{"id":12130,"date":"2015-09-11T07:05:39","date_gmt":"2015-09-11T12:05:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12130"},"modified":"2015-09-11T07:05:39","modified_gmt":"2015-09-11T12:05:39","slug":"rachel-carsons-critics-keep-on-but-she-told-truth-about-ddt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12130","title":{"rendered":"Rachel Carson\u2019s Critics Keep On, But She Told Truth About DDT"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/e360.yale.edu\/feature\/rachel_carsons_critics_keep_on_but_she_told_truth_about_ddt\/2908\/\" target=\"_blank\">Rachel Carson\u2019s Critics Keep On,\u00a0But She Told Truth About DDT<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"dek\"><em>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.<\/em><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\">Any time a writer mentions Rachel Carson\u2019s 1962 book\u00a0<em>Silent Spring<\/em>\u00a0or the subsequent U.S. ban on DDT, the loonies come out of the woodwork. They blame Carson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p><\/span><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/e360.yale.edu\/images\/features\/98t00nez.jpg\" alt=\"Rachel Carson\" width=\"225px\" height=\"\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"credit\">rachelcarson.org<\/div>\n<div class=\"caption\">Biologist and author Rachel Carson in 1963.<\/div>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\">The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, devotes an<a href=\"http:\/\/rachelwaswrong.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">entire website<\/a>\u00a0to the notion that \u201cRachel was wrong,\u201d asserting that \u201cmillions of people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm.\u201d Likewise former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn has declared that \u201cmillions of people, particularly children under five, died because governments bought into Carson\u2019s junk science claims about DDT.\u201d The novelist Michael Crichton even had one of his fictional characters assert that \u201cBanning DDT killed more people than Hitler.\u201d He put the death toll at 50 million.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rachel Carson\u2019s Critics Keep On,\u00a0But 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[3272,5841,8918,1426,2516,655,8916,8917,8919,7163],"class_list":["post-12130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-competitive-enterprise-institute","tag-ddt","tag-malaria","tag-misinformation","tag-pesticides","tag-propaganda","tag-rachel-carson","tag-silent-spring","tag-tom-coburn","tag-yale-environment-360"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12131,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12130\/revisions\/12131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}