The "Tierney Lab" links to http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/.
Interesting guy.
Here's the full text for the curious.
FINDINGS; Fateful Voice of a Generation Still Drowns Out Real Science
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: June 5, 2007
For Rachel Carson admirers, it has not been a silent spring. They've
been celebrating the centennial of her birthday with paeans to her
saintliness. A new generation is reading her book in school -- and
mostly learning the wrong lesson from it.
If students are going to read ''Silent Spring'' in science classes, I
wish it were paired with another work from that same year, 1962,
titled ''Chemicals and Pests.'' It was a review of ''Silent Spring''
in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of
agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin.
He didn't have Ms. Carson's literary flair, but his science has held
up much better. He didn't make Ms. Carson's fundamental mistake,
which is evident in the opening sentence of her book:
''There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed
to live in harmony with its surroundings,'' she wrote, extolling the
peace that had reigned ''since the first settlers raised their
houses.'' Lately, though, a ''strange blight'' had cast an ''evil
spell'' that killed the flora and fauna, sickened humans and
''silenced the rebirth of new life.''
This ''Fable for Tomorrow,'' as she called it, set the tone for the
hodgepodge of science and junk science in the rest of the book.
Nature was good; traditional agriculture was all right; modern
pesticides were an unprecedented evil. It was a Disneyfied version of
Eden.
Ms. Carson used dubious statistics and anecdotes (like the improbable
story of a woman who instantly developed cancer after spraying her
basement with DDT) to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to
pass. She rightly noted threats to some birds, like eagles and other
raptors, but she wildly imagined a mass ''biocide.'' She warned that
one of the most common American birds, the robin, was ''on the verge
of extinction'' -- an especially odd claim given the large numbers of
robins recorded in Audubon bird counts before her book.
Ms. Carson's many defenders, ecologists as well as other scientists,
often excuse her errors by pointing to the primitive state of
environmental and cancer research in her day. They argue that she got
the big picture right: without her passion and pioneering work,
people wouldn't have recognized the perils of pesticides. But those
arguments are hard to square with Dr. Baldwin's review.
Dr. Baldwin led a committee at the National Academy of Sciences
studying the impact of pesticides on wildlife. (Yes, scientists were
worrying about pesticide dangers long before ''Silent Spring.'') In
his review, he praised Ms. Carsons's literary skills and her desire
to protect nature. But, he wrote, ''Mankind has been engaged in the
process of upsetting the balance of nature since the dawn of
civilization.''
While Ms. Carson imagined life in harmony before DDT, Dr. Baldwin saw
that civilization depended on farmers and doctors fighting ''an
unrelenting war'' against insects, parasites and disease. He
complained that ''Silent Spring'' was not a scientific balancing of
costs and benefits but rather a ''prosecuting attorney's impassioned
plea for action.''
Ms. Carson presented DDT as a dangerous human carcinogen, but Dr.
Baldwin said the question was open and noted that most scientists
''feel that the danger of damage is slight.'' He acknowledged that
pesticides were sometimes badly misused, but he also quoted an adage:
''There are no harmless chemicals, only harmless use of chemicals.''
Ms. Carson, though, considered new chemicals to be inherently
different. ''For the first time in the history of the world,'' she
wrote, ''every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous
chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.''
She briefly acknowledged that nature manufactured its own
carcinogens, but she said they were ''few in number and they belong
to that ancient array of forces to which life has been accustomed
from the beginning.'' The new pesticides, by contrast, were ''elixirs
of death,'' dangerous even in tiny quantities because humans had
evolved ''no protection'' against them and there was ''no 'safe' dose.''
She cited scary figures showing a recent rise in deaths from cancer,
but she didn't consider one of the chief causes: fewer people were
dying at young ages from other diseases (including the malaria that
persisted in the American South until DDT). When that longevity
factor as well as the impact of smoking are removed, the cancer death
rate was falling in the decade before ''Silent Spring,'' and it kept
falling in the rest of the century.
