Hello, this is the fifth video in our Vortex series and I'm sure if
you've seen them all, you agree on two points of our vortexing history. First,
that this is a pretty revolutionary approach. This is about challenging
the way in which you see the word vortex in history is not about another room in the big
house of history. It's about rethinking what the house of History is all about.
And second, I'm sure it’s agreed nothing is sacred in vortexing history, vortexing history does not
fraternise as academic history should. We do not fraternise with our topics, even if we may
have sympathies with one or another side and this video will underscore this when we look at DDT.
After all, we don't just look at a chemical that moved from miracle stuff to one of the
most vilified chemicals on this planet, we also talk about Rachel Carson, one of the
patron saints of environmentalism. Now every social movement has these
here and there's nothing wrong with having these heroes from a social movement spinner.
And yet I think taking a critical glance at Rachel Carson and putting her into the vortex
into a global context of conversations, I'm sure that will raise eyebrows here and there.
After all, if you do environmental history,
there is a natural expectation that, yes, you will be an environmentalist.
Now. It's true for the founding fathers of environment history,
the people who blazed a path for us in the 70s and 80s. Many of these people were members,
if not activists for environmental causes, and that is pretty much how
it is in these new emerging fields that came to life in the 60s, seventies, 80s.
What we usually find is a co-evolution of social movements and historiographic field. What we see
in environment history is the same as that we see in women's history, in black history. The key is
that over time you see more and more of these drops of academic cooling fluid and a growing
appreciation of the needs for an academic perspective. That has certainly happened
in environmental history. There is no longer this close proximity, or should I say there is
more diversity in the field. We still see many academics writing in activist mode, but we also
see others who look at things with more distance. Anybody notice that vortexing history is certainly
part of this letter trend? We see things from a distance. And maybe that is not a distancing from
the environmental movement, but really the way to talk to environmentalists in the new Millennium.
If you look around in our global environmental discourse, there's plenty of goodwill. There is
plenty of ideas and plenty of awareness that we live on a planet in great danger. What we need
is a greater understanding of where we are, on what will actually work in our quest for a more
sustainable future. But maybe I should take a step back here when I talk about Rachel Carson, because
not everybody who's watching this video may know who Rachel Carson is. If you do, you'll think
no and everybody knows Rachel Carson that well, a dozen years ago, I was deputy director of the
Rachel Carson Centre in Munich, Germany, and that centre turned into an experiment about, you know,
does everybody know who Rachel Carson is? And my experience was that more often than not, I had to
answer questions about, you know, who is Rachel Carson and had to provide a summary in two or
three sentences about what that is over cocktails. Another thing - that question isn’t embarrassing
the embarrassing question back then was, are you paid by Rachel Carson? Which has said, well,
Rachel Carson died in 1964. She was never a rich person. And no, we're not paid by Rachel Carson.
We're paid by the German Government and not Rachel Carson said. But if we were paid by Rachel Carson,
there wouldn’t be much money in that. So who is Rachel Carson? Well, Rachel Carson was a trained
marine biologist who turned into a popular science writer. She had a degree from Johns Hopkins,
but dedicated the latter part of her life to writing about the seas. That was her topic
until she developed an interest in pesticides and specifically DDT. The product of this interest,
the book enigmatically entitled Silent Spring, this book was published in 1962.
And it was an immediate sensation and this book is widely credited
for triggering the global ban on DDT. Well, as you may guess from the opening,
that's not quite what it is. Not so fast, is my response to this reading, and of course,
myth busting is always something you should do with a measure of nuance. But that's what
we have these papery things for, that you can draw on for all the details of this. This is a
video after all. I need to do something to wake you up while you watch this video. So Billy,
behind the camera volunteered to produce some kind of flashy icon that will come up now because this
talk is organised around five years and for each of these years we will have something dramatic in
this video that captures your imagination. So Billy let it roll for the year 1948.
1948 Paul Miller receives the Nobel Award in medicine for inventing DDT or more for discovering
that DDT has potential as a pesticide. Paul Miller was an employee of the Chemical Corporation in
Switzerland, a researcher who was had the task of finding a new pesticide. The discovery took place
in 1939 and very quickly DDT comes into use. It is being used in World War Two and it is
particularly used after the second war. At war and DDT becomes one of the flagship chemicals,
and what we can are we called the great Age of industrial chemistry. The immediate post war
years were a time when there were mushrooming array of chemical products and even more.
