Rachel Carson: Murderer

Activists in the environmentalist movement have a callous disregard for people. You say: "What do you mean, Williams? We can't think of a more caring people." First, I'm not talking about sensible people who're concerned about clean air and water. I'm talking about the movement leaders and the politicians they have under their thumbs. Let's look at it.

The New York Green Party said in its opposition to pesticide spraying to halt the spread of West Nile disease, "These diseases only kill the old and people whose health is already poor." In East Meadow and Hempstead, N.Y., local officials, following the advice of environmental activists, decided not to spray. Nassau County's Health Commissioner said, "We believe the risk of infection for residents remains quite low." Two county residents became infected with West Nile disease and died. Environment activist Lynn Landes says, "West Nile may be a nasty experience for a very few, fatal for an exceedingly rare number, but as diseases go it's no big deal." According to the most recent Centers for Disease Control statistics, 2,530 Americans have been infected with West Nile disease and 125 died, but to environmentalists that's "no big deal."

American deaths due to environmental activist callousness pale in comparison to other countries. How about a few statistics? In 1972, the activist-controlled Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT, a pesticide once considered a "miracle" for all of the lives it saved by killing the mosquitoes that carried malaria. The ban went into effect despite the evidence that with proper use it posed no health hazard to humans and only little substantial harm to animals. The EPA ban led to diminished DDT production, making the pesticide less available to the world.

What were the effects? In what is now Sri Lanka, there were 2,800,000 malaria cases and 7,300 malaria deaths in 1948; with the use of DDT there were only 17 cases and no deaths in 1964. After DDT use was discontinued, Sri Lankan malaria cases rose to 500,000 in 1969.

Worldwide, malaria's devastating effects all but ended during the time that DDT use was widespread, roughly from 1950 to 1970. DDT was seen as such a miracle that it earned Dr. Paul Muller the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1948. In 1970, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences wrote: "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. In a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that otherwise would have been inevitable."

According to the World Health Organization, now about 2.5 million people die of malaria each year. Most of the victims are in Africa and are children. According to the American Council on Science and Health's president, Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, some 60 million or more lives have been needlessly lost since the ban on DDT took effect. Whelan says, "It's a real tragedy that DDT has been so demonized over the years by activist organizations such as Environmental Defense and the regulatory bodies that they have duped."

C.S. Lewis made an observation applicable to do-gooders everywhere: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Yow. This article struck me as preaching to the choir, but then I went back and read it carefully. I had thought it was saying "Environmentalists are morons". I still suspect that is the underlying message, but the author does allow for the possibility of "sensible people who care about clean air and water."

It's always stuck me as contradictory that I see so many posts here ridiculing environmentalists. It seems to me a black-and-white issue: it's cheaper to keep a river clean in the first place than it is to try and restore it once it's been trashed; if we don't try and stop companies from dumping toxics into the bay, then for every dollar they save by not dealing with their own waste I'll have to spend ten as a taxpayer to clean up later; if we don't limit logging in Washington State then we're letting the loggers drive the fishermen out of work (seems like they gotta share the pie); if we restrict EPA enforcement efforts then we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and we'll end up paying for Superfund cleanups out of taxpayer dollars.

I'm very pro-greed and very anti-stupid. Seems to me like the longer we keep the golden goose producing, the richer we get. Sensible environmentalism seems to me like the good kind of greed, which is long-term greed. Look at the benefits of water that purifies itself and air that refreshes itself, two products of a healthy environment: that's a golden goose worth guarding.

Why on earth isn't the environment a top priority for people who consider themselves conservatives? Why does it seem like a conservative response to wacked-out environmental policy is to eliminate, rather than to fix? Why does Rush Limbaugh stop at ridicule instead of commenting on the underlying issue, which is waste-not-want-not, and inherently patriotic and conservative?

I feel like a real conservative. I'm the last generation of U.S. citizen that will remember drinking from streams in the lower 48 without high-tech water purification devices. Where's the environmentalist strain of the conservative movement these days? Can anyone point me to some authors/books/websites?

Sensible environmentalism seems to me like the good kind of greed, which is long-term greed.

That also benefits your children and your grand-children, etc. I agree. The environmentalist movement is not about the environment and it never has been. The Green Party champion is a socialist and that should tell people something.

I am disgusted with certain Japanese shoving the Kyoto Protocol down everyone's throat (because the treaty was introduced in Japan) when the air in Japan is so bad.

I want to commit this to memory

The problem here is we are not dealing with sensible environmentalists, we are dealing with terrorists who would rather see all the people dead than anything else. Perhaps the reason many conservatives seem so anti-environment (and we really aren't) is because the enviro terror movement have put us off of it. Sure, of course we should take care of the earth God gave us, but I won't see people put out of jobs or dead because of a stupid fish... God said people come first before animals, we are take care of them, but not let them replace us in His view.

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