Why weren't all of the new poisons killing people? An important clue
emerged in the 1980s when the biochemist Bruce Ames tested thousands
of chemicals and found that natural compounds were as likely to be
carcinogenic as synthetic ones. Dr. Ames found that 99.99 percent of
the carcinogens in our diet were natural, which doesn't mean that we
are being poisoned by the natural pesticides in spinach and lettuce.
We ingest most carcinogens, natural or synthetic, in such small
quantities that they don't hurt us. Dosage matters, not whether a
chemical is natural, just as Dr. Baldwin realized.
But scientists like him were no match for Ms. Carson's rhetoric. DDT
became taboo even though there wasn't evidence that it was
carcinogenic (and subsequent studies repeatedly failed to prove harm
to humans).
It's often asserted that the severe restrictions on DDT and other
pesticides were justified in rich countries like America simply to
protect wildlife. But even that is debatable (see
www.tierneylab.com), and in any case, the chemophobia inspired by Ms.
Carson's book has been harmful in various ways. The obsession with
eliminating minute risks from synthetic chemicals has wasted vast
sums of money: environmental experts complain that the billions spent
cleaning up Superfund sites would be better spent on more serious
dangers.
The human costs have been horrific in the poor countries where
malaria returned after DDT spraying was abandoned. Malariologists
have made a little headway recently in restoring this weapon against
the disease, but they've had to fight against Ms. Carson's disciples
who still divide the world into good and bad chemicals, with DDT in
their fearsome ''dirty dozen.''
Ms. Carson didn't urge an outright ban on DDT, but she tried to
downplay its effectiveness against malaria and refused to acknowledge
what it had accomplished. As Dr. Baldwin wrote, ''No estimates are
made of the countless lives that have been saved because of the
destruction of insect vectors of disease.'' He predicted correctly
that people in poor countries would suffer from hunger and disease if
they were denied the pesticides that had enabled wealthy nations to
increase food production and eliminate scourges.
But Dr. Baldwin did make one mistake. After expressing the hope
''that someone with Rachel Carson's ability will write a companion
volume dramatizing the improvements in human health and welfare
derived from the use of pesticides,'' he predicted that ''such a
story would be far more dramatic than the one told by Ms. Carson in
'Silent Spring.' ''
That never happened, and I can't imagine any writer turning such good
news into a story more dramatic than Ms. Carson's apocalypse in Eden.
A best-seller titled ''Happy Spring''? I don't think so.
On Jun 13, 2007, at 2:17 PM, Jon Clements wrote:
Dave et al, the article appears to be just a free preview now with
an upgrade to purchase the whole article. We apologize but
apparently apple-crop went on a bit of a hiatus in conjunction with
myself, so the posts have not been getting delivered timely.
FWIW, my impression of Rachel Carson was that she was in
impassioned scientist that appreciated good science but exposed --
what was then -- the indiscriminate use of pesticides that had an
extreme impact on non-target wildlife. Carson's work and writing
kindled the formation of EPA, whether you consider that good or bad...
:-)
Jon
Jon Clements
Extension Tree Fruit Specialist
UMass Cold Spring Orchard
393 Sabin Street
Belchertown, MA 01007
VOICE 413.478.7219
FAX 413.323.0382
IM mrhoneycrisp
Skype Name mrhoneycrisp
On Jun 5, 2007, at 1:36 PM, Dave Rosenberger wrote:
Check out the excellent article on Rachel Carson's legacy in
today's NT Times on-line at the web-site noted below. (It will
NOT say what you might expect from the Times!)
If you go article, it is also worth checking out the link "go to
tierney lab" which appears below the skeleton emerging from the
egg-shell. I especially enjoyed the "founding principles" of the
Tierney lab noted on the right-hand side of the page that appears
when you click "go to tierney lab."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/science/earth/05tier.html?
_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin
--
**************************************************************
Dave Rosenberger
Professor of Plant Pathology Office: 845-691-7231
Cornell University's Hudson Valley Lab Fax: 845-691-2719
P.O. Box 727, Highland, NY 12528 Cell: 845-594-3060
http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu/pp/faculty/rosenberger/
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