There were very few critical questions being asked about these products. So DDT was used
lavishly or should we say excessively. There were certain excesses in the use of DDT in the 1950s.
Let me mention the Fire Ants campaign that the US Department of Agriculture launches in 1957.
The fire ants is an invasive species. You can insert another cross link here if you wish in
this book full of these cross links. These are the crucial links that I insert in this book to
make clear that these issues are networked with others. Invasive species, the fire ants entered
the US through the port of 1930s. In the 50s, the US department decides we need to eradicate the
fire ants. And yes, if you were to eradicate, you just spray wherever you think the fire ant may be.
Next year,
1962. Well, the USDA did not succeed in eliminating the fire ants. It did not
even stop the spread. All it achieved in terms of tangible results of the fire ants campaign,
the only thing that really achieved was they got Rachel Carson interested in
pesticides. This dramatic spraying campaign wherever you thought the fire might be,
this captures the imagination of the trained biologist Rachel Carson. And she dedicates 5
years to researching the effects of pesticides and specifically DDT. The
result of this is the aforementioned book Silent Spring, published in 1962.
Rachel Carson does painstaking research on the matter not so much in terms of her own
experiments, there was discontent all around. People experienced that this pesticide was not
the miracle stuff that some people claimed it would be, which is term of the normal when it
comes to pesticides. For most pesticides it just takes 3/4/5 years and you realise, no, this is
not a panacea. This is a chemical product with advantages and disadvantages, side effects and you
need to work through them. So there was a lot of discontent around, but it was just inside expert
circles and insiders. What Rachel Carson did is assemble all these insights and brought this
discontent to a simmering boil. And it worked. The book was an immediate sensation and triggered
a loud broad public debate. The kind of debate that nearly every book author would like to see,
including this present book author, but I'm happy to say, you know,
there's the first review of this book, is already out after less than a week after the
official application date. And Billy, could you insert a link to that wonderful review?
Sorry, this is a recording about Rachel Carson's book, which, by the way,
made a bigger splash than mine ever will, but we all play in our own league anyway.
There is a debate about this book, but the impact of this debate is
almost entirely cultural. This is a book that challenges the intellectual hegemony
of the chemical industry. And after that, the intellectual humility of the American
business community was never quite the same. This is a milestone in the rise
of environmentalism and a milestone in the decline of U.S. business as a hegemonic force.
By contrast, the political consequences were practically nil, and I think it's important to
make that point because very often stories about Rachel Carson talk about the publication of Silent
Spring, talk about the bitter controversy that this triggered, the truly evil attacks on Rachel
Carson. This was also a story about a woman outside the established network of science
that raises her voice and that triggers certain sentiments in a distinctly male expert community.
There's a tendency to, you know, come from this controversy. In 62 64, three C and then
fast forward to the 70s, when DDT is banned. Now, if something takes 10 years to for a ban
to come before something happens in those ten years, and one of the things that happens in
the years after Silent Spring’s publication is the use of pesticides actually grows.
In 1964 the US used £320 million of pesticides. Two decades later, in 1982,
that number stands at £818,000,000 almost three times the amount in the early 60s.
So you see that the effect on pesticides use is very small. If there is one at all.
Fast forward 1972, the US Environmental Protection Agency imposes a ban on DDT in the United States,
and this ban is one of the flagship events of a time that is now widely credited as a
high watermark of US environmentalism and environmental comments are hugely popular
across the political spectrum. The Environment Protection Agency is 2 years old - a new creation
by the Nixon administration to finally get serious about environmental issues.
This ban was not the first ban on DDT.
In Norway and Sweden banned DDT in 1970. And if you look at the context, you see that a
lot about this ban is really about timing. The US announced the ban on DDT on the eve of the
Stockholm Summit in 1972 and the Stockholm Summit is the first big global environmental conference,
so part of the now of this ban was we show to the world that, yes, we're getting serious about
environmental issues. Still, you could make a point that that's the timing part. After all,
the ban on DDT is about banning a dangerous chemical because Rachel Carson had shown
that there are so many reasons why we should view DDT as a dangerous chemical.
Well, there's something that is often lost in the debate over DDT, and Rachel Carson.
The year of maximum use of DDT in the United States was 1959, three years before Silent
Spring was published. So you could say that in a way, DDT was already on a downward slope.
