Environmentalists”Silent Spring’ mythology killing us softly

Theirs is the disease you don’t hear about on the nightly news. Newspaper editorialists, too, are silent about the death toll from this ailment — nearly 9.5 million people since 1999, of which 8.5 million were pregnant women or children under the age of 5.

No, the disease isn’t AIDS. It’s mosquito-borne malaria, and we’ve had the means for wiping out this affliction for over a century. However, thanks to environmentalist mythology, the tool, DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), has been banned in most countries worldwide.

The ban on DDT, like the modern environmentalist movement itself, grew out of the book “Silent Spring,” by Rachael Carson (See “Lies of Rachel Carson,” by world-renowned entomologist J. Gordon Edwards — a long-time member, incidentally, of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society.)

As almost any schoolchild today can parrot, Carson claimed DDT thinned the eggs of birds. Pointing to a 1956 study by Dr. James DeWitt published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, Carson wrote: “Dr. DeWitt’s now classic experiments [demonstrate] that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction.”

DeWitt, however, concluded no such thing. Indeed, he discovered in his study that 50 percent more eggs hatched from DDT-fed quail than from those in the control group.

Following Carson’s lead, hippie environmentalists began claiming that raptor populations — eagles, osprey, hawks, etc. — were declining because of DDT.

They failed to note that such populations had been declining precipitously for years prior to the use of DDT. Indeed, according to the yearly Audubon Christmas Bird Counts for 1941 to 1960 — years that saw the greatest, most widespread use of DDT — the count of eagles actually increased from 197 in 1941 to 897 in 1960. A 40-year count over roughly the same period by the Hawks Mountain Sanctuary Association also found population increases for Ospreys and most kinds of hawks.

Finally, after years of study, researchers at Cornell University in 1975 “found no tremors, no mortality, no thinning of eggshells and no interference with reproduction caused by levels of DDT which were as high as those reported to be present in most of the wild birds where ‘catastrophic’ decreases in shell quality and reproduction have been claimed” (Scott, M.L., etc., 1975, Poult. Sci. 54(2): 350-368.).

Carson, her book’s affected prose designed to create optimum public panic, heralded, too, a coming cancer epidemic among humans. Her assertion was based on the high incidences of liver cancer found in adult rainbow trout in 1961 — a result, not of DDT, but of a fungi produced carcinogen, aflatoxin, which had contaminated the food chain of the trout.

Since then, in 1978, after a two-year study, the National Cancer Institute has concluded that, indeed, DDT is not carcinogenic. Even more recently, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October 1997 found nothing to indicate that the risk of breast cancer is increased by exposure to DDT or DDE, a byproduct of DDT.

None of this evidence, though, would have swayed William Ruckelshaus, head of a brand new Environmental Protection Agency in 1971. Ruckelshaus not only refused to attend EPA’s 1971-72 administrative hearings on DDT, but also refused to read even one page of the 9,000 pages of testimony. Not surprisingly, Ruckelshaus ignored the findings of the hearings’ judge — “DDT is not a carcinogenic … a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man” — and banned DDT anyway.

It’s not surprising. William Ruckelshaus was a member of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Since 1971, pressured by specialized environmentalist organizations like the International Pesticide Action Network, much of the rest of the world has banned DDT, too. Those countries now rely on pesticides that are neither as effective nor as safe as DDT. Meanwhile, the death tolls from malaria in tropical Third World countries silently climbs. Heedless of this, environmentalists are now pressuring governments to preserve wetlands — i.e., swamps — which are the foremost breeding grounds of disease-carrying mosquitoes.

One would have to conclude, given the facts, that environmentalists are either insane or intent upon eradicating every human being from the face of the planet. At a U.N.-sponsored earth summit in 1971, a delegate’s remark gives us the answer: “What this world needs is a good plague to wipe out the human population.”

If the death toll from malaria — or West Nile — begins to mount in this country, we’ll certainly hear about it on the nightly news. Malaria will be blamed, but the real culprit will be environmentalist mythology, which has been killing us softly for decades.

Steven Brockerman is a Las Vegas freelance writer and owner of WrittenWord Consulting, which provides curriculum models for private schools and home-schoolers. He is not now nor has he ever been affiliated in any way with any petrochemical or pesticide industry or business concern.