Reason and Revision
It has become fashionable in some circles to attack Rachel Carson, the celebrated scientist and author of Silent Spring and other classics of the environmental canon. The charge against Carson goes like this: By spearheading the ban on DDT, she doomed millions of people in the developing world to death by malaria. Some particularly irresponsible people have gone so far as to accuse her of mass murder.
Well, that's bogus, and, over at the excellent science blog, Deltoid, Tim Lambert sets the record straight with two succinct and crucial points. First:
Well, that's bogus, and, over at the excellent science blog, Deltoid, Tim Lambert sets the record straight with two succinct and crucial points. First:
Because of Carson, the agricultural use of DDT was banned, but not the anti-malarial use of DDT and it has continued to be used to this day.And second:
... banning the agricultural use of DDT saved lives by slowing the development of resistance. Furthermore this is exactly the case Carson made in Silent Spring, warning that overuse would destroy the effectiveness of insecticides.This is not to say that the popular reaction against DDT didn't get carried away. As in any debate, the truth is more in the middle than on the margins. And, as with any technology, the trick is to use it judiciously.
4 Comments:
DDT is not nor has ever been a good solution to malaria.
says who?
The original sin in science denialism is tobacco. Not surprisingly it also was the source of Rachel Carson kills zillions
For what it's worth, here's Malcolm Gladwell writing in a 2001 New Yorker piece. I found it pretty evenhanded and certainly illuminating. Here's the quote:
"'Silent Spring' was concerned principally with the indiscriminate use of DDT for agricultural purposes; in the nineteen-fifties, it was being sprayed like water in the Western countryside, in an attempt to control pests like the gypsy moth and the spruce budworm. Not all of Carson's concerns about the health effects of DDT have stood the test of time--it has yet to be conclusively linked to human illness--but her larger point was justified: DDT was being used without concern for its environmental consequences. It must have galled Soper, however, to see how Carson effectively lumped the malaria warriors with those who used DDT for economic gain. Nowhere in 'Silent Spring' did Carson acknowledge that the chemical she was excoriating as a menace had, in the two previous decades, been used by malariologists to save somewhere in the vicinity of ten million lives. Nor did she make it clear how judiciously the public-health community was using the chemical. By the late fifties, health experts weren't drenching fields and streams and poisoning groundwater and killing fish. They were leaving a microscopic film on the inside walls of houses; spraying every house in a country the size of Guyana, for example, requires no more DDT in a year than a large cotton farm does."
This is not to defend those who paint Carson as Hitler. Far from it. The comparison is too preposterous to countenance and I think Carson deserves her place in the canon. It does, however, suggest that, even here, there's more than one valid perspective.
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