Gerry Rising writes a column for the great newspaper, The Buffalo News (which is part of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire/Hathaway holdings).
Rising wrote a column praising Rachel Carson near her birthday last spring, and got a lot of comment. On November 25 his column dealt with the criticisms of Carson, drawn from comments to his earlier column. Rising’s view is quite middle of the road, and points the way to why the critics of Carson seem so shrill to me.
A single quote (interestingly it was repeated in two of the communications I received) will indicate the response that bothers me: “Rachel Carson is responsible for more deaths than Pol Pot.” Sadly, that statement represents the carefully mounted and continuing attack on Carson.
DDT played an extremely important disease-controlling role in World War II, but consider the following:
• Its supporters credit DDT with eliminating malaria in this country but that disease was already largely gone here by 1939 when Hermann Mueller discovered that the chemical was lethal to insects.
• An international campaign led by Fred Soper to eliminate malaria through use of DDT that indeed saved thousands of lives had largely run out of steam by the early 1960s when “Silent Spring” was published. Mosquitoes were building up resistance and geographical factors particularly in African countries, made spraying extremely difficult. Between 1960 and 1989 deaths from malaria actually decreased when treatment shifted from insecticides to medicine.
• Carson never did call for banning DDT and other pesticides in “Silent Spring.” She wrote, “It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I contend that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife and man himself.”
• The 1972 Environmental Protection Agency ban of DDT in America was instituted 10 years after “Silent Spring” was published and eight years after the author’s death from cancer. Although Carson’s influence was evident, the act cites substantial scientific evidence of DDT’s adverse effects on wildlife and increased insect resistance.
• The focus of “Silent Spring” was on the indiscriminative use of insecticides for agricultural purposes, not on its use as a public health measure. Carson critics have made much of the World Health Organization’s 2006 approval of DDT, but that approval is “under strict control and only for indoor residual spraying,” thus exactly the kind of use Carson supported.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Okay, I get the message, too.
Jackie, my apologies. I guess I “picked” the fight when I posted what I thought was a nice, corrective post to one of Cao’s blogs (she has several, with much overlap) noting that some claims about DDT and Rachel Carson were in error.
Godwin’s Law has already been invoked (not that the people who should be restrained by it, ever are), and I’ve spent way too much time.
Back to regular blogging.
Did you see the post on the A. E. Housman quote? Nice folks over at the Housman study group.
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Cao, whoever you are, let me address you one last time. Why are you here? It is obvious you find Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub abhorrent. This is an educational site, and your comments are boring me silly (not that I can even read them all without squirming, or worse). Ed has done much good in the way of education, and should be admired. What have you contributed to advancing knowledge in our children? I wish you all the best, sister, but I am tired of your commentaries. Really.
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Cao, you either have a reading comprehension issue, or you’re a lot more dishonest that you should be.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has threatened you with a lawsuit. I merely point out that what you wrote is libelous. You have no defense. The person you libeled is not a public figure, and there’s a good case to be made that your libel was with malice.
So, I advised you to retract the error — and I pointed you to a website that tells you why your statement was false.
Is it too much to hope that, perhaps as a courtesy extended by a person who strives to be accurate, you would take down the libel?
No skin off my nose. I don’t get sued. I’m not the one who committed the libel. You can take my friendly advice, or refuse to show manners. Your choice.
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I was particularly shocked to discover Edwards had twisted the findings of Dr. DeWitt. DeWitt fed DDT to birds. He discovered that DDT killed the chicks through a variety of mechanisms.
Edwards cites a small part of one study DeWitt did. Edwards quotes DeWitt saying that there was a normal rate of hatching among chicks from the birds fed DDT.
Edwards chops the quote, however, distorting it. He fails to quote the next sentence, in which it is revealed that half the chicks that hatched in the study cited, died within a few days.
In other words, coupled with those that failed to hatch, way more than half the chicks died.
Carson actually wrote this:
Here is Edwards’ version; you can plainly see the difference:
According to Edwards, 80% of the eggs hatched. That misleads an unwary reader into thinking 80% of the chicks were fine.
Actually, DeWitt found few of the chicks hatched, nothing like 80%; and half of those that did hatch, promptly died, probably victims of estrogen poisoning.
You can check the sources here.
That falls into the “not accurate” category in my book.
Have you a response to any of this, Cao?
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A second thing Edwards gets wrong is his entire diatribe against William Ruckelshaus and the EPA’s suspension of the pesticide registration for DDT. Edwards paints it as a Ruckelshaus irrational vendetta against the chemical.
Reading through Edwards, you never would learn that two federal courts had ordered EPA to act and act quickly against DDT because the evidence already presented in court was clear that DDT was damaging and deadly. Edwards makes no mention of those court orders.
Nor does Edwards mention that the chemical companies appealed the registration suspension, and the courts completely backed Ruckelshaus’s action as fair, impartial, straight down the law, and fully supported by science.
There are good histories available on the web. Unfortunately, the court cases themselves are not available free on the web that I have found. But a quick search of EPA archives turns up the facts. This post provides several links.
Some of us who were involved in environmental law issues during and after this time were quite shocked at Edwards’ depiction of the circumstances of the DDT ban. There was constant research to determine the fact of DDT damage, and how severe it was, from 1947 on (Carson cited much of the pre-1962 work). This research did not stop; as Discover Magazine’s recent article on DDT notes, there are now more than 1,000 studies confirming the damage in birds alone. There is no study I have ever found which rebuts, refutes, or even contests these findings, including those that Edwards cites. I have checked his footnotes on a couple dozen studies, and in each case Edwards has misstated the conclusions of the study. Each one found DDT damage, and none made a case that DDT should not be severely restricted as it is in the U.S.
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I love the way you label the dozens of research papers and careful citations Rachel Carson used as “lies.” No bias there, eh?
I have already given you several links in several places. To date, you’ve responded to none. Are you reading them?
Here’s one: Edwards and Milloy simply misquote ornithologist J. J. Hickey. They claim Hickey said the decline in peregrine falcons occurred long before DDT, failing to note that Hickey himself distinguished between declines caused by hunting and poaching, declines caused by loss of habitat, and declines caused by DDT. In fact, Hickey blamed DDT for the post-DDT decline.
I’ve read several of Hickey’s papers; nowhere does Hickey say “DDT was not to blame.”
Here’s a post I’ve already done on it: Peregrine falcons, ‘100 things about DDT, #77’
Should we take Edwards’ errors and hysterics one at a time? It’ll take a long time, but your response, or lack of it, will be much more clear.
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typical tactics of a leftist
Rachel Carson WAS WRONG. To illustrate, I have now been threatened with a lawsuit in my comments section by a man in the bathtub, because he can’t defend her.
…
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So tell me what is not accurate in Edwards’ copious notes that are contrary to Rachel Carson’s LIES. I’m interested in seeing if you can defend yourself without linking to some leftist environmentalist site – or an even more unhinged one like COUNTERPUNCH.
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No, the first few hundred pages of Carson’s book were not filled with lies. Gordon Edwards was quite the prolific whiner about it, but most of his complaints were in error.
I am disturbed that you never respond to anything I cite, to any substantive argument I make.
Notice that this fellow above provides five specific refutations to Gordon Edwards’ screed. Your noting that you posted Edwards’ screed earlier is not a rebuttal.
Slamming Rachel Carson, whose work was accurate and whose writing was poetic, is mean, rude, and a demonstration of a lack of discernment.
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As has already been clearly illustrated, in just the first few hundred pages of Carson’s book were filled with lies.
Apologizing for them after her death and raising her to the status of some kind of cult Goddess of the Environmentalist NUTS is really irresponsible.
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