"Will Google be paying similar tribute to any of the other mass killers of the 20th century? Hitler? Stalin? Mao? Pol Pot? Probably not. But then, none of the others have had the benefit of having their images burnished by a thousand and one starry eyed greenies. Nor, unlike Carson – as I note in The Little Green Book of Eco Fascism – do they have named after them a school, a bridge, a hiking trail, three environmental prizes and an annual “sustainable” feast day (at her birth place in Springdale, Pennsylvania)"
--James Delingpole, Breibart News
"The list of diseases and their insect carriers, or vectors, includes typhus and body lice, plague and rate fleas, African sleeping sickness and tsetse flies, various fevers and ticks and innumerable others.
These are important problems and must be met. No responsible person contends that insect borne disease should be ignored.
The question that now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection, but it has heard little of the other side of the story--the defeats, the short lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts."
--Rachel Carson, "The Silent Spring."
Reading "The Silent Spring" again, I first read the objections to Ms. Carson's seminal screed upon the industrial, widespread and wanton use of chemical pesticides, but I also saw her argument through the lenses of my latter day education in biology and the environment, chiefly the fantastic TV series narrated by David Attenborough, including "Life Underground" and "Blue Planet." And, with time, I've learned that criticism and analysis ought to be used with equal vigor examining the arguments of those we love as on those we despise.
Warning: I surely learned more biology from David Attenborough than I ever got from the professors of biology at my undergraduate college. Truth be told, I had four main professors in college biology, and only one was really good. What passed for biology at my college in the mid 1960's was mostly descriptive and "fund of knowledge" stuff which did not allow much for critical thought or, for that matter, for anything really useful. "The Voyage of the Beagle" was superior to most of my courses, though no less descriptive and iterative. Memorize. Regurgitate. Consider yourself "educated."
But back to Carson.
One might say, if one had no time to investigate further that any woman who could earn the title of "eco fascist" from Breibart must be hero, ipso facto and be believed simply by virtue of the enemies she has made.
Carson makes all sorts of allegations about the destructive effects of DDT, mostly coalescing around the triad of ideas: 1/ DDT destroys birds, their eggs and other unintended creatures 2/ Target insects become resistant and the survivors are even more of a problem 3/ that once DDT kills off the pest at which it was aimed, new insects, mites, spores replace it which are even more destructive to the cows, people or crops the DDT was meant to protect.
She does not use the standard footnoted references to support each claim so it can be examined based on the source study but rather a "List of Principle Sources" to cover arguments presented over a span of pages. This can be forgiven as this book was intended for the general public.
A University of Wyoming entomologist, J. Gordon Edwards, goes page by page listing and "refuting" the "lies" he find in Silent Spring, to the effect only of revealing his own psychopathology, but she does leave herself open to this sort of thing by publishing as she did, a layman's book about science. But these attacks are trivial and often driven by other agendas.
The real problem I have with Ms. Carson is her proposed solution for malaria and other problems is in no way proven to be less potentially havoc wrecking on the environment than the pesticides she decries: namely genetically manipulated mosquitoes who are released into selected biological systems to breed in sterility, resulting in a decline of the mosquito targeted, mostly Anopheles.
She says, "Examples of successful biological control of serious pests by importing their natural enemies are to be found in some 40 countries distributed over much of the world. The advantages of such control over chemicals are obvious: it is relatively inexpensive, it is permanent, it leaves no poisonous residues."
Defending the biological warfare she likes: "To some the term microbial insecticide may conjure up pictures of bacterial warfare that would endanger other forms of life. This is not true. in contrast to chemicals, insect pathogens are harmless to all but their intended targets...outbreaks of insect disease in nature always remain confined to insects, affecting neither the host plants nor animals feeding on them."
Oh, Ms. Carson, beware that word "always." In science, "always" always calls for the exception to always.
The other operative word here is "pests." What is a "pest"? I would have to imagine a pest is some insect, plant or organism people, or at least some people do not like or consider harmful to a human enterprise or offensive to someone's taste.
(In New Hampshire, the horticulture department at the University of New Hampshire does not like, aesthetically, purple/ maroon leafy maples, the Norwegian maple. The UNH department prefers green. The faculty testified before a committee of the New Hampshire House of Representatives the Norwegian maple, with its dark leaves of deep maroon is "an invasive species" [another choice phrase.]You cannot legally buy, import or plant a Norway maple in the state to this day, unless, somehow, you plant them around the Hampton Academy school grounds, which, somehow, is exempt from the problem of an invasion by Norway maples. It might be noted, you rarely find a Norway maple growing wild in the woods and forest around Hampton or anywhere along the Seacoast--they are almost always ornamental trees planted by some stealthy gardener, likely before they were outlawed--Except when it comes to governmental planters.)
The most famous example of biowarfare run amuck, of course, was the effort to rid the Hawaiian islands of rats by importing mongoose. Turns out, rats being nocturnal, were not much bothered by the mongoose, which likes to hunt by day and wound up killing a lot of lovely Hawaiian birds but few rats. Best laid plans oft' do go astray, or at least occasionally. It doesn't take much googling to discover other misadventures:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_pest_control
The problem for Ms. Carson and for all of us, is biology is interwoven and like that wonderful Simpson's Halloween episode, when Homer goes into the past, where he steps on a butterfly and thereby changes evolutionary destiny for the planet, over and over and in unpredictable ways is worth re watching. This "butterfly effect" was not original with the Simpsons, which only made it most entertaining, but is a cautionary tale we ought not forget.
Ms. Carson spends chapter after chapter, citing example after example of how ridding a micro-environment, a field, a state of one insect, one mite results in the emergence of another, even more troublesome insect, mite, fungus, cautionary tale after cautionary tale, only to then lay out for us a fool proof, trouble-free solution of competitor based, predator-under-our control solution. She does strike the refrain that the whole notion of "nature under our control" is an exercise in hubris, but she cannot help herself.
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| Obadiah Youngblood "Church" |
Ms. Carson alerted us to the problem; she was not as strong on the solution.
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