Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, led to the banning of DDT, a pesticide against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. This week, Google celebrated her 107th birthday with this doodle.
Bethany Mandel writes: “Using faulty science, Carson’s book argued that DDT could be deadly for birds and, thus, should be banned. Incredibly and tragically, her recommendations were taken at face value and soon the cheap and effective chemical was discontinued, not only in the United States but also abroad. Environmentalists were able to pressure USAID, foreign governments, and companies into using less effective means for their anti-malaria efforts. And so the world saw a rise in malaria deaths.
Gallingly, environmentalists even claimed that the effectiveness of DDT was leading to a world population explosion. Translation: preventable disease wasn’t killing enough poor children in developing countries.”
She goes on to tell of a horrible experience she had with a dying child in Cambodia, where one million people are infected with malaria each year.
We exchanged tweets on this, and I’m impressed that you actually paid attention.
I complain that Ms. Mandel’s story — touching and informative in places and troubling all the way through — starts off from a premise that some sort of arbitrary ban on DDT by nasty and uncaring environmentalists in the U.S. is killing children in Cambodia with a shortage of DDT.
Children are dying, but that’s the only part of such a narrative that squares with reality. Mandel’s indictment of Rachel Carson unjustly brands environmentalists as enemies of human life, when the truth is somewhere to the opposite.
Thanks for staying rational.
I’ve detailed my brief complaints at my blog. If you’d care to chime in, or if your readers would care to read and discuss, please do.
In short: Rachel Carson pleaded to keep DDT working against disease carrying mosquitoes; DDT advocates did not listen and the stuff stopped working as well as health workers needed it to, in order to complete their ambitious campaign to wipe out malaria.
The ban on DDT in the U.S. actually increased the amount of DDT available to fight the disease in Africa and Asia, though massive house-to-house spraying campaigns largely ended. It was not a shortage of DDT to fight malaria, but a shortage of will and understanding.
Most important, Carson’s science was solid, and still is. As a sort of divine rebuttal of the Carson critics, malaria deaths have plunged since the U.S. ban on DDT; fewer people die now from malaria worldwide, today, than used to die every three months.
If Rachel Carson shoulders the responsibility for that change in malaria deaths, she’s a saint.
Yes, I’m glad we could tweet each other about it. I have moreorless healthy skepticism about scientific claims, because I have no way to judge them myself. I don’t know who is spinning the truth and whether that spin is reasonable or wacky. I appreciate your list of claims and generally assume you’re right, but I will say one thing about the post on your blog. Your conclusion is a bit wild. How many children will die because people think they should go murder Rachel Carson? Come on.