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Rachel Carson’s Critics Keep On, But She Told Truth About DDT
Rachel Carson’s Critics Keep On, But She Told Truth About DDT
More than half a century after scientist Rachel Carson warned of the dangers of overusing the pesticide DDT, conservative groups continue to vilify her and blame her for a resurgence of malaria. But DDT is still used in many countries where malaria now rages.
Any time a writer mentions Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring or the subsequent U.S. ban on DDT, the loonies come out of the woodwork. They blame Carson’s book for ending the use of DDT as a mosquito-killing pesticide. And because mosquitoes transmit malaria, that supposedly makes her culpable for just about every malaria death of the past half century.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, devotes anentire website to the notion that “Rachel was wrong,” asserting that “millions of people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm.” Likewise former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn has declared that “millions of people, particularly children under five, died because governments bought into Carson’s junk science claims about DDT.” The novelist Michael Crichton even had one of his fictional characters assert that “Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.” He put the death toll at 50 million.
It’s worth considering the many errors in this argument both because malaria remains an epidemic problem in much of the developing world and also because groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, backed by corporate interests, have latched onto DDT as a case study for undermining all environmental regulation.
10 Successes of the Sustainability Movement to Date
10 Successes of the Sustainability Movement to Date
Wind turbines image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.
The environmental movement had a lot to brag about. In a mere ten-year span in the 1960s and early 1970s, a relatively small community of student activists, along with crusading scientists, from Rachel Carson to Barry Commoner, managed to bring widespread attention to the need for greater environmental protection. The legislative successes flowed like kombucha at a farmers market. All the books and protests and far-out happenings actually resulted in real, tangible progress, which citizens in the United States and other parts of the world could chart over time, like marking a child’s height against the wall.
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