Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was a marine biologist who first received popular acclaim for her "sea trilogy" of books (The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea, and Under the Sea Wind), but is most remembered for her scientific investigation into the use of pesticides.
Her work was integral in saving the bald eagle from extinction, which, in great irony to what you will see below, could make her one of the greatest American patriots.
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[edit] Silent Spring
Carson published her most famous work, Silent Spring, in 1962. The book criticizes the overuse of pesticides, especially DDT. Carson documents how DDT works its way through the food chain and traces its ecological effects, which include risks to animals and humans alike. The book led President John F. Kennedy to order an investigation of the claims by the Science Advisory Committee, which vindicated Carson's work.[1] This ultimately led to a ban on the agricultural use[2] of DDT in the United States under the Nixon administration.
One of the arguments Carson made for the limitation of the use of pesticides was that pests would develop resistance to them and their overuse would thus ultimately make them less effective when they were truly needed.[3] This, in fact, played out as she predicted in Sri Lanka, where DDT had been extremely effective in nearly wiping out malaria. In 1964, spraying programs were stopped to save money because of the paucity of malaria cases. A common DDT-proponent canard is that environmentalists banned it in '64, which is completely bogus. In fact, spraying resumed into the 1970s, but the mosquitoes had evolved resistance to DDT and cases of malaria began to increase again.[4] Incidentally, mosquitoes there have also been evolving a resistance to malathion, DDT's replacement.[5]
The book is considered to be one of the first works of the modern environmental movement.
[edit] Legacy and corporate tantrums
Upon publication of Silent Spring, chemical companies launched a smear campaign against Carson, labeling her a "hysterical woman."[6] Since then, she has been accused of "mass murder" and "environmental genocide" by shills and anti-environmental wingnuts, who claim her book led to a ban on DDT that has killed millions in the Third World by allowing malaria to spread.[7] There is even a site run by the right-wing think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute titled rachelwaswrong.org.[8] In fact, no such thing ever happened. Silent Spring only called for a limitation on the use of DDT and it has never been completely banned for use in the third world as it has in the US (and there are even still a few exceptions to the ban in the US).[9][10] However, it is still an article of faith among the Steve Milloys of the world that Carson was the environmental version of Hitler.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Library of Rachel Carson papers at the Yale University Library
- Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham University
- Rachel Carson website
- Bug Girl's category for Carson
- Rachel Carson's Birthday Bashing, Salon
- Rachel Carson, Mass Murderer? FAIR
- Rehabilitating Carson, Prospect
- Steve Milloy's Malaria Clock (My Green Eco-Imperialist Legacy of Imaginary Death) (The "infected" tally is reaching 16 billion!)
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ The Story of Silent Spring, NRDC
- ↑ As distinct from its use in controlling insect vectors of disease
- ↑ Mosquito resistance of DDT on Wikipdedia
- ↑ The Great DDT Hoax, ScienceBlogs
- ↑ S.H.P.P. Karunaratne and J. Hemingway. Malathion resistance and prevalence of the malathion carboxylesterase mechanism in populations of mosquito vectors of disease in Sri Lanka. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 2001, 79: 1060–1064.
- ↑ Environmentalist Rachel Carson, TIME
- ↑ Ultra-right rag Human Events lists Silent Spring as a runner-up for "The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th-20th Centuries."
- ↑ Rachel Carson, Mass Murderer? The creation of an anti-environmental myth
- ↑ The Unending War on Rachel Carson, ScienceBlogs
- ↑ The Demonization of Rachel Carson, Skepticblog