John Tierney wrote an excellent article in the New York Times about the centennial of the birth of famed environmental writer Rachel Carlson. Carlson’s Silent Spring, written in 1962, grossly over estimated the dangers of DDT. Tierney argues that the legacy of the book is that millions of people are afraid of minute doses of synthetic chemicals and spend too much time and effort avoiding relatively harmless chemicals while ignoring more serious dangers.
The human costs have been horrific in the poor countries where malaria returned after DDT spraying was abandoned. Malariologists have made a little headway recently in restoring this weapon against the disease, but they’ve had to fight against Ms. Carson’s disciples who still divide the world into good and bad chemicals, with DDT in their fearsome “dirty dozen.â€
Indeed, while spraying huge amounts of DDT on agricultural fields definitely led to serious declines in raptors and other birds due to eggshell thinning, DDT and other synthetic chemicals should have a place in sensible pest management and especially in malaria control. Using a chemical by the ton on a cotton field is going to have very different effects than applying to mosquito netting or on the walls of hut. These applications are very targeted and use small amounts of the chemical. We must always remember to use reason and critical thinking, and not just jump on the environmental bandwagon because someone wrote a scary book.
I’ve got a copy of Silent Spring sitting on my bookshelf from a college environmental literature class. Perhaps I should move it from the science shelf to my literature shelf. It’s a well-written book, but it’s science is poor, misleading, and biased. It’s a reminder to me to keep my mind open and to be skeptical of everything I read.
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1 Keith Schneider // Jun 7, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Nothing excellent about Tierney’s piece.
On the day late last month that Rachel Carson would have turned 100 years old I posted a piece on Mode Shift that focused on the surprising failure of the nation’s major environmental organizations to defend the mother of modern environmentalism. The free market right has set out on a deliberate path to diminish Carson, and by extension the American environmental community, as credible in responding to the consequences of industrial technology. The attack on Carson is an important facet of the free market right’s campaign to diminish the reach of local, state, and federal safeguards. And it’s been remarkably effective and destructive. The federal government, for instance, has no strategy for responding to global climate change because of its sympathy to free market assertions that the science of climate change is deeply flawed.
In any case on Tuesday this week John Tierney, an influential free market science writer and columnist at the New York Times, leveled a broadside at Carson in the pages of Science Times. Calling Silent Spring a “hodgepodge of science and junk science,†Tierney accused Carson of using “dubious statistics and anecdotes (like the improbable story of a woman who instantly developed cancer after spraying her basement with DDT) to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to pass. She rightly noted threats to some birds, like eagles and other raptors, but she wildly imagined a mass ‘biocide.’â€
I know Tierney and worked with him at the Times in the early 1990s, when he joined the paper. He’s smart, thorough, and delights in being a contrarian on environmental issues. He wrote a famous piece questioning the value of recycling, essentially saying that recycling wastes more energy and materials than it saves. In another piece for the Times Magazine, Tierney singlehandedly changed the public’s view of Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich when he reported on a bet that Ehrlich made with Julian Simon, an economist at the University of Maryland. In 1968 Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which predicted a runaway global population boom (he was right on that) and mass starvation globally and food riots in the United States in the 1980s (he was wrong about that). Ehrlich bet that the prices of five key metals would rise as a result of population increases and scarcity of natural resources. Simon bet that innovation would drive prices down. In 1990, Ehrlich conceded defeat and sent Simon a check for $576.07, the amount that represented the decline in the metals’ prices after accounting for inflation, he reported.
Now Tierney is after Rachel Carson, using as the basis of his critique a 1962 review of Silent Spring in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin. Baldwin’s review was the subject of debate as intense at the time as Carson’s ground-breaking journalism. Her assessment of the toxic trail left by pesticides in plants and animals was defended and confirmed then by independent scientists, some of them working at the behest of President John F. Kennedy. And they’ve been reconfirmed time and again in the real world since.
See more here at www.modeshift.org
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