Modern Heroes 2: Rachel Carson

         An elephant that learned something of the ways of men (and women)

Back in 1957 about the time the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was hitting screens across America the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) was locked in its own combat with alien invaders… and losing.

In the 1930s the undocumented fire ant had arrived from South America and been making a nuisance of itself ever since. It was named for its habit of biting its victims then injecting an alkaloid venom which produced the sensation of being burned, hence “fire ant”.

In 1957 the USDA decided that the chowing down on Gringo butt had gone on long enough and resolved on a massive chemical assault to annihilate the noxious bug.

Unfortunately, their zeal rather got the better of them. Vast quantities of the insecticides dieldrin (since banned)and heptachlor were sprayed over 20,000,000 acres of farmland in nine southern states. Losses to wildlife and livestock were considerable and rather more annoying than the depredations of the ant itself. More annoying still were the denials from the USDA that their operation had anything to do with the festering bodies strewn across the land.

At a time of almost universal trust in the government and scientists to do the right thing, excesses like this were commonplace.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Or in this case the woman: Rachel Carson.

Rachel Carson was a shy and retiring woman with a profound love of the natural environment and a talent for evocative prose. Her area of specialization was marine biology; a subject on which she wrote two best-selling books. But around 1957 the chemical armaghedons planned against several species of insect pests came to her attention. It wasn’t just the gratuitous assault on the natural world that bothered her so much as the suspicion that the motive behind it was simply to boost the sales and profits of vast chemical combines.

The result of this new direction was her master work, Silent Spring, published in 1962,  in which she detailed several of the more outrageous pesticide operations singling out the pesticide DDT as particularly harmful.

Her book was an astonishing success. But the two million copies sold was the least of it. Silent Spring joined that very select number of books which have actually transformed the world.

Environmentalism was a movement whose time had come and Carson’s book lit the touch paper. But along with being widely credited with setting the scene for the rise of the Green movement her book had more particular effects.

Five of her main contentions found their way into most people’s consciousness.

·        Dangerous pesticides are used indiscriminately.

·        We are all now surrounded by “dangerous “ chemicals.

·        The pesticide DDT is one of the worse and causes cancer. This idea was so pervasive that this pesticide was popularly thought as toxic as plutonium.

·         DDT weakens the egg shells of birds driving several species toward extinction.

·        DDT accumulates in animals’ bodies over time.

The popular acceptance of these assertions created the political headwind behind the campaign to ban DDT.

In 1971 the Environmental Protection Agency appointed Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney to investigate the effects of DDT on people and the environment. After an exhaustive 80 days of testimony from 150 scientists, Judge Sweeney ruled that DDT “is not a carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic hazard to man” and does “not have a deleterious effect on fresh water fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wild life. There is a present need for the continued use of DDT for the essential uses defined in this case.”

Despite the judge’s findings two months later EPA head, William Ruckelshaus, went ahead and banned DDT anyway citing its “carcinogenic risk to humans”. Years later he admitted that use of DDT was, in fact, outlawed for “political reasons”.

But the crusade against DDT was far from over. Euro Greens were only too ready to accept that, though usually moronically stupid, the Yanks were on to something in forbidding DDT. So Europe along with America ceased production themselves and then made foreign aid contingent on recipients not using banned pesticides. So the ban became global, although far from complete as many countries continued to use DDT despite the cacophony of warnings from the west.

One Minor Niggle

The only problem with this inspiring story of the little guy triumphing over Big Chemical was that the little guys inspired by the little gal were wrong.

·        DDT has never been proven to cause cancer even among the thousands who worked for years without protective clothing in chemical companies manufacturing it or those further thousands who have sprayed it in houses and fields around the world.

To demonstrate its relative harmlessness, Professor J. Gordon Edwards of San Jose State university, often ate a spoonful of it in front of students for many years before his early death from a heart attack suffered at the age of 84  while hiking in the Glacier National Park!

·        Forty years down the line the jury is still out as to whether DDT thins bird egg shells or not. This hasn't stopped Carson's claim that it does from being repeated ad infinitum as a proven fact down the years.

·        DDT is metabolized by animals and so does not build up to dangerous levels in their body fats.

·        Rachel Carson’s more general charge that, “For the first time in history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals” set off an anti-chemical panic that robbed voters and their representatives of all sense of proportion. It was a ridiculous idea because most chemicals (including DDT) are dangerous if the dose is high enough, even an excess of water has been known to kill.

And the unprecedentedly high life expectancy rates across the world largely attained with the assistance of “chemicals” tell another story. And one much at variance to the childish idea that we’re all being picked off by the surrounding brew of toxic compounds intentionally designed to poison us by unscrupulous capitalists, who are so evil and greedy that they don’t even care about the health of their own children.

To illustrate the extent of the delirium Carson triggered a close supporter of her thesis, Paul Ehrlich (25 book titles available on amazon!), claimed that Carson's then building cancer epidemic would reduce American life expectancy to 42 years by the end of the century!

But these days with the idiocies of the environmentalists now orthodox and embraced by the establishment, you may wonder why the irrational banning of one pesticide should matter. After all the unabbreviated dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane if not life threatening does sound a bit scary.

DDT is the wonder chemical

DDT  has saved more lives than any other manmade compound. It has saved hundreds of millions from typhus, yellow fever, sleeping sickness, dengue, plague, encephalitis, yellow fever and above all malaria.

In addition to those lives saved are the hundreds of millions more who have been saved from the suffering and permanent disabilities caused by these conditions.

That is until Rachel Carson’s book whipped up the irrational hysteria which choked off the supply of DDT to the poorest and most helpless people in the world; more than 90% of malaria deaths are in Africa and the majority of those are children under five.

Whenever DDT has been removed from the fight, suffering and death rates climbed. Whenever it has been reintroduced they fell.

It’s often claimed that the DDT ban didn’t cause these millions of deaths as insect resistance was making its use less effective anyway.

Whilst this is partly true, DDT remains more effective and particularly cost effective (a vital factor in poor countries) than other control methods. This is mainly because spraying it onto the walls of homes deters even resistant mosquitoes from entering and so infecting the inhabitants.

In the 40 years since the 1972 ban between 60 and 80 million people have died from malaria.

Not all of those can be laid at Rachel Carson’s door. What is certain, though,  is that at the very least she was responsible for millions of deaths and countless further millions of blighted lives.

What do you call a nice woman who cared deeply about the environment; a scientist who was so certain she was right, she felt justified in manipulating the data to convert the world; a woman who was right about the overuse of pesticides, but wrong about everything else; a well-meaning woman who was indirectly responsible for the agonizing deaths of millions?

To the feeble-minded, environmentalists, feminists, and leftists she’s an icon and role model.

To the more rational there isn’t a single word which unites all those contradictions  apart perhaps from the word “human”.