Rachel Carson: Political Icon

[Pogo]

Fact Checking in the Blogosphere:

>> One of the benefits that ought to arise from the existence of the blogosphere is that of fact-checking. False claims can be refuted quickly, and, we might hope, not repeated thereafter. Sadly it doesn’t seem to work out that way, as the following examples show.

...
Meanwhile, the claim that bans on the use of DDT in anti-malaria campaigns have cost millions of lives, has been repeated yet again, by Miranda Devine in the SMH, and Rafe Champion at Catallaxy.

So in the interests of accuracy and bipartisanship, let’s get the facts straight

...

* DDT has never been banned in antimalarial use. The main reason for declining use of DDT as an antimalarial has been the development of resistance. Antimalarial uses have received specific exemptions from proposals to phase out DDT, until alternatives are developed. Bans on the use of DDT as an agricultural insecticide, promoted by Rachel Carson and others, have helped to slow the development of resistance, and therefore increased the effectiveness of DDT in antimalarial use...

OK, I’m not really holding my breath, and I don’t suppose the SMH is going to apply the Google rule to lazy, sloppy and inaccurate work like Devine’s.

Devine scores just about all the points possible on this one, citing fiction writer Michael Crichton as a scientific authority, misrepresenting the easily checkable position of the WHO, and citing the ludicrous bookburners of Human Events. <<
​

The abbreviation "SMH" is particularly apt but who is this Miranda Devine and what is this work to which the above refers?

From the opinion column in the Sydney Morning Herald, 6/19/05:

>> But worldwide the mosquito death toll is staggering. The World Health Organisation says malaria kills 1.2 million to 2.7 million people each year, most of them in Africa - mostly children and pregnant women - and causes brain damage to many more.

That is one dead child every 30 seconds. Only AIDS is a bigger killer of Africans.

All those deaths are the reason Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, about the evils of pesticides, was last week voted among the most dangerous books of the past two centuries. Fifteen American scholars enlisted by conservative magazine Human Events awarded Carson the honour along with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. Silent Spring, with its scary talk of cancer and dead fish and the mantra that man must not interfere with nature, launched the modern environmental movement. It also demonised DDT.

"We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides," wrote Carson, "but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves." <<​

The Rachel Carson "quote" at the end btw, is also fabricated (see first link).

Now about this list of "dangerous books" -- I had to do a search but here it is --- The top ten most dangerous knowledge that may not be uttered includes:

"The Kinsey Report" by Alfred Kinsey;
"Democracy and Education" by John Dewey
"The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan
"The Course of Positive Philosophy" by Auguste Comte
"Beyond Good and Evil" - Friedrich Nietzsche
"General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" -- John Maynard Keynes

Sharing the "Honorable" mention category with Silent Spring were:

The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)
Madness and Civilization (Michel Foucault)
Coming of Age in Samoa (Margaret Mead)
Unsafe at Any Speed (Ralph Nader)
The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir)
Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)


To note a pattern common to the whole list, they seem to have it out for any kind of science that, even theoretically, might improve somebody's state of living. Which kinda speaks volumes about the judges.

So that's what we're dealing with in this thread, folks. Book burners.

 

[gipper]

Have you been donating lots of money to African causes?

No. Does that make me heartless and uncaring? Does that make my comments in my previous post incorrect?

Why do you ask a question that is totally unrelated to the topic of my previous post?

How do you save lives in Africa by killing the bald eagle with DDT?

Why don't you just state what you think?

It is apparent you value the lives of birds over humans.

Sick....very sick.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Pogo still melting down?

 

[Pogo]

Pogo still melting down?

Hey, how's that frantic search for "the blood of 50 million on her hands" cooming along?
Any clues?

Are you looking in the right place?

 

[Pogo]

On behalf of absent (read: hiding) friends...

From the link above, following the Rachel Carson myth-link:

>> Andrew Kenny in The Spectator writes:

Judged on sheer evil, the worst crime in history was brown, the Nazi genocide, although the reds slaughtered more people. The death toll (difficult to measure) is roughly, Hitler&#8217;s holocaust 6 million, Stalin&#8217;s famine and terror 8 million, and Mao&#8217;s famine 30 million. But the greens have topped them all. In a single crime they have killed about 50 million people. In purely numerical terms, it was the worst crime of the 20th century. It took place in the USA in 1972. It was the banning of DDT. &#8230;

In 1971 DDT was poised to rid the world of malaria. In 1972 it was banned. &#8230;​

In a review of Michael Crichton&#8217;s "State of Fear" Ron Bailey agrees with Crichton that the greens killed 50 million:

Along the way, Mr. Crichton makes vividly apparent how environmentalist misinformation costs lives and money. He has Kenner tell fatuous Hollywood environmentalist Ted Bradley (Martin Sheen?) that banning DDT was &#8220;arguably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century.&#8221; Why? Because DDT was the best defense against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. &#8220;All together, the ban has caused more than 50 million needless deaths,&#8221; Kenner says. &#8220;Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, Ted. And the environmental movement pushed hard for it.&#8221; True enough.'​

However, it is conceivable that relying on a science fiction writer and an astroturf web site might not be wise. So I checked to see what the peer-reviewed scientific literature... &#8220;Agricultural production and malaria resurgence in Central America and India&#8221; published in Nature by Chapin and Wasserstrom tells us what really happened.

The graph on the left shows that malaria did skyrocket in India in the 70s. But not because they cut back on DDT spraying because of pressure from environmentalists. The graph shows that they didn&#8217;t cut back on DDT, but dramatically increased its use. So how come malaria increased?

Well, the increase in DDT use was in agriculture. This caused the insects to become resistant, so they had to use more DDT to get the same effect. This caused more resistance, so even more DDT was used and so on. The end result was that in the areas where DDT was used in agriculture, the mosquitoes became completely resistant and DDT no longer stopped them from spreading malaria, with the disastrous
results shown in the graph.

Was this catastrophe predictable? Well, yes. In fact, Rachel Carson warned about it in Silent Spring. If India had followed the example of the United States and banned the agricultural use of DDT and reserved it for public health many millions of cases of malaria would have been prevented.

...
So the people with significant responsibility for the resurgence in malaria were the chemical companies that stymied efforts to reduce the agricultural use of pesticides. And it was chemical companies that helped set up the astroturf junkscience site that has attempted to blame Rachel Carson for causing the resurgence. Nice. It&#8217;s like a hit-and-run driver who, instead of admitting responsibility for the accident, frames the person who tried to prevent the accident. <<​

(links, graphs and much more at the link, which specific page is here)


So if anything it might be said, to follow the same logic as the Potheads of the world, that millions were killed by not listening to Rachel Carson.

We'll now step aside and allow the perpetrators of such junk mythology to come in and apologize profusely as I know they're all standing in line to do, for slurring the name of a respected conservative.


[MENTION=27995]Uncensored2008[/MENTION]
[MENTION=12394]PoliticalChic[/MENTION]
[MENTION=31153]HenryBHough[/MENTION]

This thread has got to be the most monumental failure ever.

Happy belated birthday, o failed thread.

 

[HenryBHough]

Liberals lie and babies die.

That is hardly news.