From The Indepedent:
Google have continued their recent run of doodles celebrating eminent female scientists with an image to mark the 107th anniversary of the birth of Rachel Carson.Here we go again with Rachel Carson being held up as a heroine.
Carson, who was born in Pennsylvania on 27 May 1907, trained and worked as a marine biologist, but she is best know for Silent Spring, the book that is widely credited with launching the modern global environmental movement.
The 1962 book focused on the impact of synthetic pesticides on the environment - with the title referring to the absence of birdsong across swathes of agricultural landscape following the widespread introduction of pesticides and other intensive farming practices.
The search engine's image shows Carson in the field, with binoculars, rucksack and notebook, surrounded by just the type of thriving ecosystem she warned the world - accurately, as it turned out - it risked losing. Animals include a seal, a turtle and crab, while birds depicted include a pelican, a tern and a heron.
When it was published, Silent Spring sparked a public outcry, bringing to widespread attention the effects of chemicals both on the ecosystem and on human health.
Although her research was attacked by chemical companies, a decade after her book was published, and years after her death, her book led to a nationwide ban of DDT, a colourless and crystalline organochloride with insecticidal properties, and other pesticides.
Silent Spring demonstrated that these pesticides could cause cancer and that their agricultural use was a threat to wildlife, particularly to birds.
A worldwide ban on DDT's agricultural use was formalised under the Stockholm Convention, but its limited use in disease vector control continues to this day and remains controversial.
It's a sad reality, but the modern global environmental movement, the one Carson launched, kills.
Let's talk about Rachel Carson and the impact she has had on the lives of millions of people, causing suffering and death.
Because of Rachel Carson, bad science, and politics decades ago, millions and millions of people needlessly have died of malaria.
Their deaths were preventable - not by the use of mosquito nets, but by the application of DDT.
The banning of DDT is a tragic example of what happens when politics and environmentalism run amok.
I think of Al Gore and his hero, Rachel Carson.
The banning of DDT wasn't a victory. It was a death sentence for millions of people. Literally.
It was bad science. It was bad politics.
From the 1998 PBS Frontline report, "Fooling with Mother Nature":
On the walls of the US vice president's office, you might expect to see framed photos of political giants past and present. Amidst his collection, however, Al Gore cherishes a picture of a biologist from Western Pennsylvania - Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring." Why does an unassuming scientist lay claim to this space? "For me personally," says Gore in his introduction to the 1992 edition of her book, "Silent Spring had a profound impact ... Indeed, Rachel Carson was one of the reasons that I became so conscious of the environment and so involved with environmental issues ... Carson has had as much or more effect on me than any, and perhaps than all of them together."
Carson's Silent Spring killed and continues to kill.
So many of Carson's claims have been refuted.
Read a sampling of the debunking of Silent Spring.
Why The Insecticide DDT Should Never Have Been Banned
Killing People - The banning of DDT and radical environmentalists
Malaria Foundation International
The Lies of Rachel Carson
Bring Back DDT, and Science With It!
The latter is a 2002 piece by Marjorie Mazel Hecht. It provides a concise overview of Carson's illegitimate assertions and the consequences of the hysteria that she launched.
The 1972 U.S. ban on DDT is responsible for a genocide 10 times larger than that for which we sent Nazis to the gallows at Nuremberg. It is also responsible for a menticide which has already condemned one entire generation to a dark age of anti-science ignorance, and is now infecting a new one.
The lies and hysteria spread to defend the DDT ban are typical of the irrationalist, anti-science wave which has virtually destroyed rational forms of discourse in our society. If you want to save science—and human lives—the fight to bring back DDT, now being championed by that very electable candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., had better be at the top of your agenda.
Sixty million people have died needlessly of malaria, since the imposition of the 1972 ban on DDT, and hundreds of millions more have suffered from this debilitating disease. The majority of those affected are children. Of the 300 to 500 million new cases of malaria each year, 200 to 300 million are children, and malaria now kills one child every 30 seconds. Ninety percent of the reported cases of malaria are in Africa, and 40 percent of the world’s population, inhabitants of tropical countries, are threatened by the increasing incidence of malaria.
...The campaign to ban DDT got its start with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962. Carson’s popular book was a fraud. She played on people’s emotions, and to do so, she selected and falsified data from scientific studies... .
Does that sound a bit extreme?
Are you thinking that I'm citing sources that lack credibility?
Do you need a source that you can identify as enlightened, sophisticated, and acceptable to the liberal mindset?
OK.
Read "What the World Needs Now Is DDT."
It's by Tina Rosenberg and was published in The New York Times on April 11, 2004.
It appears that Rachel Carson, Al Gore's inspiration, sparked a movement that cost millions of lives.
What the world needs now is DDT, and to stop worshipping Rachel Carson.
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