"The Green Death"

I remember reading Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring", and taking it's warnings to heart.  It was back in the 70's, when "teach-ins" and Earth Day were being used by the fledgling environmental movement.  I confess, without any qualms, I became a True Believer.

Since then, life has changed.  I've taken college-level science courses, and taught science for over 20 years.  In that time, I've found that much of what is written about science in popular media is:

• Wrong
• Not scientifically-based
• Blatant lies
• With a small basis of reality, but wrong conclusions being made about the results of the studies

During those years, although I've examined (and rejected) many of my former beliefs about nuclear power, global warming, environmental scares, and medical hoo-doo, I hadn't looked at the forerunner of the environmental leaders, and her seminal work.

This article does.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.

The resulting explosion of mosquito-borne malaria in Africa has claimed over sixty million lives. This was not a gradual process – a surge of infection and death happened almost immediately. The use of DDT reduces the spread of mosquito-borne malaria by fifty to eighty percent, so its discontinuation quickly produced an explosion of crippling and fatal illness. The same environmental movement which has been falsifying data, suppressing dissent, and reading tea leaves to support the global-warming fraud has studiously ignored this blood-drenched “hockey stick” for decades.

There's a huge difference between what you WANT to happen, and what actually DOES happen.  Rachel, perhaps unwittingly, unleashed a lethal political firestorm on the world, as detailed in this article.

Further reading here.

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