Rachel Carson and her Accomplices
This is exactly why we have to make sure, on issues like the environment, that we proceed with good science—and not with hysteria:
Hooray for DDT’s Life-Saving Comeback
Rachel Carson. They named a bridge after her in Pittsburgh, roughly the equivalent of naming one after Josef Mengele, it seems to me.
It’s great to see some of the environmental groups finally acknowledging that they were wrong. It’d be nicer if it brought back the tens of millions of children who have died needlessly, but better late than never, I suppose. I know I sound a little snarky on this one, but you know, it really, really ticks me off, and we’ve just got to do better than this. Much better. People suffer and die when we act on impulse. There’s a lot of blood on the hands of a lot of people here, not just some of the environmentalists; it was Richard Nixon’s EPA that bought into the hysteria generated by the ill-researched Silent Spring. Pathetic. Decisions made while in the grip of hysteria or hyper-emotionalism rarely produce good results.
From the article:
Junk-science debunker Steven Milloy, an adjunct scholar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wonders why the environmentalists took so long to change their minds.
“There are no new facts on DDT — all the relevant science about DDT safety has been available since the 1960s,” Milloy says.
Milloy adds: “It might be easy for some to dismiss the past 43 years of eco-hysteria over DDT with a simple ‘never mind,’ except for the blood of millions of people dripping from the hands of the WWF [World Wildlife Fund], Greenpeace, Rachel Carson, Environmental Defense Fund, and other junk science-fueled opponents of DDT.”
Milloy reminds us that the same people who spread DDT hysteria are now pushing the global-warming scare. “If they and others could be so wrong about DDT, why should we trust them now?”
When the stakes are this high—millions of lives—to do anything less than being certain is to invite chaos.
This phrase comes from the 1978 "Jonestown massacre" in which most members of the Peoples Temple cult, blindly following their leader Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
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