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The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 sent shock waves through state agencies. The following year, in 1963, the Arkansas branch of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife (which later became the US Fish and Wildlife Service) imported grass carp as an organic treatment for catfish ponds. Carp, with their voracious appetites for plankton, were a chemical-free filter. When the approach proved successful, additional species — black, silver, and bighead carp — were brought from Vietnam and Malaysia, and later from China and Russia as well. Without differentiating among the species, agencies like the US Department of...

On Jan. 24, 2017, PBS aired a two-hour special on Rachel Carson, the mother of the environmental movement. Although the program crossed the line from biography to hagiography, in Carson’s case, the unbridled praise was well deserved – with one exception. Rachel Carson was an American hero. In the early 1960s, she was the first to warn that a pesticide called DDT could accumulate in the environment, the first to show that it could harm fish, birds, and other wildlife, the first to warn that its overuse would render it ineffective, and the first to predict that more natural means...

We've been told conservatives don't believe in science and that there's a "Republican war on science." But John Tierney, who's written about science for The New York Times for 25 years and now writes for the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, told me in my latest online video, "The real war on science is the one from the left." Really? Conservatives are more likely to be creationists -- denying evolution. "Right," says Tierney. "But creationism doesn't affect the way science is done." What about President George W. Bush banning government funding of stem cell research? "He didn't stop stem cell research,"...

On Sunday morning, the South Carolina honey bees began to die in massive numbers. Death came suddenly to Dorchester County, S.C. Stressed insects tried to flee their nests, only to surrender in little clumps at hive entrances. The dead worker bees littering the farms suggested that colony collapse disorder was not the culprit — in that odd phenomenon, workers vanish as though raptured, leaving a living queen and young bees behind. Instead, the dead heaps signaled the killer was less mysterious, but no less devastating. The pattern matched acute pesticide poisoning. By one estimate, at a single apiary — Flowertown...

These People Took DDT Pills In the 1970s to Prove it Was Safe In 1971 two people in North Hollywood started eating DDT pills every day. That's right, they willingly swallowed 10mg of poison every single day for three months. In front of witnesses. From the Associated Press: - Robert Loibl and his wife, Louise, hold 10-milligram capsules of DDT which they took in front of witnesses for 93 days at lunch time, June 10, 1971. Loibl said their total dosage was more than the average person consumes in 83 years. He said his wife's dandruff disappeared, their appetites perked...

During the few minutes you spend reading this column, malaria will kill six Africans and sicken about 3,000 more, mostly children and pregnant women -- a rate of more than one million deaths and 500 million illnesses annually among the 2.2 billion people who live in malarial regions like Africa. There’s legislation moving through the Senate right now intended to reduce this tragic toll.U.S. taxpayers spend about $200 million annually on malaria control efforts. Ironically, almost none of this money is spent to kill or repel the mosquitoes that spread disease. The money is instead spent on anti-malarial drugs and...

Big Search Engine Empire Honors Wacked Environ Mental-ist

Noted for her groundbreaking work on grief associated with death and dying, Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was the quintessential physician who cared deeply about the emotional wellbeing of her dying patients. Through her extensive studies and research in psychiatry, Dr. Ross came to the conclusion that there are five unique emotional stages involved in dealing with death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and ultimately – acceptance. Looking around this country today, one has to wonder which stage of grief we are all in, because our Judeo-Christian heritage is most assuredly dying. Just last week came the horrifying revelation that at least 40...

I cannot say it strong enough. Do not believe the lies that environmental groups, particularly those that receive millions from liberal foundations and from members who never question the “science” they claim to justify massive scare campaigns. One such organization is Friends of the Earth (FOE) and its latest claim is that bees are dying all over the world as the result of the use of pesticides in agriculture and by people protecting their gardens. It is a lie. The attack on the use of pesticides began in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” that claimed that...

Decades after industrial waste dumping turned part of Southern California's seafloor into a toxic hot spot, scientists have dredged up a mystery. Chemicals fouling the ocean off the Palos Verdes Peninsula seem to be going away without being cleaned up. Samples taken from the sediment suggest more than 100 metric tons of the banned pesticide DDT and industrial compounds known as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, have vanished from one of the country's most hazardous sites, almost a 90% drop in just five years.

