The Daily Telegraph’s James Delingpole got suckered by the anti-Rachel Carson propaganda, and wrote a bitter piece complaining about how environmentalists are ruining the environment and people’s lives (double whammy: environmentalists worry about people over profits, and the environment over corporations, so Delingpole hoped to tweak ’em at both ends). Lots of discussion, too much to read and most of it nasty and off target.
It was a smaller part of Delingpole’s generally anti-science, contrary-to-fact rant about global warming.
Chris Goodall fixed all of Delingpole’s errors on DDT at Carbon Commentary.
Being pro-DDT has become as religious an exercise as being for creationism taught in public schools. There’s no good evidence to support the point, but there are a tiny handful of people who are gullible enough to spread whatever they say. That tiny handful of advocates never gets the facts on their side, nor they on the side of the facts, but they appear deluded enough that they get their panties in a wad if you point out that their claims are false. “I’m not a liar!” they’ll retort with indignation good enough to make them rivals of the Portugal soccer squad’s acting, or just crazy enough to fail to recognize their errors.
And so the falsehoods spiral on virally.
Rachel Carson’s ghost should get busier. DDT can’t stop malaria, and now rarely slows it at all. Rachel Carson was right — and had we listened in 1962, malaria might be a lot less prevalent today.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Morgan worries, at his site where he will brook no contradictions from YOU, that people may get too fearful if they know the facts.
Oh, quit trying to bullshit us, Morgan (again). Carson’s work, Silent Spring, started with the observation that birds were dying when the elm trees were sprayed with DDT. Adam Smith’s work, Wealth of Nations, started when he observed how nations got rich, or stayed poor.
I suppose you think Smithian capitalism is a scare story, too? Wonks without facts?
If you’re looking for warnings that could have saved people, that people ignored, you could take a look at the story of Cassandra, or the story of Belshazzar, as told in Jewish and Christian scripture.
Or, to contradict the study you worry about (what’s that? You’re stunned into incapacity by a science report — albeit from psychology, the weakest of the sciences if it even is science), take a look at Upton Sinclair. His warnings about meat safety and purity got some traction, and action occurred — and your burger from In-N-Out is very safe, as a result. You prefer caveat emptor (buyer beware)?
Of course, people acted wisely to Rachel Carson’s warnings, too, especially after the scientists pointed out she was accurate, and not telling a scare story.
Maybe you need new examples. Better, have you had your eyeglass prescription renewed in the last decade? You could use some new lenses to look at events. Crab-glasses went out the first time the John Birch Society imploded when those kids wouldn’t get off their collective lawn.
(In the picture: Rachel Carson critic realizes he shouldn’t have drunk DDT from that cup.)
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[…] I’m no spring chicken myself. This seems to be a sixties thing. Maybe it’s all Rachel Carson’s fault. Just a thought; agree with her work or not, it’s definitely an example of what I’m […]
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