Silent Spring revisited

pettyfog · Apr 23, 2007

I have a love-hate relationship with Rachel Carson... and that paradigm illustrates 'killed by the best of intentions', perfectly!

She was, in my opinion and actual observation, 100% right on the effect of DDT on wildlife, especially bird populations.

but...
The same over educated/under thinking idiots that are harping on global warming also refuse to allow the most effective insecticide, ever. Never mind we've learned how to use it safely and effectively while not dosing every man woman and child with it.

Article

In the years before it lost the public's support in the mid-1960s, the Global Malaria Eradication Programme wiped out malaria in the American South, several Latin American countries, Taiwan, the Balkans, much of the Caribbean, sections of northern Africa and much of Australia and the South Pacific.

Exposés like Carson's made the global campaign's methods increasingly unpopular and eventually brought to a halt the effort to end malaria on a global scale. The disease has since bounced back in many developing countries. In the mid-'90s, the only South American country that continued to use DDT, Ecuador, was also the only country to experience a significant decline in malaria. Many countries, like Uganda, remain hesitant to use DDT because European nations have threatened to refuse their agricultural exports if they do.

"It's a paradox that right now we are using pesticides at a greater rate than when 'Silent Spring' was published," Diana Post, executive director of an environmental nonprofit called the Rachel Carson Council, told the Washington Post. Paradoxically, widespread use of DDT for malaria control would likely result in fewer pounds of insecticide being released, not more, since countries struggling with malaria are now using much larger quantities of less potent alternatives. Spraying houses in the whole country of Guyana required the same amount of DDT once used on a single cotton field in a single growing season.

Carson didn't have the benefit of more than 40 years of additional data, but her successors do. DDT remains the cheapest and most powerful tool for stopping malaria. When sprayed on interior walls, it has virtually zero interaction with wild ecosystems. Yet when the topic of relaxing restrictions in order to save millions of lives comes up, someone inevitably brandishes a copy of "Silent Spring" and opposition is silenced so completely that you could hear a mosquito buzzing in the next room.
Click to expand...

And by the way... the same applies to my views on Lead Mercury and Asbestos.

The assumption that if 'lots of it is evil, then even some of it is still bad' illustrates the lack of common sense in what now might be -laughingly- called the 'Establishment'.

Forum	Title	Date
Miscellaneous	9/11 and 'silent moderate muslims'	Sep 11, 2007
Miscellaneous	Any Silent Bob fans which are also Fulham FC fans?	May 27, 2007
Miscellaneous	Google Points Spring Shift	Oct 3, 2008
Miscellaneous	Springsteen and FFC -- Did He Know Something??	Apr 4, 2008

Silent Spring revisited

pettyfog Well-Known Member

Share This Page

About Us

League Standings

Useful Searches

Silent Spring revisited

pettyfog Well-Known Member

Share This Page