Thoughts on the consequences of radical environmentalism, intended and unintended:
The motivation behind Silent Spring, the suppression of nuclear power, the global-warming scam, and other outbreaks of environmentalist lunacy is the worship of centralized power and authority. The author, Rachel Carson, didn’t set out to kill sixty million people – she was a fanatical believer in the newly formed religion of radical environmentalism, whose body count comes from callousness, rather than blood thirst. The core belief of the environmental religion is the fundamental uncleanliness of human beings. All forms of human activity are bad for the environment… most especially including the activity of large private corporations. Deaths in faraway Africa barely registered on the radar screen of the growing Green movement, especially when measured against the exhilarating triumph of getting a sinful pesticide banned, at substantial cost to an evil corporation.
Those who were initiated into the higher mysteries of environmentalism saw the reduction of the human population as a benefit, although they’re generally more circumspect about saying so in public these days. As quoted by Walter Williams, the founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, Alexander King, wrote in 1990: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guayana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” Another charming quote comes from Dr. Charles Wurster, a leading opponent of DDT, who said of malaria deaths: “People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”
Like the high priests of global warming, Rachel Carson knew what she was doing. She claimed DDT would actually destroy all life on Earth if its use continued – the “silent spring” of the title is a literal description of the epocalypse she forecast. She misused a quote from Albert Schweitzer about atomic warfare, implying the late doctor agreed with her crusade against pesticide by dedicating her book to him… when, in fact, Schweitzer viewed DDT as a “ray of hope” against disease-carrying insects. Some of the scientists attempting to debunk her hysteria went so far as to eat chunks of DDT to prove it was harmless, but she and her allies simply ignored them, making these skeptics the forerunners of today’s “global warming deniers” – absolutely correct and utterly vilified. William Ruckleshaus disregarded nine thousand pages of testimony when he imposed the DDT ban. Then as now, the science was settled… beneath a mass of politics and ideology.
These people are the greatest mass murderers in history. Why do we continue to give them so much power, both political and cultural?
[Update a few minutes later]
Apparently NASA is as scientifically corrupt as the CRU:
The emails show the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and suspect data management and integrity of NASA, wildly spinning in defense of their enterprise. The emails show NASA making off with enormous sums of taxpayer funding doing precisely what they claim only a “skeptic” would do. The emails show NASA attempting to scrub their website of their own documents, and indeed they quietly pulled down numerous press releases grounded in the proven-wrong data. The emails show NASA claiming that their own temperature errors (which they have been caught making and in uncorrected form aggressively promoting) are merely trivial, after years of hysterically trumpeting much smaller warming anomalies.
As you examine the email excerpts below, as well as those which I will discuss in the upcoming three parts of this series, bear in mind that the contents of these emails were intended to prop up the argument for the biggest regulatory intervention in history: the restricting of carbon emissions from all human activity. NASA’s activist scientists leave no doubt in their emails that this was indeed their objective. Also, please note that these documents were responsive to a specific FOIA request from two years ago. Recent developments — combined with admissions contained in these documents — beg further requests, which have both been already filed and with more forthcoming.
Read the whole thing. As DocZero says, we need to dramatically change the risk/reward ratio for this kind of fraudulent behavior, particularly when it’s used as a basis for public policy.
[Update a few minutes later]
Recently, the president of the U.N. Foundation and former Sen. Tim Wirth said the manipulated evidence uncovered by the Climategate e-mail scandal was a mere “opening” to attack science that “has to be defended just like evolution has to be defended.”
Get it? Those unreasonable people who deny evolution — despite the overwhelming evidence — are the same brand of illiterate hoi polloi who won’t hand over their gas-powered lawn mowers on the word of an oracle weather model and haphazardly placed weather station.
In some ways, I’m even more infuriated by being lumped in with creationists than I am with being compared to a Holocaust denier. These people are intellectually bankrupt.
I am no enviro, by a long shot, but I have read Silent Spring and I question whether the Dr. Zero has.
As usual in science, the DDT / malaria issue is more complex than what you can fit on a bumper sticker. As this article , written by the head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois, points out:
What people aren’t remembering about the history of DDT is that, in many places, it failed to eradicate malaria not because of environmentalist restrictions on its use but because it simply stopped working. Insects have a phenomenal capacity to adapt to new poisons; anything that kills a large proportion of a population ends up changing the insects’ genetic composition so as to favor those few individuals that manage to survive due to random mutation. In the continued presence of the insecticide, susceptible populations can be rapidly replaced by resistant ones. Though widespread use of DDT didn’t begin until WWII, there were resistant houseflies in Europe by 1947, and by 1949, DDT-resistant mosquitoes were documented on two continents.