Due to the resistance problem that I mentioned, if you spray with one chemical lavishly, there was
a pretty good chance that insects will develop resistance within a matter of years and there
was a weak interest from the manufacturers of pesticides because what you need to do about DDT
as a chemical, it's a really easy chemical. And it is very cheap to produce, so manufacturers have
an interest in neglecting DDT and moving on to other, more expensive, more profitable pesticides.
We move on again, 2001, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants imposes a ban on
12 chemicals, and that includes DDT. That is The Dirty dozen to use the testosterone fuel language
of this agreement, a dirty dozen of chemicals is banned once more. This ban has very little
to do with commercial interests. By 2001, DDT is no longer an issue that has any commercial
significance. And we can say that because people have tried to revive their business with DDT in
the 1980s, the Reagan administration, in its first years had a certain anti environmental streak. One
of the measures that Reagan imposes in the early years is it revokes the ban on DDT production
in the US, Du's connectivity banned, but the recognition heralds of Free Enterprise said, you
know, we will free American Enterprise from pesky regulations and we want American manufacturers
to be free to produce the DT again. And the response from the Heralds of Enterprise was
we didn't really care. In 1985, there were a grand total of two US manufacturers in the DDT business,
and they produced a grand total of 300 tonnes of DDT. So much for revoking this. So commercial
interests really not very significant. There's another issue that is significant. In 2001,
when the Stockholm Convention bans DDT again. And that issue is malaria. In the 1950s,
the World Health Organisation had launched a campaign to eradicate malaria and that
campaign the 50s relied heavily on DDT. Now this campaign to cut a long story short, this campaign
unravelled in 1960s because of the resistance problem. It didn't quite work to use DDT mostly as
a primary weapon against malaria, it's important to recognise that the campaign against malaria,
based on unity that unravelled before there was a ban on DDT anywhere. It's just that.
The one thing that solves everything approach doesn't work for malaria. Malaria remains a
problem. It remains a problem to this day, and in 1998 the World Health Organisation launched
another campaign to roll back back malaria. You see how the goal was more modest, but one of the
issues that came up was, well, what is will be the place of DDT in this campaign? Well, in light of
the Stockholm Convention of 2001, the World Health Organisation decided that they would not use DDT
at all in the fight against malaria and after much criticism it changed course just a little bit in
2006 when the World Health Organisation decided that it would allow DDT use in a very targeted,
limited manner. The goal was to use maybe as little as possible in this campaign.
And in assessing this debate in the early 2000s, I think it's crucial to see that this isn't just
a debate about goals and means. This is a debate about symbolic capital. The ban on DDT was one of
the first landmark victories of the environmental movement, and reversing this ban was a sensitive
matter and there you see how when we talk about environment issues, we really talk about legacy,
about early environmentalism, but the legacy of Rachel Carson and how we always operate in
a shadow of history when we take environmental decisions, and it's also about this mystery of
the ban, the legend that the ban is forceful and determined, whereas management of pollutants is
something that reeks of compromise - cross reference to the London smog video here,
where we talked about how most pollution control programmes are really about. And making a deal
curbing pollutants while allowing for other issues here. That is something that is the reality of the
world, but not something that works well with the sentiment of many environmentalists. They
want something more forceful, and the ban on DDT is one of those forceful measures.
So where does all this leave us now in 2023, where are we? Well, I guess the matter is
unresolved. We still live in a world where DDT is probably the most vilified chemical on the
planet. At the same time, we use it in a very limited, targeted fashion, but there is an idea,
read Silent Spring. Because if you read Silent Spring now you realise that this book has been
transformed by the debate that followed in its wake. Many people view it as a diatribe against
pesticides, but if you read it you realise well, no, that's not really what the book is for. One
thing, Rachel Carson never asked for a ban on DDT. The book is really a call for humility.
It's a description of the web of life, and it is a discussion of the folly of intervening into the
web of life with brute force technology. This is a book about the folly of seeking control of nature,
and, by the way, that was the working title of Silent Spring, the control of nature, and this
call for looking at the intricate web of life, this call has lost nothing of its significance.
I'm sure you realise by now The Vortex is not very much about DOS and Don'ts. That's not what
the roaring waters of The Vortex allow, the do's and don'ts that we can work with are usually the
trivial or the obvious, but it's a good idea to get wise about the web of life and if you
want to get wise about the web of life, well, reading Rachel Carson. It's not the worst idea.