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A study found that when it comes to career choices, men prefer things and women prefer people.If you thought it was sexist to assume that girls aren't good at science, maybe you should think again (though stereotypes are dangerous and there are certainly many, many exceptions). A recent study in the journal Hormones and Behavior found that genetics play a key role in the career choices we make. In short, men become astronauts and women prefer nursing because of our biological nature, not environmental factors. In our society, males are more likely to work in fields dealing with "things" like...

Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite. Unfortunately for residents of many urban areas such as New York and Philadelphia, the bedbugs are not only biting but spreading at an alarming rate. Despite this outbreak, the mainstream media has until recently kept insisting that bedbugs developed a resistance to DDT so any emergency lifting of the EPA ban on that pesticide is unnecessary. However, your humble correspondent has speculated that the MSM would eventually have to change its position on the DDT ban due to the fact that so many of its members are being assaulted by bedbug attacks which...

"Fraud in science is a major problem." So begins "DDT: A Case Study in Scientific Fraud" by the late J. Gordon Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Entomology at San Jose State University in San Jose, California. The article was published shortly after his death last July in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Fall, 2004. It is based in part on his 34-page manuscript discussing fraud in acid rain, ozone holes, ultraviolet radiation, carbon dioxide, global warming, and pesticides, particularly DDT. His publications distinguish Edwards as the leading authority on the environmental science and politics of DDT. In World War...

Decades after most countries stopped spraying DDT, frozen stores of the insecticide are now trickling out of melting Antarctic glaciers. The change means Adélie penguins have recently been exposed to the chemical, according to a new study. The trace levels found will not harm the birds, but the presence of the chemical could be an indication that other frozen pollutants will be released because of climate change, says Heidi Geisz, a marine biologist at Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester in the US. She led a team that sampled DDT levels in the penguins. She worries that glaciers could...

August 7, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - National Geographic (NG), a leading environmentalist, de-population supporting magazine, has published a major cover story by Michael Finkel on the extraordinarily deadly and complex malaria parasite. The July 2007 NG edition article discusses possible solutions to the disease but also uncharacteristically acknowledges a leading expert's contention that the international ban on DDT was a terrible mistake which may have cost many millions of lives, especially in poor African nations. Environmental ideologues have been quick to slam Finkel's article as being flawed and damaging to the their past success in convincing the world to ban...

Liberal Reader Calls WashPost on Liberal Bias in DDT Story Posted by Ken Shepherd on June 10, 2007 - 03:28. This was a rare treat. Seeing a self-described liberal hitting the Washington Post for liberal bias. In this case the writer, one Philip Evans of Kensington, Md., sees the bias stemming from a case of lazy reporting:Regarding the May 23 Metro article "RachelCarson Bill From Cardin on Hold":I'm a knee-jerk liberal, but sometimes I find myself sympathetic to conservatives who see bias in The Post. Does The Post lack the reportorial resources to confirm whether Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) is...

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 toxic legacy Her book Silent Spring is a case study in the tragedy of good intentions Margaret Wente Toronto Globe and Mail Thursday, May 24, 2007 I was 12 when I read Rachel Carson's newly published book, Silent Spring, in 1962. Although I'd never heard the term "environmentalist," she turned me into one. I didn't understand the complicated science in it. But I was horrified by her evocation of a natural world whose creatures were being wiped out by man-made poisons - the silent spring, where no birds sang. In school, I wrote an essay praising Silent Spring,...

At times it seems that there are more sites honoring Rachel Carson than Josef Stalin at his peak. There's an environmental advocacy institute (at Chatham University, her alma mater), a state office building in Harrisburg, several research institutions, a number of schools (no less than eight, by my count), and here in Pittsburgh, we got this bridge.     The bridge in question, once known as the 9th Street Bridge, was renamed the Rachel Carson Bridge late last year at the request of Esther L. Barazzone, president of Chatham University. It's one of three downtown suspension bridges crossing the Allegheny. Together they're...