Posted on 05/26/2007 8:27:50 PM PDT by GMMAC
If ignorance is “evil”.
You could say the same thing about many things - and people.
I guess that you miss the point. The point is that her erroneous ideas resulted the the deaths of hundreds of millions, while Hitlers intentional slaughter was only able to kill tens of millions. Do you get the point of this type of comparison now?
I’m afraid I have to disagree with you; intentions don’t matter, ultimate results do. Otherwise, it would be the road to heaven and not hell that would be paved with them.
That said, classification does matter. I agree that Rachel Carson is not in the same category as Adolf Hitler, as Hitler intended to do evil and Carson did not. She really should be classed with the people who, when faced with Hitler’s evil, chose to appease it.
Just as the peace-at-any-cost crowd’s policies in practice resulted in unilateral disarmament, so the policies that sprang from Carson’s writings left tens of millions of innocents defenseless against a natural scourge far more ruthless and devastating than any human malice.
Such articles refer to the non-scientific hysteria which caused the end of the use of the most effective chemical used to kill mosquitoes and, thus, control malaria. There was simply no science to support the anti-DDT hysteria which caused the ban and the millions of human deaths which followed.
Trying to do the best we can with the information we currently have is all that we can do. Yes, too many times it goes terribly wrong - that doesn’t make us an appeaser or evil. It makes us human.
Not very long ago we sealed tin cans containing food with lead solder. The same with water pipes. It killed or seriously harmed at least tens of thousands of people if not hundreds of thousands or more. Somebody made that choice. It had terrible consequences. The people that made that choice weren’t evil, weren’t bad - they were just human doing the best they could at the time. I can’t fault them for that regardless of the consequences. Again, intentions matter.
The same goes for engineers that built the things we use. Early suspension bridge engineers didn’t know about resonances and damping or metal fatigue and there affect on large structures. When they built new things with the best of intentions the best they knew how and they sometimes failed with people dying as a result. They weren’t appeasers, they weren’t evil and they didn’t deserve to be put to death for murder. They were humans pushing the limits of our knowledge doing the best they could at the time. We learned from it, expanded our knowledge and applied it the next time.
So if only the consequences matter, if you give a cookie that has peanut butter in it to someone and they die because they have a peanut allergy that you didn't know about are you guilty of murder? After all, the consequences were the death of an innocent person. Take the same scenario only you know they are allergic to peanuts.
Intentions matter.
That’s all true.
But that doesn’t make Carson a “mass murderer”.
There a many at fault. Consider how long its been since that book was publish without being fully refuted until now even as more information became available many years ago.
Parasitic nematodes are another example of a biological control, and can be used to control cricket and grasshopper larva, and many grubs in the lawn and in trees.
If you want to control dandelions and many lawn weeds you can support US farmers and use corn meal gluten (a by- product of corn syrup production.) We have more options than to just pay Dow Chemical or Chevron to nuke all the bugs in your quarter section.
On the other hand, we have bees dying off. Is this some new pesticide or microwave radiation? Pesticide—like DDT—does not discriminate between “Bad” and “Good” insects. Kills the pollinators and non pollinators, and good predators of bad insects. Cant answer whether bees are dying as a result of pesticides, but if we lose the bees we have a big problem. Hard to pollinate 1500 acres of tomatoes by hand.
Enviro-vangelism was still the order of the day in the 80's and 90's when I was in school, and it's school that made it possible. Indeed, the substitution of fake secular ideologies and Southern California quasi-religions for genuine religions is among school's great corrosive impacts on the modern world.
I’m afraid I have to continue to disagree with you there. Everyday, health professionals, military and police, heck, people just driving to work not intending to harm other people. On the contrary, the majority of people on this planet want to be of at least some service to their fellow human beings.
Still, mistakes happen and consequences follow. And we learn and progress, or in some really tragic circumstances regress from the results. Either way, none of us ever overcome the consequences of our actions and often our original intentions only serve to haunt us later.
Unfair? You bet-but that’s life.
Prove me wrong.
More people have dies from preventable things that DDT could have stopped than Hitler killed.
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