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Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Thank You St. Rachel of Carson
This is the centennial year of the birth of Rachel Carson who popularized modern junk science with her publication of Silent Spring in 1962 which was instrumental in the world wide banning of of DDT. The use of this substance had resulted in the near eradication of malaria world wide with the concomitant increase of life expectancy, especially in the third world areas of Africa, Asia and South America. With the banning of DDT these poor areas were unable to substitute its use with more expensive chemical compounds as were the developed nations. As a result, the exponential rate of increase in cases of malaria in the third world have caused the unnecessary premature deaths of many millions of humans, usually children under 8 years of age.
Although as a result of recent less glandular cost benefit studies, the ban of DDT is gradually being lifted, the environmentalists continue to resist 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 literary flair, but his science has held up much better...Ms. Carson’s manyAnother example of a leftist exacerbated "crisis" is the eradication of rats, mosquitos, flies and sparrows decreed by one of the left's great "heroes" Mao-Tse-Tung in 1950s China:worshipersdefenders, ecologists as well as other scientists, often excuse her errors by pointing to the primitive state of environmental and cancer research in her day. They argue that she got the big picture right: without her passion and pioneering work, people wouldn’t have recognized the perils of pesticides. But those arguments are hard to square with Dr. Baldwin’s review.
The anti-sparrow campaign, for instance, was extremely effective but had tragic results. Villagers were told to rush out to the fields, banging on pots and pans and screaming at the tops of their voices. The sparrows took to the air, and as the pandemonium continued, stayed there, too terrified to land, until they dropped dead from exhaustion. The only trouble was that sparrows are a vital link in the food chain and are particularly fond of [eating] locusts. With no sparrows left to eat them, there was a plague of locusts, the crops were ruined and millions of people died in the ensuing famine.The most recent and continuing manifestation of a junk science "crisis" assuming the proportions of a quasi religion is the urging of a lemming like response to climate change by the prophet Al Gore of the "Church of the Warmistas".
The collectivists are almost never held accountable for the damage they cause. In the words of Dr. Thomas Sowell: "The proposals of the self anointed moral elite are to be judged by the righteousness of the intentions behind them, rather than the consequences of their implementation."
cross posted at: Fighting in the Shade™
Comments
Broken link, leads back to Eternity Road.
Posted by on 06/12/2007 at 04:45 PMI fixed them, Mark. Thanks for the heads-up.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 06/12/2007 at 04:52 PMSorry guys the link that Fran fixed leads to a subscription post of the NY times. I tried to fix it with no luck, however link works ok at Fighting in the Shade. Obviously still having problems with the HTML tags.
Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 06/12/2007 at 09:15 PMDo any adults here actually believe the Mao/sparrows story? Mao definitely went through several animal purges in his day… But sparrows falling from the sky, exhausted because of pan banging? Please.
Posted by on 06/18/2007 at 04:56 PMAdam,
This event happened during the 1950s as the linked story states. I am old enough to remember seeing the photos in the media of village “heroes” pushing wheelbarrows full of dead sparrows through the streets. It was before the era of “photoshop”. As I was not there I cannot attest to the exact methods used but also remember that nets were also mentioned.Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 06/18/2007 at 05:20 PM...her publication of Silent Spring in 1962 which was instrumental in the world wide banning of of DDT [which has] caused the unnecessary premature deaths of many millions of humans.
There has never been any such “world-wide” ban.
Posted by on 06/19/2007 at 12:42 PMhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
“The book resulted in a large public outcry that eventually led to DDT being banned in the US, and its publication was one of the signature events in the birth of the environmental movement. DDT was subsequently banned for agricultural use worldwide, but its use in disease vector control continues to this day in some parts of the world.”
The banning of the manufacture of DDT in the US (1972) which was the only manufacturer at that time resulted in a de facto world wide ban.Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 06/19/2007 at 01:24 PMAs your own quote states explicitly, DDT is *not* banned for use in disease control. I do not know what you mean by a “de facto” ban: has any nation ever faced any adverse consequence for using DDT as an anti-malaria measure?
Posted by on 06/19/2007 at 08:23 PM”...has any nation ever faced any adverse consequence for using DDT as an anti-malaria measure?”
Jeffrey,
I am unaware of any such consequences. The important consequence of the ban has been the inability of technologically backward third world nations to obtain and deploy the product.Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 06/19/2007 at 10:47 PMIt’s been my understanding that many countries used DDT continuously even since its ban in the U.S. And, that many of them have since discontinued its use not from environmental concerns, but because the mosquitoes have developed such a resistance to it that it is no longer effective. While the U.S. seems to have carried on with alternatives just fine, it may have actually saved lives by delaying the onset of resistance in countries unable or unwilling to develop alternatives. Lastly, Carson’s underlying premise in Silent Spring - that the reckless, largely unquestioned application of chemicals in our environment leads to adverse and potentially catastrophic health and environmental problems seems to have stood the test of time. I submit that the awareness ignited by Carson - one that surely want too far in many instances - has saved many lives that would have been cut short or significantly degraded by the prevailing attitudes of the day.
Posted by on 06/20/2007 at 12:32 AMThe important consequence of the ban has been the inability of technologically backward third world nations to obtain and deploy the product.
I honestly don’t understand what you’re claiming. What ban are you referring to? the ban against using DDT within the United States? How would that prevent some African or Asian nation from obtaining DDT for use in disease control?
Posted by on 06/20/2007 at 06:24 AM"How would that prevent some African or Asian nation from obtaining DDT for use in disease control?”
Where would they have obtained it? As they had no capability of manufacturing it and the manufacturer in the U.S. was prohibited from producing or shipping it, a de facto ban was in effect.
Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 06/20/2007 at 08:28 AMThe first site brought up by a Google search for “DDT world production” says that Mexico and China are now the primary makers of DDT and that “The cumulative world production of DDT has been estimated as 2 million tons” or about 1,800 million kilograms, whereas the most the U.S. ever made in one year, before the ban, was 82 million kilograms. (I don’t know why they use tons first and then switch to kilograms as a measure.)
Posted by on 06/20/2007 at 09:25 AMI believe I initially misunderstood the statistics I just cited: “cumulative” probably means “the amount that has been produced, ever”, and not “the amount being produced now, by all countries.” So I don’t know how much DDT was produced last year, but it is still being produced.
Posted by on 06/20/2007 at 09:55 AM
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