Also worth pointing out is that Carson never called for a complete ban on the use of pesticides; rather she pointed out that overuse can and does have bad side effects.
Who is left to fill the legitimate roles that the CRU and Hansen’s group had?
So don’t use DDT because… eventually it will quit working. Brilliant.
Like destroying all life on earth I guess. Yeah, that would be bad. Thanks for that Chris, I guess she was a saint after all.
Curt – no, don’t over-use DDT. Again, life is more complicated than what will fit on a bumper sticker.
Sometimes it’s as simple as reading history, though ridiculing those who wish to re-write it does take a little more effort. The result of her book was the BANNING of the use of DDT. And the guy who did it admitted the decision was political. And the result was the deaths of millions of humans. It saved the lives of billions of mosquitoes. That is her legacy.
Actually, DDT is not banned everywhere and where it is not banned it is rarely used because it is no longer efficacious. Like any pesticide it works well in some circumstances but not others. It isn’t the be all and end all of pesticides.
The silence in Silent Spring refers to an absence of bird song. Commenters should read Carson’s book before commenting on it. Silent Spring fostered awareness and adoption of Integrated Pest Management(IPM). IPM is the methodology followed by most foresters, horticulturalists, farmers and municipalities in the industrialized world follow today.
She wrote some other really great books: “The Sea Around Us”, “The Edge of the Sea”, and “Under the Sea Wind”. If you had a halfway decent high school biology teacher and curriculum in the sixties or seventies, it might have been required reading.
It wasn’t required reading in my high school because I did have a good science teacher. It was given to me by my mom, who tearfully claimed it was “eye-opening” and had changed her life. I read (part of) it around ’76 or so. I knew my mom as someone who had tendencies to over-indulge in fad movements and I was curious. At 16 I had acquired enough of a capacity to think critically that it didn’t have the intended effect.
Fortunately humans are adaptive. We do learn from history, though sometimes it takes a figurative sledge-hammer to get the message. Her legacy is secure. She was Al Gore Jr. before he was out of diapers. We have finally got the message of the overwhelming damage that the environmental movement has fostered on human life over the decades. Al Gore’s legacy will be much more benign; something like a snort and eye-roll.
I recently heard a college radio station talk show about this as I was traveling. One of the crying hand-wringers said she,
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“…feels like I’ve been lied to about the WHOLE global warming ‘thing’…”.
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I’m guessing she has more disappointments to come, since she’s still “feeling” about things instead of thinking about them. Not to mention that she said she “feels” like she’s been lied to, instead of screaming at the top of her lungs about ACTUALLY being lied to.
Of course most of the goofs on the show that day went on and on about how this affected them. Time and energy spent fighting against GWB policies was a big issue. (as if his policies had begun in the early 60’s to cause smog) I never heard one of them address loss of productivity, loss of jobs or overall costs to the country. As usual, it was all ME, ME, ME, what I’VE done, what MY group did, hours WE spent. On the topic of costs, one guy said he thought college students had a harder time covering their expenses THAN ANY OTHER GROUP OF PEOPLE, and how at one time he thought $4.00 per gallon gas was necessary to save the planet, but now…he’s just not sure. Poor baby.
We obviously have little legal sway or authority anywhere in the world but here at home. IMHO, any of the NASA scientists that can be proven to have been aware of the scam, should be prosecuted. This was an attempt at subverting our country’s policies through lies and manipulation. Same goes for anyone else feeding at a government trough. Just because it wasn’t for immediate and overt personal gain, but for political viewpoint instead, doesn’t mean it’s OK to lie, cheat and manipulate.
Book ’em Danno, collusion, falsifying documents and lying to government officials.
Kurt,
I was referring to the three titles at the bottom of my comment for high school biology. They are very good layman intros to ecology, not to be confused with environmentalism.
Have you ever seen DDT in action? When I was a kid a friend of mine in the air force had a can of it (after it was banned.) One short spray and the fly’s forty feet away just dropped out of the sky. Amazing stuff.
