This is one of the nation’s bestsellers. Up to now, 500,000 copies have been sold,
and Silent Spring has been called the most controversial book of the year.
Rachel Carson’s push to limit the use of
powerful pesticides like DDT helped spark the American environmental movement.
Rachel Carson is one of those rare individuals
who brought about change in all of our lives.
But the seeming loss of this pesticide in the fight against malaria also turned her
into a poster child for environmental regulation gone too far.
DDT was eliminated and malaria made a comeback
and millions of children in third world have died because of this nonsense.
Although environmentalists worship her,
I say she’s a mass murderer.
If you discredit Rachel Carson, you discredit the founding principle of the EPA. The idea
that Carson gave DDT such a bad name that it became banned in much of the world is a
gross oversimplification.
As the world continues its fight against malaria, what lesson does Silent Spring hold?
She was a very soft-spoken soul who loved
nothing better than going down to the tide pools of the rocky Atlantic shores and studying
creatures in their habitats and their relationship to each other.
The naturalist and science writer Rachel Carson
spent decades urging Americans to see the beauty around them. But in 1962, Carson published
Silent Spring, and her message took on markedly different tone.
Man is part of nature, and his war against
nature is inevitably a war against himself.
To Carson, that war was exemplified by the growing use of DDT — a potent synthetic
insecticide that was so revered for its ability to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes during
World War II that its discovery led to a Nobel Prize.
This diabolic weapon of modern science saved
millions of humans but killed billions of insects. Men with this newly discovered force
has at long last gained the upper hand in our age old struggle.
DDT was soon billed as the solution to every insect pest.
And, in time, upwards of 80 million pounds was being sprayed annually in the U.S.
alone — applied to everything from vast forests and cropland to spreading tracts of
suburban American homes.
This was the advent of “better living through chemistry,” and DDT was the wonder child.
Once a bug comes into contact with DDT, he is lost.
The effect is disastrous.
Basically like a chemical holocaust against these insects, it drove lots of insect populations down.
And it was enormously effective.
But Carson’s research showed the massive spraying of DDT and other insecticides was
causing a hidden harm.
Carson forced us to consider an invisible threat, something that we might not smell,
you might not see; but which had all kinds of unintended consequences.
We poison the caddis flies in a stream, and
the salmon runs dwindle and die. We poison the gnats in a lake, and the poison travels
from link to link of the food chain.
We spray our elms, and the following springs are silent of robin song.
She alerted us to the possibility that, in trying to improve on nature, we were actually
poisoning ourselves. But to have a woman question the authority of science, and then of scientific
men was something that created a great deal of discomfort in some quarters and downright
hostility in others.
Time magazine called Miss Carson’s book an “emotional and inaccurate outburst.”
The major claims in Ms. Rachel Carson’s
book, Silent Spring, are gross distortions of the actual facts. If man were to faithfully
follow teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and
diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.
But, as evidence mounted that DDT was a persistent
and damaging environmental toxin, its pervasive spraying raised increasing political and scientific alarm.
A government-backed scientific panel today reported that pesticides may, indeed, represent
a grave threat to mankind.
The average American already has more DDT in his body than is permitted in the meat
and fish that we eat. It does not go away. It accumulates, and it passes to babies through
their mother’s milk.
By the 1970s, Carson was being hailed as an environmental hero, while DDT was in retreat—
with a host of developed countries, including the US, severely limiting its use.
Silent Spring forced us to reconsider a fundamental
faith in science and technology.
But, as the decades passed, the disaster some critics had predicted seemed only too near.
In Africa and Asia, the mosquito is a mass
killer. More than 2 million people die every year from malaria, which mosquitoes transmit.
The Center for Disease Control estimates
that a child in Africa dies from malaria every 30 seconds.
And the critics knew just whom to blame.
By the 1960s DDT had all but eradicated malaria...
then came Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring book.
Her misleading bestseller got the pesticide DDT banned.
But the progressive nut balls had it wrong, as usual.
And what is the result of DDT being banned?
Malaria out of control in third world countries where before it had been nearly eliminated.
