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Rachel Carson's Silent Spring: Environmentalist Mythology Killing Us Softly
by Steven Brockerman (August 11, 2002)
Theirs is the disease you don't hear about on the nightly news. Newspaper editorialists, too, are silent about the death toll from this ailment -- nearly 9 ˝ million people since 1999, of which 8˝ million were pregnant women or children under the age of five. No, the disease isn't AIDS. It's mosquito borne malaria, and we've had the means for wiping out this affliction for over a century. However, thanks to environmentalist mythology, the tool, DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), has been banned in most countries worldwide.
The ban on DDT, like the modern environmentalist movement itself, grew out of the book, Silent Spring, by Rachael Carson. As almost any school child today can parrot, Carson claimed DDT thinned the eggs of birds. Pointing to a 1956 study by Dr. James DeWitt published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, Carson wrote: "Dr. DeWitt's now classic experiments [demonstrate] that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction."
DeWitt, however, concluded no such thing. Indeed, he discovered in his study that 50% more eggs hatched from DDT fed quail than from those in the control group.
Following Carson's lead, hippie environmentalists began claiming that raptor populations -- eagles, osprey, hawks, etc. -- were declining due to DDT. They failed to note that such populations had been declining precipitously for years prior to the use of DDT. Indeed, according to the yearly Audubon Christmas Bird Counts, 1941 to 1960, years that saw the greatest, most widespread use of DDT, the count of eagles actually increased from 197 in 1941 to 897 in 1960. A forty-year count over roughly the same period by the Hawks Mountain Sanctuary Association also found population increases for Ospreys and most kinds of hawks.
Finally, after years of study, researchers at Cornell University "found no tremors, no mortality, no thinning of eggshells and no interference with reproduction caused by levels of DDT which were as high as those reported to be present in most of the wild birds where ‘catastrophic' decreases in shell quality and reproduction have been claimed" ("Effects of PCBs, DDT, and mercury compounds upon egg production, hatchability and shell quality in chickens and Japanese quail").
Carson, her book's affected prose designed to create optimum public panic, heralded, too, a coming cancer epidemic among humans. Her assertion was based on the high incidences of liver cancer found in adult rainbow trout in 1961 -- a result, not of DDT, but of a fungi produced carcinogen, aflatoxin.
Once again, environmentalists followed Carson's lead. A 1969 study ("Multigeneration studies on DDT in mice.") concluded that mice fed DDT developed a higher incidence of leukemia and liver tumors than unexposed mice. Epidemiology data of the preceding 25 years, though, showed no increases in liver cancer among the human populations in the areas where DDT had been sprayed. Upon further examination of the data, moreover, researchers discovered high incidences of tumors in the control group, too. Apparently, both groups had been feed food that was moldy, contaminated by aflatoxin.
Since then, in 1978, after a two-year study, the National Cancer Institute has concluded that, indeed, DDT is not carcinogenic. Even more recently, a study ("Plasma organochlorines levels and the risk of breast cancer") published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October 1997 found nothing to indicate that the risk of breast cancer is increased by exposure to DDT or DDE (a byproduct of DDT).
None of this evidence, though, would have swayed William Ruckelshaus, head of a brand new Environmental Protection Agency in 1971. Ruckelshaus not only refused to attend EPA's 1971-72 administrative hearings on DDT, but also refused to read even one page of the 9,000 pages of testimony. Not surprisingly, Ruckelshaus ignored the findings of the hearings' judge -- ""DDT is not a carcinogenic … a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man -- and banned DDT anyway. It's not surprising because William Ruckelshaus was a member of the Environmental Defense Fund -- later his personal stationery would have printed on it the following boast: "EDF's scientists blew the whistle on DDT by showing it to be a cancer hazard, and three years later, when the dust had cleared, EDF had won."
Since 1971, pressured by specialized environmentalist organizations like the International Pesticide Action Network, much of the rest of the world has banned DDT, too. Those countries now rely on pesticides that are neither as effective nor as safe as DDT. Meanwhile, the death tolls from malaria in tropical Third World countries silently climbs. Heedless of this, environmentalists are now pressuring governments to preserve wetlands, i.e., swamps, which are the foremost breeding grounds of disease carrying mosquitoes. One would have to conclude, given the facts, that environmentalists are either insane or intent upon eradicating every human being from the face of the planet. At a UN sponsored earth summit in 1971, a delegate's remark gives us the answer: "What this world needs is a good plague to wipe out the human population."
If the death toll from malaria begins to mount in this country, we'll certainly hear about it on the nightly news. Malaria will be blamed, of course, but the real culprit will be environmentalist mythology, which has been killing us softly for decades.
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