Free Republic

Conservationists or Environmentalists? by: Melinda Zosh, May 16, 2008 Although the Endangered Species Act of 1973, signed by Republican U.S. President Richard Nixon, was intended to save thousands of plants and animal species, only a handful have been saved, but at an enormous human cost. “Five species have recovered out of 1355 species in the past 35 years,” said M. David Stirling, author of Green Gone Wild: Elevating Nature Above Human Rights. Over that same time period, 50 million people have died from malaria and 10,000 jobs have already been misplaced, as a result of the act. “I have a...

Decades after most countries stopped spraying DDT, frozen stores of the insecticide are now trickling out of melting Antarctic glaciers. The change means Adélie penguins have recently been exposed to the chemical, according to a new study. The trace levels found will not harm the birds, but the presence of the chemical could be an indication that other frozen pollutants will be released because of climate change, says Heidi Geisz, a marine biologist at Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester in the US. She led a team that sampled DDT levels in the penguins. She worries that glaciers could...

Inconvenient Truths and Global Crises by: Bethany Stotts, May 05, 2008 Many of the world’s tragedies can be traced back to radical environmentalist movements, argued Competitive Enterprise Institute Fellow Iain Murray at a recent book forum. He said, “Rather…the mainstream model, the paradigm if you will, for receiving very desirable environmental ends has an inbuilt capacity for enduring disaster.” In his new book, The Really Inconvenient Truths, Murray argues that most destructive environmentalist movements following Rachel Carson display a similar trajectory: 1. “create a populist moral fervor;” 2. “deride anyone who opposes you as evil;” 3. “get the laws passed;”...

Environmentalists have condemned a trial plan to deploy millions of genetically modified mosquitoes in Malaysia to fight dengue fever, a report said Sunday. A mosquito bloated with blood it inserts its stinger into a human's arm. Environmentalists have condemned a trial plan to deploy millions of genetically modified mosquitoes in Malaysia to fight dengue fever, a report said. Malaysia has expressed concern about the insect-borne scourge after 25 people were killed in the first three months of the year. The New Sunday Times newspaper said the genetically modified (GM) male mosquitoes will be first freed in Ketam island, a fishing...

Last year, challenging global health orthodoxy, Bill and Melinda Gates called for the eradication of malaria. That is, for exterminating the parasite everywhere and forever, except perhaps in laboratory storage, as has thus far happened to just one disease in history, smallpox. Their call, delivered at a malaria conference that they had convened in Seattle, was, in Mrs. Gates’s language, “audacious.” Her husband went further, asking, “Why would anyone want to follow a long line of failures by becoming the umpteenth person to declare the goal of eradicating malaria?” To many public health leaders, that remains a good question. While...

Ever since the World Health Organization reversed the environmentalist-promoted ban on DDT in 2006, eco-activists have scrambled to devise new ways to malign the life-saving insecticide in order to salvage their badly marred reputation. Their latest effort involves touting a new study supposedly linking DDT exposure in adolescent girls with increased breast cancer risk in later life. The study was authored by researchers from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine — an institution infamous for alarmist research on asbestos and 9-11 rescue workers — and was published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a journal that seems to operate as a refuge...

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Dengue fever is spreading across Latin America and the Caribbean in one of the worst outbreaks in decades, causing agonizing joint pain for hundreds of thousands of people and killing nearly 200 so far this year. The mosquitoes that carry dengue are thriving in expanded urban slums scattered with water-collecting trash and old tires. Experts say dengue is approaching record levels this year as many countries enter their wettest months. "If we do not slow it down, it will intensify and take a greater social and economic toll on these countries," said Dr. Jose Luis...

DDT, the miracle insecticide turned environmental bogeyman, is once again playing an important role in public health. In the malaria-plagued regions of Africa, where mosquitoes are becoming resistant to other chemicals, DDT is now being used as an indoor repellent. Research that I and my colleagues recently conducted shows that DDT is the most effective pesticide for spraying on walls, because it can keep mosquitoes from even entering the room. The news may seem surprising, as some mosquitoes worldwide are already resistant to DDT. But we’ve learned that even mosquitoes that have developed an immunity to being directly poisoned by...

On a small island in Barnegat Bay, hundreds of birds that didn't exist in New Jersey 30 years ago bask in the summer sun. Suddenly, they all take flight, oddly elegant and vaguely prehistoric, with 6-foot wing spans and the most recognizable bills in the animal kingdom. They are brown pelicans, described by naturalist John James Audubon as one of America's "most interesting birds." They are also one of the Jersey shore's newest residents, joining other top-of -the-food-chain bird predators including the peregrine falcon, the osprey and the royal tern to form a new avian golden age on Barnegat Bay....