But places like Burkina Faso tell a different story. Even though DDT was never banned in
the fight against insect-born disease here, the tiny country has become an epicenter of
the world’s malaria epidemic.
During the rainy season, health clinics like this one in the village of Soumoussou are
packed with patients suffering from malaria. Nearly 40 percent of the country’s residents
end up contracting the disease every year.
Go to any single healthcare. You will see for yourself. You will see a lot
of people with kids there I mean just laying down on the floor, suffering and then waiting
for the treatment.
The problem is that the mosquitoes here have become resistant to the pesticides used against
them, including DDT.
Insects are very good at out-evolving constraints, and so all over the world lots of different
insect species developed resistance against DDT.
Mosquitoes that had a genetic propensity to metabolize DDT survived the spraying, and
every year, those survivors reproduced and multiplied.
In many African countries, that resistance
combined with decades of government neglect, poor infrastructure and abysmal health care
systems to turn malaria into a perfect storm.
In West Africa you can’t really use DDT, because resistance is extremely high pretty
much everywhere.
DDT didn’t work. Which is nothing to do with Silent Spring.
In fact, Carson had warned of this very problem.
Inevitably, it follows that intensive spraying
with powerful chemicals only makes worse the the problem it is designed to solve.
Rely on a single insecticide, you’ll get
immune insects.
Over the last decade, malaria rates have come down through a combination of new anti-malarial
drugs and insecticide treated bed nets. But these results are endangered by the same mistakes
– over-reliance on a small set of tools, including pyrethroid insecticides.
It used to be that you could kill a mosquito
with pyrethroid insecticide in minutes. Now, ten hours of exposure kills about 25 percent
of them. Unless we get new technologies to box in the mosquito very quickly, then we’re
probably gonna lose all the gains we’ve got from the last ten years.
That's because the mosquito continues to adapt
-- evolving not only new defenses to insecticides, but new feeding habits as well.
Some mosquito populations can actually recognize
the silhouette of a door, and they go for people when they come in and out of doorways.
That’s how sophisticated evolution can be in changing the behavior.
Here, in this cluster of research sites set
among Burkina Faso’s rice fields and villages, promising new strategies are put through their
paces — including one developed in Raymond St. Leger’s Maryland lab.
Most insects don’t die of old age, or because
they get snapped up by a passing bird. They actually get killed by disease. And more insects
die from fungal disease than any other kind of disease agent.
St. Leger decided this fungus could be improved
upon, so he genetically altered it to produce a spider venom, turning the fungi into a mosquito
terminator of sorts.
So, basically it’s a vehicle which makes its own insecticide and then functions like
a hypodermic. The fungus injects the insecticide straight into the blood of the insect.
Since mosquitoes must first be infected by
the malaria parasite before they can pass it onto humans, Johns Hopkins University immunologist
George Dimopoulos has genetically supercharged the the mosquito’s natural defenses against
contracting the disease.
He has also used bacteria found in mosquitoes intestines to help block the development of
the parasite before it can multiply.
It’s like giving the mosquito a probiotic that protects them against malaria.
So, you can put all of these different, innovative
approaches together. They all dovetail with each other, and that’s gonna be the solution.
The solution isn’t gonna be relying on any single technology as the silver bullet.
These scientists stress the need for a more
holistic view of pest control, which is exactly what Rachel Carson was advocating for in Silent
Spring. Despite claims by some modern-day critics, Carson understood there was still
a need for pesticides.
We must go on to think in terms of other methods of control, of much more scientific, much
more accurate and precise methods. You can’t just step in with some brute force and change
one thing without changing a good many others.
We are learning that lesson. We’re doing our best to learn that lesson.
The mosquito, meanwhile, continues to evolve,
an ever-adaptable animal… carrying not just malaria, but Dengue, Yellow Fever, Zika, and
a host of other diseases… as it pursues its ancient hunt for human prey.
A recent study estimated that vector-borne
diseases – mostly mosquito-borne diseases – have killed half of all the humans who’ve
ever lived. They are by far and away the most dangerous animal. They’re even more dangerous
to us than other people are. So, ideally, we want to develop an evolution-proof system
for controlling them.