“The Nine Most Dangerous Myths About Pesticides and High-Yield Farming,” by Dennis Avery, Center for Global Food Issues, http://www.cgfi.org/materials/speeches/nine_myths.htm.
“100 Things You Should Know about DDT,” by J. Gordon Edwards and Steven Milloy, JunkScience.com, 1999, http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Environment/ddt_100.htm.
“DDT vs. Death by Malaria,” by Robert J. Cihak, M.D., TYSK News, http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Environment/ddt_vs_death.htm, April 28, 2004.
The belief that your “virtue” is more important than your freedom of your life is widespread. From tyrants trying to ban free trade in medical drugs to Iranians stoning lewd women its universal. This health mullahism is combined with a western and overwhelmingly white, and its victims are overwhelmingly dark skinned, the fear that it goes beyond despotism to genocide becomes real.
One of the greatest of these pseudogenocidal villains is Rachel Carson. The method she pioneered, which would be so effective in killing blacks and browns, was banning DDT.
To do this, she claimed DDT caused cancer. She claimed it weakened the young of birds. And she ignored those it saved. Now that she is dead, her legacy is filth, disease, and death.
She claimed it caused cancer. Worse, she claimed that this was proven. That pesticide “six of seven” others were known to bring this disease, she claimed. Never mind it wasn’t true. Find a scientific article from before 1962 (when her ghastly Silent Spring was written). And since then scientific results have debunked her specious allegation. Scientific papers spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, some on studies lasting decades found no link between DDT and cancer. The most extreme of the studies, where primates were fed thirty-three shousand time the average human’s exposure to DDT in the early 1970s found no conclusive results.
Her back-up allegation, that if it does not harm mammals certainly it does something to our feathered friends, is also wrong.
According to Avery
The myth about DDT thinning birds’ eggshells also came directly and wrongfully from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. She wrote, “Dr. Dewitt’s now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diets DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched.”
Ms. Carson was lying. Dr. Dewitt’s study actually showed no significant difference in hatching rates between the quail fed DDT (80 percent) and the control quail (83.9 percent). When Dr. Dewitt tested pheasants, he found that those fed with DDT hatched more than 80 percent of their eggs, while the controls birds hatched only 57 percent.
To give a scale of the counterevidence, here is one point from Edwards and Milloy work, as well as its documentation
Many experiments on caged-birds demonstrate that DDT and its metabolites (DDD and DDE) do not cause serious egg shell thinning, even at levels many hundreds of times greater than wild birds would ever accumulate.
[Cecil, HC et al. 1971. Poultry Science 50: 656-659 (No effects of DDT or DDE, if adequate calcium is in diet); Chang, ES & ELR Stokstad. 1975. Poultry Science 54: 3-10 1975. (No effects of DDT on shells); Edwards, JG. 1971. Chem Eng News p. 6 & 59 (August 16, 1971) (Summary of egg shell- thinning and refutations presented revealing all data); Hazeltine, WE. 1974. Statement and affidavit, EPA Hearings on Tussock Moth Control, Portland Oregon, p. 9 (January 14, 1974); Jeffries, DJ. 1969. J Wildlife Management 32: 441-456 (Shells 7 percent thicker after two years on DDT diet); Robson, WA et al. 1976. Poultry Science 55:2222- 2227; Scott, ML et al. 1975. Poultry Science 54: 350-368 (Egg production, hatchability and shell quality depend on calcium, and are not effected by DDT and its metabolites); Spears, G & P. Waibel. 1972. Minn. Science 28(3):4-5; Tucker, RK & HA Haegele. 1970. Bull Environ Contam. Toxicol 5:191-194 (Neither egg weight nor shell thickness affected by 300 parts per million DDT in daily diet);Edwards, JG. 1973. Statement and affidavit, U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, 24 pages, October 24, 1973; Poult Sci 1979 Nov;58(6):1432-49 ("There was no correlation between concentrations of pesticides and egg shell thinning].”) ]
On the same theme, they debunk the supposed harm of DDT to bald eagles
Bald eagles were reportedly threatened with extinction in 1921 — 25 years before widespread use of DDT.
[Van Name, WG. 1921. Ecology 2:76]
Alaska paid over $100,000 in bounties for 115,000 bald eagles between 1917 and 1942.
[Anon. Science News Letter, July 3, 1943]
The bald eagle had vanished from New England by 1937.
[Bent, AC. 1937. Raptorial Birds of America. US National Museum Bull 167:321-349]
After 15 years of heavy and widespread usage of DDT, Audubon Society ornithologists counted 25 percent more eagles per observer in 1960 than during the pre-DDT 1941 bird census.
[Marvin, PH. 1964 Birds on the rise. Bull Entomol Soc Amer 10(3):184-186; Wurster, CF. 1969 Congressional Record S4599, May 5, 1969; Anon. 1942. The 42nd Annual Christmas Bird Census. Audubon Magazine 44:1-75 (Jan/Feb 1942; Cruickshank, AD (Editor). 1961. The 61st Annual Christmas Bird Census. Audubon Field Notes 15(2):84-300; White-Stevens, R.. 1972. Statistical analyses of Audubon Christmas Bird censuses. Letter to New York Times, August 15, 1972]
Cihak outlines the morality, or virtue, of the ban
In a remarkable article in the April 11 New York Times Magazine, “What the World Needs Now Is DDT,” Tina Rosenberg, a Times editorial writer, describes how DDT should be used more extensively in Africa, and points out why it is not. She writes:
“… South Africa is beating the disease with a simple remedy: spraying the inside walls of houses in affected regions once a year. … [S]prayed in tiny quantities inside houses – the only way anyone proposes to use it today – DDT is most likely not harmful to people or the environment. Certainly, the possible harm from DDT is vastly outweighed by its ability to save children’s lives.”
So, why is DDT not being used in this benign manner, let alone more aggressively against malarial mosquito breeding areas? The answer: Wealthy Western funders won’t allow it. And they won’t allow it because of a combination of outdated science and pseudo-science, coupled with a truly breathtaking faux morality.
And Africans need food more. Because they are starving to death.
Africa today averages only about 2300 calories per capita per day, compared to Europe’s 3400, and Africa’s average is declining. The International Food Policy Research Institute warns that by 2020, current farming and population trends would leave Africa with more than 200 million malnourished people—even after African farmers clear wildlands equal to the land area of France.
Charitably, Carson was mistaken. Maybe she felt strongly about the issue, and felt that facts were less important than her faith. Certainly many religions feel this way. But many of her allies knew what they were doing. They’re intent was to kill people.
During the DDT hearing in Washington in 1972, Dr. Charles Wurster, the chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, testified that DDT was a danger to birds. Asked if a DDT ban would lead to more human deaths, he stated that the world had too many people. “We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”
