Rachel Carson was probably responsible for more human deaths than Pol
Pot, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara combined.
Her science -- the Science of Scare -- is being replayed today as the
Science of Global Warming. In other words, not a science but a fear-
mongering religion in which Al Gore is the Pope and David Suzuki one
of his Cardinals.
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, new.morning [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
June 5, 2007 NYTIMES
Fateful Voice of a Generation Still Drowns Out Real Science
By JOHN TIERNEY
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
