Editor’s Note: In addition to Alexandra Smith and Steve Caratzas, with this post we introduce our third new writer this week - Jason Leggett of Reasic fame. Jason is a stalwart climate science student, and will be tackling this area as well as other eco-subjects for us on a regular basis here at Celsias. Welcome Jason!

Rachel Carson - 1907-1964 Marine Biologist & Author Credited with spawning the modern environmental movement

Rachel Carson - is she friend, or foe?

There has long been a debate over the effects of Rachel Carson's work Silent Spring, and that debate came to a head recently when a U.S. Senator effectively blocked a resolution to honor Carson on what would have been her 100th birthday:

A Republican Senator known for his criticism of various environmental causes is single-handedly holding up two bills in the US Senate that would honor the life of Rachel Carson, author of the well-known book Silent Spring, RAW STORY has learned. The bills were introduced by a bipartisan group of Senators from Carson's home-states of Pennsylvania and Maryland on the occasion of the centennial of her birthday on May 27. "This week, Dr. Coburn blocked two bills intended to honor Rachel Carson on the 100th anniversary of her birth (one bill to name a post office after her in PA, and a resolution honoring her)," said a press release at Senator Tom Coburn's (R-OK) website. - Raw Story

My initial thought was: "Why on earth would someone block an attempt to honor someone posthumously, unless that person was someone heinous, like maybe Hitler or Stalin?" What I found was shocking. The Senator apparently subscribes to a theory that actually does compare Carson to Hitler and other brutal dictators. From an article titled, "Rachel Carson's Ecological Genocide - Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot ... Rachel Carson":

A pandemic is slaughtering millions, mostly children and pregnant women -- one child every 15 seconds; 3 million people annually; and over 100 million people since 1972 --but there are no protestors clogging the streets or media stories about this tragedy. These deaths can be laid at the doorstep of author Rachel Carson. - Free Republic

This statement from Coburn's office is remarkably similar:

"Dr. Coburn believes the tremendous harm Carson’s junk science claims about DDT did to the developing world overshadow her other contributions," said spokesman John Hart in an e-mail to RAW STORY. "Millions of people in the developing world, particularly children under five, died because governments bought into Carson’s junk science claims about DDT. To put it in language the Left understands, her 'intelligence' was wrong and it had deadly consequences." - Raw Story

The book that upset industry, but started a movement

This unfortunate misconception is the result of a very misleading and inaccurate campaign that is being waged against Carson and the movement that she helped to initiate. Basically, the argument is that she pushed for a ban on the use of DDT, which led to the deaths of millions of people every year around the world. I hope to demonstrate that this couldn't be farther from the truth. First, and possibly most important, is the fact that Carson never advocated an absolute ban on the use of DDT. Hear her thoughts on the subject:

No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection, but it has heard little of the other side of the story - the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts. Even worse, we may have destroyed our very means of fighting. ... What is the measure of this setback? The list of resistant species now includes practically all of the insect groups of medical importance. ... Malaria programmes are threatened by resistance among mosquitoes. ... Practical advice should be 'Spray as little as you possibly can' rather than 'Spray to the limit of your capacity' ..., Pressure on the pest population should always be as slight as possible. - Deltoid

Rather than supporting a total ban on DDT, Carson wanted only to curb the uninhibited, wasteful spraying that was taking place. The most interesting part about this is that her concern was not only about the environment. Carson was also very aware of the concerns about malaria and was actually working to help by drawing attention to the fact that the massive spraying taking place was actually building chemical resistance in the insects. Another important point to note is that there was never actually a complete ban on DDT:

DDT has never been banned in antimalarial use. The main reason for declining use of DDT as an antimalarial has been the development of resistance. Antimalarial uses have received specific exemptions from proposals to phase out DDT, until alternatives are developed. Bans on the use of DDT as an agricultural insecticide, promoted by Rachel Carson and others, have helped to slow the development of resistance, and therefore increased the effectiveness of DDT in antimalarial use. - John Quiggin

For instance, when the EPA banned the substance in 1972, it provided a few exceptions (my emphasis):

An end to the continued domestic usage of the pesticide was decreed on June 14, 1972, when William D. Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, issued an order finally cancelling nearly all remaining Federal registrations of DDT products. Public health, quarantine, and a few minor crop uses were excepted, as well as export of the material. - EPA

So, if Rachel Carson never advocated a complete ban on DDT, and, indeed, there was no such ban, how could she be responsible for the death of millions? Here's one common argument that has been widely circulated:

In Sri Lanka, in 1948, there were 2.8 million malaria cases and 7,300 malaria deaths. With widespread DDT use, malaria cases fell to 17 and no deaths in 1963. After DDT use was discontinued, Sri Lankan malaria cases rose to 2.5 million in the years 1968 and 1969, and the disease remains a killer in Sri Lanka today. - Capitalism Magazine

However, like many of the arguments against Carson, this is only half the story:

Now when you think about it, the story that they tell just isn’t credible. If DDT spraying had almost eliminated malaria, and they got a new outbreak, then no environmentalists would be able to stop them from resuming spraying. So I went to the library to find out what really happened. And it wasn’t hard to find out. The definitive history of malaria is Gordon Harrison’s Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man and it turns out that, yes of course they went back to spraying. Harrison writes:

Sri Lanka went back to the spray guns, reducing malaria once more to 150,000 cases in 1972; but there the attack stalled. Anopheles culicifacies, completely susceptible to DDT when the spray stopped in 1964, was now found resistant presumably because of the use of DDT for crop protection in the interim. Within a couple of years, so many culicifacies survived that despite the spraying malaria spread in 1975 to more than 400,000 people.

So in 1977 they switched to the more expensive malathion and were able to reduce the number of cases to about 50,000 by 1980. In 2004, the number was down to 3,000, without using DDT. And the reason why they stopped spraying in 1964? It wasn’t environmentalist pressure. With only 17 cases in 1963, they didn’t think it was needed any more. And this wasn’t an unreasonable belief. In the countries where malaria had been eradicated, once the number was this low, treating the remaining cases with drugs to kill the malaria parasite was sufficient to completely eradicate it. - Deltoid

There are other arguments to address, but I'll stop here. I mainly wanted to clear the supposed link between Carson and malaria deaths. There is a lot of misinformation available on this issue, and apparently Senator Coburn has accepted much of it, which would make him misinformed. This is very unfortunate, as it has resulted in his decision to derail legislation that would've honored Carson for her great contributions to the environment. The good news, however, is that we don’t need a United States Senate Resolution to be able to celebrate Rachel Carson's life and work. There are several ways that we can each pay tribute to her. First and foremost, we can honor her in the way we live our lives:

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road - the one less traveled by - offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. - Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

We can also join in any number of events that are being planned by the Rachel Carson Homestead Association in their Centennial Celebration. Another option would be to participate in discussions that are taking place at the Rachel Carson Centennial Blog. Do you have personal stories about what you've done to celebrate Rachel Carson's life? Do you have any additional information about how to do so? Please share your thoughts.

 

Further Reading:

• Which Came First - Pests, or Pesticides?
• Pesticides, and You