Last year, the World Health Organization reversed a 25-year-old policy and recommended using the pesticide DDT to fight malaria in the Third World. A new study published in the public health journal, PLoS ONE, provides more evidence that the decision was long overdue. The U.S. and Europe solved their malaria problem a half-century ago by employing DDT, but the mosquito-borne disease remains endemic to the lowland tropics of South America, Asia and Africa, where each year a half-billion people are infected and more than a million die. Despite those staggering numbers, radical environmental groups like the Pesticide Action Network continue...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mosquitoes that carry malaria, dengue fever and yellow fever avoid homes that have been sprayed with DDT, researchers reported on Wednesday. The chemical not only repels the disease-carrying insects physically, but its irritant and toxic properties helps keep them away, the researchers reported in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE. They estimate that DDT spray reduced the risk of disease transmission by nearly three-quarters. Malaria affects more 40 percent of the world's population, killing more than a million people every year, most of them young children. DDT use has been discontinued in most countries because...

August 7, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - National Geographic (NG), a leading environmentalist, de-population supporting magazine, has published a major cover story by Michael Finkel on the extraordinarily deadly and complex malaria parasite. The July 2007 NG edition article discusses possible solutions to the disease but also uncharacteristically acknowledges a leading expert's contention that the international ban on DDT was a terrible mistake which may have cost many millions of lives, especially in poor African nations. Environmental ideologues have been quick to slam Finkel's article as being flawed and damaging to the their past success in convincing the world to ban...

Disease Control:The Los Angeles Times hypes an alleged link between global warming and a rise in malaria in parts of Africa. It so happens those areas don't use a cure that the Times doesn't mention — DDT. Last time we checked, mosquitoes — not sports utility vehicles — spread malaria. But Times staff writer Edmund Sanders made that linkage last Saturday, when rising malaria rates in parts of Kenya were attributed to higher temperatures and those temperatures to the carbon emissions of the U.S., among other countries. In Kenya's western highlands, Sanders wrote, "maximum annual temperatures over the last 20...

West Nile virus surges with 27 casesOnly five had been reported by this time last year. Kern County is hit the hardest, with 22. Eighteen incidents were recorded just last week. By Marla Cone, Times Staff Writer July 22, 2007 West Nile virus, spread by mosquitoes, has taken an early hold on parts of California this summer, sickening 27 people statewide compared with only five last year at this time. Unusually high temperatures throughout the state in March triggered an earlier start to the West Nile virus season than in other years. Human illnesses have been documented in six counties,...

KAMPALA, Uganda -- Though Africa's sad experience with colonialism ended in the 1960s, a lethal vestige remains: malaria. It is the biggest killer of Ugandan and all African children. Yet it remains preventable and curable. Last week in Germany, G-8 leaders committed new resources to the fight against the mosquito-borne disease and promised to use every available tool. Now they must honor this promise by supporting African independence in the realm of disease control. We must be able to use Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane -- DDT. The United States and Europe eradicated malaria by 1960, with the use of DDT. At the time,...

Environmentalism has quite a few followers and those followers have quite a bit of power. With that power, they are able to suggest and enact programs and legislation they feel is best for the world. So I have to wonder: How can such a large number of well meaning citizens get something so wrong, so often? Looking back, you see a list of actions and trail of tragic, unintended consequences.

Liberal Reader Calls WashPost on Liberal Bias in DDT Story Posted by Ken Shepherd on June 10, 2007 - 03:28. This was a rare treat. Seeing a self-described liberal hitting the Washington Post for liberal bias. In this case the writer, one Philip Evans of Kensington, Md., sees the bias stemming from a case of lazy reporting:Regarding the May 23 Metro article "RachelCarson Bill From Cardin on Hold":I'm a knee-jerk liberal, but sometimes I find myself sympathetic to conservatives who see bias in The Post. Does The Post lack the reportorial resources to confirm whether Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) is...

For Rachel Carson admirers, it has not been a silent spring. They’ve been celebrating the centennial of her birthday with paeans to her saintliness. A new generation is reading her book in school — and mostly learning the wrong lesson from it. If students are going to read “Silent Spring” in science classes, I wish it were paired with another work from that same year, 1962, titled “Chemicals and Pests.” It was a review of “Silent Spring” in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin. He didn’t have Ms....

Carson's toxic legacy Her book Silent Spring is a case study in the tragedy of good intentions Margaret Wente Toronto Globe and Mail Thursday, May 24, 2007 I was 12 when I read Rachel Carson's newly published book, Silent Spring, in 1962. Although I'd never heard the term "environmentalist," she turned me into one. I didn't understand the complicated science in it. But I was horrified by her evocation of a natural world whose creatures were being wiped out by man-made poisons - the silent spring, where no birds sang. In school, I wrote an essay praising Silent Spring,...

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...