I suppose that will depend upon how much Gore hates Hillary.
Posted on 06/04/2007 9:17:47 PM PDT by neverdem
For Rachel Carson admirers, it has not been a silent spring. They’ve been celebrating the centennial of her birthday with paeans to her saintliness. A new generation is reading her book in school — and mostly learning the wrong lesson from it.
If students are going to read “Silent Spring” in science classes, I wish it were paired with another work from that same year, 1962, titled “Chemicals and Pests.” It was a review of “Silent Spring” in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin.
He didn’t have Ms. Carson’s literary flair, but his science has held up much better. He didn’t make Ms. Carson’s fundamental mistake, which is evident in the opening sentence of her book:
“There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings,” she wrote, extolling the peace that had reigned “since the first settlers raised their houses.” Lately, though, a “strange blight” had cast an “evil spell” that killed the flora and fauna, sickened humans and “silenced the rebirth of new life.”
This “Fable for Tomorrow,” as she called it, set the tone for the hodgepodge of science and junk science in the rest of the book. Nature was good; traditional agriculture was all right; modern pesticides were an unprecedented evil. It was a Disneyfied version of Eden.
Ms. Carson used 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.” She warned that one of the most common American birds, the...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Am I asleep? In the nyt? What page? Back of the last page of half human bisexual dwarfs seeking kittens?
Smokers Told To Quit Or Surgery Will Be Refused That was de facto in the UK over a decade ago for cardiac patients. A smoker wasn't listed for bypass surgery until he quit smoking. He finally quit, but he died before the scheduled surgery.
Hospitals admit white kids with lesser emergencies
Firearm Ownership and Storage Patterns Among Families With Children Who Receive Well-Child Care in Pediatric Offices I took a gander @ Pediatrics for the prior link and found it.
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Tierney had a regular OpEd column for a while when he replaced Bill Safire. Now he has a column in the Science section. He wrote this for the Times a while ago.
Oops! Malaria was virtually wiped out in the US BEFORE the introduction of DDT and has not come back since the discontinuation of DDT use.
It’s amazing how much Bad Science dogs us. And costs us.
Ms. Carson used 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.There was a book some years back in which the author recounted tracking down some people Rachel Carson had immortalized via anthropology, and discovered some of the stories RC had quoted had been made up for their own amusement at her credulity.
| (definition) by Webster 1913 (print) |
Clap"trap` (?), n.
1. A contrivance for clapping in theaters. [Obs.]
2. A trick or device to gain applause; humbug.
I’d really like to see him either as the Dhimmicrat nominee, or as the Green Party spoiler candidate (a real table-turn, considering what Ralph Nader supposedly did to Gore in 2000).
Why is that?
I’m sure the thorough explanation is quite complex, but the basic one is that it had to do with civilization — a concept which has never really taken hold in most of Africa. According to Wikipedia’s entry on DDT: “DDT contributed to the final eradication of malaria in Europe and North America, although malaria had already been eliminated from much of the developed world in the early 20th century through the use of a range of public health measures and generally increasing health and living standards. “Malaria’s decline in the United States and Europe in the late 1800s was due mainly to draining swamps and removing mill ponds”.”
Civilization is the same reason that malaria is a lot more deadly in Africa than it ever was in the US. And it’s not due to different strains of malaria. I had malaria twice as a preschooler while living in Rwanda (father was in the Foreign Service). Only significant effect was that I came down with severe gallstones a couple of decades younger than either of my parents had (but they both had them by their forties, so I was pretty sure to get them eventually anyway). But of course, I wasn’t a malnourished child in a family which kept popping out babies regardless of the near-starvation (or actually dead from starvation) status of the previous ones, the family bathed regularly, none of us were suffering from the venereal diseases that already plagued Africa long before AIDS came along, etc, etc. The bottom line is that African culture has long tended to use every penny and every calorie that can possibly be scrounged up to produce more babies, with utter disregard to the horrific standard of living, while Western culture has long had a focus on improving quality of life from one generation to the next. Malaria flourishes where humans live like animals.
Interesting point, since I have limited to no understanding of the situation your experienced explanation makes sense. Thanks.
Well my actual “experience” ended when I was 5 years old, but I’ve tended to read about it a good deal, due to the combination of my personal/family experience with the disease and with Africa, and the super-charged but rarely rational political controversy over DDT use.
Based on your comment —I will read this later.
Thanks for posting.
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