I did pest control for a short while as a kid. I once put a black widow in the undiluted poison we used (normally it was a couple of tablespoon to a huge tank of water on the back of the truck.) It did the backstroke. I finally killed it with a blunt object.
I call BS on the article treatment of egg shell thinning. Reading EXTONET treatment of dicofol (aka Kelthane) causes eggshell thinning. Dicofol is made from DDT. See: http://extoxnet.orst.edu/pips/dicofol.htm the write up for DDT is: http://extoxnet.orst.edu/pips/ddt.htm
Most people have a misunderstanding as to how DDT controls malaria. It does not control malaria by killing the mosquitoes but by acting as a super repellent. I read one study where two huts were treated one with deltamithrin and the other with DDT. The researchers then counted Anopheles bites. The thought was the mosquitoes would land on the treated surface and die. The deltamithrin treated dwelling, the mosquitoes entered and promptly bite the researchers. This is bad because the malaria parasite has to incubate inside the mosquito. So having the the mosquito die after biting doesn’t really help. On the other hand the dwelling treated with DDT the mosquitoes flew in and exited without biting anyone.
I could go on with such things as why DDT can be both almost non-toxic to birds and extremely toxic depending on how the chemical is formulated. BTW if you think DDT would be great for mosquito control in your house I was told in Central America that having a WHO DDT treatment is like having someone spray your whole interior with flour.
So how many people would not have died of malaria from the time DDT was banned until is stopped being effective?20 million, 30? What complex explanation do you have for their families?
Bill Maron – would you please read the article I linked to? It’s written by somebody who actually knows what the hell they are talking about. You just might learn something.
Well I read that wapo thing, and now I actually remember Joni Mitchell’s famous “Hey, farmer, farmer put away your DDT now”. Thank-you.
By all means, let’s make sure we don’t oversell DDT’s capacity. We might raise false hopes. Oh that’s right, it’s been BANNED, never mind.
So how exactly are we to use every available weapon if one of them is BANNED? And I’d love to hear your answer to Bill’s question, I’m betting it’d be good for a laugh or two.
DDT is still useful — if sprayed on the walls of houses in the tropics.
Sprayed all over the environment in the tropics, on the other hand, and I think you’d see resistant mosquitoes developing sooner. Some restraint in its use could be extending its useful and increasing the number of lives saved.
What’s really needed is release of insects that are genetically engineered to resist the parasite, so they stop being vectors.
Curt & Bill – I do know that DDT is by no means the only pesticide in the world. I also know that DDT is legal for vector control (killing mosquitos) but not for general agricultural work.
See, I am not an entomologist, so I tend to rely on the advice of entomologists when it comes to killing bugs. I do this for the same reason I rely on a doctor for medical advice and a lawyer for legal advice.
You may get your advice in these matters from some dude who stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, but I find listening to people who have spent years studying an issue to be more helpful.
Chris,
I found the link you referenced useful, but not (perhaps) for the reasons that you might think. It seems to me that the author supports the notion of making use of pesticides (not simply DDT, to be sure), which is precisely the opposite of what the UN is doing in Africa, where the ONLY method that they approved of (until rather recently) was netting. The link you shared makex it clear that this is an irresponsible and incorrect approach, and in fact can be assumed to be ineffective as well. Thus the failure to make use of pesticides (albeit in limited roles, as you correctly point out) can in fact be tied to a very large number of deaths, just as the ‘parent’ of this thread suggests.
Scott – what part of “DDT is legal for vector control” are you not comprehending? The “residual pestide spraying” recommended by the World Health Organization uses DDT.
Laying “millions of malaria deaths” on a non-existent ban is factually incorrect.
Do I go to BumprStickersRUs for that?
I’m not in the need for advice on how to kill bugs. I am (always) looking for help in preventing leftist idiots from getting away with re-writing history.
1) Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring.
2) As a result, a political decision was made to ban DDT.
3) As a result, millions of humans died of malaria who otherwise would not have.
Environmentalist assholes would have people believe that there are all sorts of complicating factors involved, this all is too complicated for you to comprehend; you should rely on us experts. Rachel Carson was really a good person, a nice person, a person who felt good things, blah, blah, blah.
Sometimes things really are simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker.
Kurt,
DDT is not banned in many tropical nations where malaria is still a problem. Would you please get off of that hobby horse.