Silent Spring

Fifty years of junk environmental science.

[Update late morning]

More thoughts from Ron Bailey:

In Silent Spring, Carson crafted a passionate denunciation of modern technology that drives environmentalist ideology today. At its heart is this belief: Nature is beneficent, stable, and even a source of moral good; humanity is arrogant, heedless, and often the source of moral evil. Rachel Carson, more than any other person, is responsible for the politicized science that afflicts our public policy debates today.

It’s certainly not for the better.

10 thoughts on “Silent Spring”

    1. I don’t have a definitive answer but it’s likely somewhere between Hitler and Stalin based on malaria deaths alone.

  1. It’s odd that Carson should come up this week.

    I’m currently battling bugs due to a roof leak that went un-noticed, inside the walls, which the bugs dearly loved. My bug guy, Bob, and I were lamenting that we couldn’t just DDT the miserable buggy bastards.

    Bob was a bug guy in the Air Force for over 30 years and he remembers when they had to quit using it. He says that’s when he began to battle insect infestations instead of treating them and eliminating them. Bob says it’s the lack of DDT that has allowed the bed bug epidemic we have right now.

    And of course bed bugs is small potatoes, no DDT also means billions and trillions and quadrillions and skadzillions of mosquitoes running around killing people with malaria. But all the little eagles are safe and sound in their hard shells!

  2. DDT was never the problem, overapplication was the problem.

    The solution was to throw the baby out witht the bath water.

  3. two factual problems with the Carson as responsible for banning DDT for Malaria:

    1) DDT was NEVER banned for use on public health / insect disease vectors in the USA nor in most other places worldwide and many TONS have been used annually to control skeeters continuously since the publication of Silent Spring as well as before.
    In any case, why should the permit withdrawal of pesticides on crops (what you call Banned) in the USA affect any other country ? They always scream and yell how they don’t even like us, rofl.

    2) Carson supported the use of pesticides for control of insect disease vectors but saw their broadcast use on entire forests, etc as futile as well as potentially dangerous since we did not know their effects. (read the book)

    Thems the facts for anyone to discover who cares to. In any case, bedbugs are immune to DDT. It only takes 25 generations for any insect to develop pesticide resistance and bedbugs have over 12 generations a year or more.

    Just as in antibiotic resistance in gonnerea, mersa, tuberculosis, etc. there are real limits to our ability to control the world. sad but true.

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