Editorial: Cheer For Rachel Carson? Just A Little!

Global warming chatter is picking up momentum. Last week, the president and chief executive officer of the National Wildlife Federation reminded us of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. It seems he would have us pay homage now at the pioneer scientist’s 100th birthday.

“Rachel,” wrote Larry J. Schweiger, “understood the direct cause-and-effect relationship between man’s conservation stewardship and the vitality of all living creatures. Despite her warnings about the need to nurture this delicate relationship, many in our country, both then and now, didn’t listen to Rachel’s admonitions.”

Also in his article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Schweiger wrote “A 100 years later, people are still attacking Rachel—Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma has blocked two resolutions honoring Rachel, declaring her work was based on ‘junk science’ and that DDT’s ban is causing millions of deaths from malaria—despite the fact that the science has been proven over and over again to be correct and the widespread use of alternatives such as pyrethroids are effective for mosquito control, while not accumulating in the environment.” (Pyrethroids are insecticides made from toxic plants.)

Melissa Kaplan’s “Herp Care Collection” (on the Internet and updated April 19, 2007) is titled: “Pyrethroids: Not as safe as you think.” She writes:

“An increasing number of insects have developed high levels of resistance to pyrethroids, such as cockroaches, pear psylla, fall army-worm, German cockroach, spotted tentiform leafminer, diamondback moth, house fly, stable fly, head lice, and tobacco budworm. Many of these species are resistant to more than one pyrethroid. Because insects reproduce—and adapt—far more quickly than do vertebrates, they are far better able to evolve defenses against the toxins we throw at them, resulting in an ever-expanding range of poisons developed and thrown into our environment.

“Pyrethroids, like all toxins, are indiscriminate: they affect all the organisms [that] come into contact with them in the air, on plants, on the ground, in the soil, and in the water. While your local grower—or you—may be applying it to deal with a specific pest, the products affect everything around it. And, since particulates are easily airborne, they travel, often great distances, from the actual point of application.”

The late Dixie Lee Ray, respected scientist and former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, reported in Trashing The Planet all kinds of statistics about DDT and how the insecticide was ultimately banned based on pseudeoscience (junk science). Other scientists supported Ray’s findings, as did the results of controlled tests with DDT on people and birds. Millions of people have died due to the 1982 ban by the Environmental Protection Agency. Schweiger contends that the science was proven to be true, but he cites no proofs. As for global warming, few question its existence; many disagree as to the cause and how to correct it.

Those hapless millions died due to an action inspired by Carson and her admirers. In 1948, before the use of DDT, public health service statistics show that in Sri Lanka, for example, there were 2.8 million cases of Malaria. By 1963 there were 17 (yes, 17). Before DDT came along, more people died in wars from typhus fever than from bullets. Six years after DDT was banned, there were 800 million cases of malaria and 8.2 million deaths per year.

People come in categories ranging from radical to sensible. We know that not all environmentalists agree with blowing up logging equipment in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. We know that not all of them believe that tearing out Snake River dams to make the river more friendly to salmon is the right thing to do. We do know, however, that they have caused a great many headaches for the river industry.

On the other hand, not everyone who disagrees with environmentalists is anti-environment. True, there are some who don’t want to let the environment get in the way of their plans. But others are great conservationists and support wildlife restoration efforts.

We don’t buy what Schweiger is selling. The charge that pseudoscience has become acceptable is true whether he admits to it or not. He wants to say “naughty, naughty!” to those who deplore junk science. Controlled tests conducted after the ban concluded that DDT was not the cause of bird problems, and further tests proved it was not injurious to humans.

We have read, not infrequently, that researchers are often paid large sums of money to write reports supporting a preconceived point of view rather than just to research issues and report honest findings.

Perhaps we are victims of the snail darter syndrome, where completion of a $95 million dam was delayed because of junk science. Perhaps we remember too well the spotted owl and the efforts made to stop harvesting lumber, because the birds would only nest in old-growth forests. It was all poppycock. The birds nested virtually everywhere in the West.

When Carson wrote that a lack of good environmental stewardship impacts wildlife, she was right. (When people move in, wildlife usually moves out.) But the goal is to make sure that when people want to move in, the reasons are legitimate, realistic, and justified. Man has dominion over wildlife, but he should utilize that dominion reasonably. So in that respect, we can tip our hat to Rachel Carson.

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