Rachel Carson and Silent Spring

Rachel Carson is responsible for more deaths than Hitler. Between one and three million African people die from malaria each year, and this is due to Rachel Carson’s environmental fanaticism that evoked most of the world’s stance against using DDT. Her book, Silent Spring, was written in response to the overuse of pesticides during World War II, but it sparked a worldwide crackdown on DDT take would take hold in the next decade. DDT is a very cheap pesticide that is used to kill mosquitoes that harbor the malaria disease.

Malaria is now running rampant through Africa because the DDT is not sprayed in certain countries. In some cases, the results were extreme. In Sri Lanka in 1948 (before DDT), there were 2.7 million cases of malaria, in 1963 (when DDT was legal), there were 17 cases, but in 1969 (after DDT was outlawed), there were 537,700 cases in the country. There is some blame to put on developed resistance due to inadequate and erratic spraying, but most of the blame should be levied on the book and her research. She referenced this resistance in Silent Spring as destroying “our very means of fighting.” There is a legitimate seriousness to the resistance developed by mosquitoes because if they start becoming resistant to every means of eradication then there will be no stopping them. Because of the novel, the US now refuses to supply the funds to Africa that would help make more efficient use of DDT, like DDT-treated walls/nets and specified spraying that would help the areas affected the most by malaria. This refusal results in millions dead each year from malaria.

One of the reasons the US is still backing the anti-DDT legislation is because there is no need to fight malaria in the US and we will only see the negative side of the DDT use. Malaria was almost non-existent in the world a couple years ago, when DDT was legal, and now it has come roaring back because malaria’s primary combatant has become discarded. There are much more expensive ways to combat malaria, but if DDT is cheap and works then why not un-ban it and develop a plan of efficient spraying? It almost sounds too easy. And where is the scientific evidence against DDT? According to heavily respected health scholar Amir Attaran, scientific processes “has not even one peer reviewed, independently replicated study linking exposure to DDT with any adverse health outcome.” When a judge ruled in favor of DDT spraying in 1971, an administrator from the newly formed EPA, who did not even attend the hearings, decided to overrule the judges verdict and ban DDT anyways. This ruling made the ban effective in most of the world because most countries were dependant on US-funded programs in their countries, so they had to relax and, in most cases, completely ban DDT.

Silent Spring should have been used responsibly by the public, but, as we Americans know, the vast majority of the public blindly and wildly follow fervor and are easily persuaded to back a cause without knowing any information on the subject. This is especially true when it comes to politics and the environment. Also the chemical industy’s crazy outpouring trying to discredit Ms. Carson only gained the novel more recognition and completely backfired. What they should have focused on what a world would be like without pesticides rather than trying to discredit an environmentalist that was already widely respected. The US would backtrack hundreds of years in terms of population, agriculture, resistance to disease, and economy if we would lose the ability to augment our crops with pesticides. Her scientific basis for the novel was based on needs/risk assessments that she had to pick one pest over another. One had to do with spruce budworm that kills forests within a year of it presence. DDT was used to kill these budworm, but did so at the expense of a certain aquatic insects that were fed on by baby salmon. So the assessment was to save the little amount of salmon babies for the risk of deforestation when an area gets infested by the budworm. Also, within the novel, Carson points out that there really is no scientific or medical evidence to determine what harmful effects DDT has on human health, so she says to be careful when using the substance. She also uses other, natural ways to get rid of insects like introducing new insect-predating organisms. This could introduce foreign organisms to a place where there are no other predators, which could cause an infestation of these new organisms that could be worse than the previous organisms they were used to prey on. This happens a lot with exotic plants and trees populating and over-running an area to the point that they themselves become pests.

In the end, Rachel Carson enabled the epidemic that is malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. Due to her environmental over-enthusiasm and the public’s blind allegiance, millions upon millions die from malaria that DDT can extinguish. The almost religious devotion to anti-DDT movements has lead to massive death in sub-Saharan Africa, which does not affect us here in America. I bet if anyone in the US has relatives or loved ones in sub-Saharan Africa, they would be part of the pro-DDT contingency fighting for the eradication of malaria, as well as the environmental nuts that stand by the scientifically unproven, governmentally blocked yet circumvented ban on DDT.