Posted on 05/21/2019 5:10:13 PM PDT by Rummyfan
On Jan. 24, 2017, PBS aired a two-hour special on Rachel Carson, the mother of the environmental movement. Although the program crossed the line from biography to hagiography, in Carson’s case, the unbridled praise was well deserved – with one exception.
Rachel Carson was an American hero. In the early 1960s, she was the first to warn that a pesticide called DDT could accumulate in the environment, the first to show that it could harm fish, birds, and other wildlife, the first to warn that its overuse would render it ineffective, and the first to predict that more natural means of pest control – like bacteria that killed mosquito larvae – should be used instead.
Unfortunately, the PBS documentary neglected to mention that in her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, Carson had made one critical mistake – and it cost millions of people their lives.
On Nov. 1, 1941, Rachel Carson published her first book, Under the Sea-Wind. Although written for adults, the book had a child-like sense of wonder. Under the Sea-Wind told the story of Silverbar, a sanderling that migrated from the Arctic Circle to Argentina; Scomber, a mackerel that traveled from New England to the Continental Shelf; and Anguilla, an American eel that journeyed to the Sargasso Sea to spawn. “There is poetry here,” wrote one reviewer.
On July 2, 1951, Carson published her second book, The Sea Around Us. Two months later, The Sea Around Us was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for 39 weeks: a record. When the dust settled, The Sea Around Us had sold more than 1.3 million copies, been translated into 32 languages, won the National Book Award, and been made into a movie. Editors of the country’s leading newspapers voted Rachel Carson “Woman of the Year.”
In October 1955, Carson published her third book, The Edge of the Sea, a tour guide for the casual adventurer. The New Yorker serialized it, critics praised it and the public loved it: more than 70,000 copies were sold as it rocketed to #4 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Today, most people under the age of 40 have probably never heard of Rachel Carson. But in the early 1960s, almost every American knew her name.
On Sept. 27, 1962, Rachel Carson changed her tone. Her next book, Silent Spring, which she called her “poison book,” was an angry, no-holds-barred polemic against pesticides: especially DDT.
The first chapter of Silent Spring, titled “A Fable for Tomorrow,” was almost biblical, appealing to our sense that we had sinned against our Creator. “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change… the cattle and sheep sickened and died… streams were lifeless… everywhere there was the shadow of death.”
Birds, especially, had fallen victim to this strange evil. In a town that had once “throbbed with scores of bird voices there was now no sound, only silence.” A silent spring. Birds weren’t alone in their suffering. According to Carson, children suffered sudden death, aplastic anemia, birth defects, liver disease, chromosomal abnormalities, and leukemia – all caused by DDT. And women suffered infertility and uterine cancer.
Carson made it clear that she wasn’t talking about something that might happen – she was talking about something that had happened. Our war against nature had become a war against ourselves.
In May 1963, Rachel Carson appeared before the Department of Commerce and asked for a “Pesticide Commission” to regulate the untethered use of DDT. Ten years later, Carson’s “Pesticide Commission” became the Environmental Protection Agency, which immediately banned DDT. Following America’s lead, support for international use of DDT quickly dried up.
Although DDT soon became synonymous with poison, the pesticide was an effective weapon in the fight against an infection that has killed – and continues to kill – more people than any other: malaria.
By 1960, due largely to DDT, malaria had been eliminated from 11 countries, including the United States. As malaria rates went down, life expectancies went up; as did crop production, land values, and relative wealth.
Probably no country benefited from DDT more than Nepal, where spraying began in 1960. At the time, more than two million Nepalese, mostly children, suffered from malaria. By 1968, the number was reduced to 2,500; and life expectancy increased from 28 to 42 years.
After DDT was banned, malaria reemerged across the globe:
In India, between 1952 and 1962, DDT caused a decrease in annual malaria cases from 100 million to 60,000. By the late 1970s, no longer able to use DDT, the number of cases increased to 6 million. In Sri Lanka, before the use of DDT, 2.8 million people suffered from malaria. When the spraying stopped, only 17 people suffered from the disease. Then, no longer able to use DDT, Sri Lanka suffered a massive malaria epidemic: 1.5 million people were infected by the parasite. In South Africa, after DDT became unavailable, the number of malaria cases increased from 8,500 to 42,000 and malaria deaths from 22 to 320.
Since the mid-1970s, when DDT was eliminated from global eradication efforts, tens of millions of people have died from malaria unnecessarily: most have been children less than five years old. While it was reasonable to have banned DDT for agricultural use, it was unreasonable to have eliminated it from public health use.
Environmentalists have argued that when it came to DDT, it was pick your poison. If DDT was banned, more people would die from malaria. But if DDT wasn’t banned, people would suffer and die from a variety of other diseases, not the least of which was cancer. However, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed.
Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented – far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place.
Carson’s supporters argued that, had she lived longer, she would never have promoted a ban on DDT for the control of malaria. Indeed, in Silent Spring, Carson wrote, “It is not my contention that chemical pesticides never be used.” But it was her contention that DDT caused leukemia, liver disease, birth defects, premature births, and a whole range of chronic illnesses.
An influential author can’t, on the one hand, claim that DDT causes leukemia (which, in 1962, was a death sentence) and then, on the other hand, expect that anything less than that a total ban of the chemical would result.
In 2006, the World Health Organization reinstated DDT as part of its effort to eradicate malaria. But not before millions of people had died needlessly from the disease.
Just another California Blissninny.
Since the world wasn’t a happy flowery little place all the time where everything is always peachy, the halfwit went coo-coo and decided that it was the Big Blue Meanies who did it.
Everything you hear out of CA stems from this attitude, especially in NorCal.
They never stop being children. Maturity is for suckers.
Having lived here for almost 4 decades it really defined what happened in the ‘60s for me: these twerps just couldn’t cope, so they went off the deep end.
Elderly Baby Boomer wannabe Rachel’s wander the streets of Palo Alto to this day, wearing their sneakers and fisherman’s hats mumbling to themselves with Hillary! bumperstickers on the back of their Prius.
Liberal-Nonsense-Killed-Millions-Of-Children BUMP
The science in the 50s did not exist to make an informed determination whether long term exposure to DDT caused an elevated risk of cancer. It had been tested on soldiers and prisoners and was found not to be toxic in doses that were used for fumigation and pest control. Unlike cigarettes that could be controlled for in an observational study, the widespread use of DDT meant nearly everyone on the planet had been exposed to it so there was no control group to compare with. The ban was justified based on the notion that there must be some non-zero risk of causing cancer so better safe than sorry. This ignored the risk/benefit analysis that showed it would save millions of lives even if it had a small chance of causing cancer. The real reason it got banned was because it gave the emerging EPA enormous political and economic power to regulate the chemical industry.
I did the same in 1956 New Mexico! The DDT fog was so cooling on a hot day!
Killing millions is the main goal of the environmental nuts.
Yes she is. May she rot in hell. Worship at the alter of human deity. DDT saved millions. Bushes singlehanded pulled off a multimillion iLife scam.
iirc, about 1 million people, mostly children, are STILL dying every YEAR due to malaria and other mosiquito borne diesease.
Bill Gates has to get with it on the donations of insect nets over the beds.
Of course nobody mention that most of the malaria deaths were black....millions....a liberal’s true outcome. Guess there were no planned parentoods in Africa and India.
We used to chase that thing on our bicycles riding in and out of the cloud like children following the Pied Piper.
Same here except it was on Barksdale AFB in NW Louisiana.
Back in the 90s I took my young daughters to the Smithstonian Institute in DC where I was appalled to find a bunch of politically correct exhibits. One of these was about the dangers of chemicals in the environment and the “great” female scientist Rachel Carson. I explained to my kids how she had DDT banned and how this resulted in the deaths of millions of people. Standing nearby was a teacher and a group of school kids who unknowingly had heard me. The teacher got a horrified look on her face and led the students to another exhibit. It was awesome.
“There were a total of 118 deaths due to malaria in the United States between 1979 and 1998 with an average of 5.9 deaths per year.”
“Malaria kills 1 million to 2 million people every year. 90% of the deaths occur in Africa.”
Not seeing a problem here.
A fun little story:
Placebo Defect · Stephen A. Kallis, Jr. · Analog Science Fiction & Fact [v112 #15, Mid-December 1992]
Too bad we all died early.
...oh wait...
Too bad she isn’t still around so she could be prosecuted. Do people realize what a huge problem was created from her stupidity?
Look, I like birds, too. But if birds have to be killed to save humans, I’m fine with it. We’re in the End Times, anyway, so ALL species will be extinct soon anyway.
This whole DDT ban makes me angry. The next-worse thing the enviroNUTS did was to to take lead out of fuel and paint. A close third is the ban on asbestos.
Pissing on her grave is on my bucket list
Contracted malaria about 15 years ago and while it hasnt been much of a problem the last few years its been inconvenient and far from pleasant
Maybe she was afraid to point a finger at the pesticide women ingest regularly to combat inconvenient children.
“Two books in this century have killed 100 million people. The first, you know (brings out Mein Kampf in his left hand), the second may surprise you” (brings out Silent Spring in his right hand).
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It’s good he shocked his audience, but he should have been pushing a book cart because the collected works of communists have killed as many or more than both the above together.
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