We know that it doesn’t do any short-term harm to people who are exposed to it, but we don’t know what might be the effects of long-term exposure. We suspect that it may be harmful to wildlife. We don’t know what the long-term environmental effects might be. Question: how many tens of millions of pounds of this substance should be sprayed on crops?
Tom C: “The publisher’s note on her book says that she “sounded the alarm”. Why is that good if it was the wrong alarm?”
The question to ask is what would the world have been like if we had continued to introduce hundreds of millions of pounds of insecticides and herbicides into the environment with little thought to the long-term consequences. For example, we know that DDT is very toxic to fish. What would today’s fisheries look like had ended up putting another few billion pounds of it into the environment? Fortunately, that didn’t happen, and it didn’t due in part to people such as Carson who raised legitimate concerns. Were they right on all the details? No. Were they right in raising the concerns? Absolutely.
Tom C: “The real effect of the ban in the US and most other developed countries was to put manufacture in the hands of small foreign firms that could not mount such an effort. That is part reason why efforts were fitful and scattered for so many years.”
I’m not sure what you point is here. That the U.S. should have continued to use tens of millions of pounds of DDT on crops in order to make sure that larger chemical firms could continue to manufacture it?
Tom C: “Jim Holman – Chemical companies are not evil and neither are lobbyists for chemical companies.”
Not, they’re not. But there’s a huge irony here. Al Gore starts an investment company based on his interest in the issue of global warming, and that is seen as a “conflict of interest,” “hypocrisy,” and so on, to the extent that it discredits his opinions. But when a registered lobbyist for the chemical industry holds forth of the virtues of DDT and the evils of environmentalism, nobody is concerned.
The guy in question is a paid consultant for an industry marketing an addictive product that causes countless millions of deaths and incidents of disease around the world, help them with their “science issues.” But in the right wing world he is described as an “adjunct scholar” of various institutes. He is a “debunker” of “junk science.” He talks about “blood dripping from the hands of Rachel Carson,” and everyone on the right stands up and cheers, even as they completely ignore what this guy does for a living. People on the right are so anxious to discredit their political opponents that they would post articles from Satan if it would help “the cause.” What’s next? An article by an arms dealer attacking the peace movement?
Tom C: “Also, the carcinogenic studies you cite are so far divorced from real-life ingestion scenarios that they are essentially worthless.”
No, the study I cited was based on people in China who had ingested DDT through normal means. This was not an animal study.
Tom C: “But even if there is a small, statistical risk, that must be weighed against the huge risk of malaria in the countries in question.”
Which is why even Greenpeace and the WWF came out in favor of indoor spraying of DDT over two years ago.
Tom – Thank you for that comment at the top of 22. Sometimes there are policy issues that offer us no easy answers and the only alternatives we have to choose from is bad or worse. Your point that sometimes we need to weigh the comparative risks is well taken.
Jim Holman –
You might want to read this article Greens Vs. World’s Poor. Amir Attaran, from that notorious right-wing think tank The Harvard University Center for International Development, says
Attaran also says
But why should we listen to him, he is only a Harvard-based expert in the field. Better to listen to our old friend Al Gore, who wrote this in a preface to Silent Spring:
It is also clear from this article that environmental groups have fought every use of DDT for vector control, even as late as 2000.
I do not think that Rachel Carson deserves to be celebrated for sloppy thinking that lacked context and nuance and led to disastrous public policy. The real hero is Fred Soper, profiled here in that notorious right-wing publication The New Yorker. Gladwell
Please read this very well-written article, as it demonstrates that issues of over-use and improper use were being addressed by experts long before Silent Spring. Once again, Carson’s transgression was one of exaggeration.
The link to the DDT-cancer paper you provided did not work so I could not evaluate it. However, you still do not understand how your take on this issue is so rich-American-centric. Maybe a four-fold increase in liver cancer for people you have ingested DDT is nothing compared to losing 800,000 children per year from malaria. Scores of environmental issues come down to a similar sort of tradeoff, and eco-fundamentalism always leads to the poor losing out.
Jim Holman
For an excellent example of exaggeration I refer to your post #23. In paragraph 2 you wonder about the effect of “tens of millions of pounds” of DDT sprayed on crops.
In paragraph 4 you upped the ante to “hundreds of millions of pounds in the environment”.
Later in the the same paragraph you bring it to a climax by thundering about “a few billion pounds” of DDT in fisheries.
Nice escalation into the realm of fantasy there.
And then you close with this:
Wow, after all those huge numbers, two whole years ago? The question we ask is “why not two score years ago”?
Tom writes: “In paragraph 2 you wonder about the effect of “tens of millions of pounds” of DDT sprayed on crops.
In paragraph 4 you upped the ante to “hundreds of millions of pounds in the environment”.
Later in the the same paragraph you bring it to a climax by thundering about “a few billion pounds” of DDT in fisheries.
Paragraph 2 – tens of millions of pounds of DDT were being sprayed on crops. From what I read as much as 220 millions of pounds of DDT were manufactured in the U.S. at one point. How much of that was exported I don’t know. Surely not all was used here.
Paragraph 4, first citation — I was referring in general not just to DDT but to all the other insecticides and herbicides in common use. You could also add to that fungicides and chemical fertilizers. (Years ago I used to sell lawn and garden chemicals. Some of that stuff is pretty nasty. I worked for a boss with a pretty relaxed attitude about safety. He once told a customer that Sevin (N-methyl carbamate insecticide – basically a powdered nerve agent) was so safe “you could put it in your coffee.” Needless to say, I didn’t.)
Paragraph 4, second citation – I was referring to the cumulative effect of tens of millions of pounds of DDT applied to agricultural crops from 1972 to today, assuming that DDT applied to crops had not been discontinued in 1972. That would add up to some billions of pounds.
Anyway, I wasn’t clear, and you were right to question. The fault is mine.
Note 25. Tom C, great article (on Soper).
#24 Dean Scourtes
Thanks for the kind words. It makes no sense to complain about exaggeration and then exaggerate in the other direction.