Even the claim that DDT was responsible for the thinning of egg shells was a lie. A division of UofCal Berkeley’s Dept of Public Health published the results of experiment demonstrating the opposite. DDT was actually, where the dosage was not lethal, causing thickening of egg shell. The damage done to fecundity (reproductive productivity) of peregrine falcons was done by environmentalists, including those working for the EPA, who tramped all over the breeding grounds of the falcons on the Anacapa Island (one of the Channel Islands off the Coast of Santa Barbara) at least once a week. They knew little about the Peregrins, which are well known to ornithologists as extremely shy, and who will abandon their nests when disturbed.
The head of the EPA had these data but played it politically safe by bending to the media savvy environmentalists in the early 70s resulting in the estimated deaths of between 30 and 40 million African children, the must vulnerable to death from Malaria.
Dr. J Gordon Edwards, a professor of entomology at San Jose State, horrified with the destruction being caused by ignorant environmentalists, published extensively, testified before Congress, and collaborated with many in science to try, in the face of a typically recalcitrant media, to bring the truth. Our media, as usual, supported the far left, including Carson. Here is one of the popular papers written by Edwards, a man who really cared both about birds, insects, and forest, one of the real environmentalists who spent virtually every summer helping to protect forests, an early member, before it became front for bourgeois Marxist lawyers.
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/summ02/Carson.html
Highly interesting. Thank you for posting.
I’ve known for some time that Silent Spring was bogus, but sadly, in my youth, I believed that Rachel Carson was a brave trail-blazing scientist. I looked up to my teachers who pushed the enviro nuttiness. (I’m not sure they are entirely to blame, since they probably got it from their teacher who they trusted and respected. Back then, there was no internet and few, if any, sources of information to refute the claims of the environmentalists.)