Silent Spring

My Lady wanted to paint the sun room and in order to get a good match with the existing paint we drove to a neighborhood paint store to buy a gallon of the right color paint. It was a sobering moment when we paid over $50 for a can of water, colorant and a bit of chemical designed to make the paint effective yet able to meet the standards inflicted by officialdom. We talked about the exorbitant price and after some discussion settled on the fact that 30 years ago the same paint sold for about $6 to $10 dollars a gallon.  Out side inflation (which would have brought the price to a $15 to $25 range) The reason for the steep increase in price is, to us obvious. It’s the cost of doing business while be hectored, lectured and regulated out of business by the Environmental Protection Administration.

The EPA and other environmental watchdog and big brother agencies such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission have been taken over by extreme environmentalists who profess to know better than we do and insist that we follow their prescription for a “better world”. While there are many industrial practices that have been improved by regulation in truth the programs and edicts of these people have probably killed more people in the past century than the environment ever thought of.

Fifty years ago a book by Rachel Carson was published, it came at a time the knowledgeable world was becoming aware of the complex interaction of the globe we inhabit and was starting to respond to that wisedom. “Silent Spring” has been given credit with empowering the environmental movement and its unfounded fear of any and all pesticides, especially DDT.

Paul Muller, the inventor of DDT received a Nobel Prize in 1948 in recognition of the role the pesticide played in saving hundreds of thousands of lives of troops fighting the Axis Powers in World War II. It killed the insects that spread Typhus and other diseases and it did so without any evidence supporting the unproven threat of cancer that Carson advanced through her book. When “Silent Spring” was published DDT was already famous for protecting human health along with a whole range of agricultural chemicals that protected crops against the depredation of insects, rodents and weeds. Some of the problems associated with pesticides had already been identified and science was working on ways to resolve those problems but as a result of political pressure from “progressives” in 1972 the United States banned the sale and use of DDT based solely on the claims of undue risk that Carson put forward in her book. Despite warnings from public health officials in the US, the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization the ban went into effect and the result has been the death of literally millions of human lives.

Carson opened  “Silent Spring”, with a chapter titled “A Fable for Tomorrow”, she invented a town so poisoned by insecticide that no birds could live, nest or sing there, I remember reading the book when it first came out and I admit to being horrified by her description of a dying town. But her story is pure fiction. Subsequent studies have demonstrated that the die-off she described has never happened. Years of bird counts have not pointed to any mass die off of birds or any other life forms other than the pest the insecticide targets. In the US the first agricultural pesticides were initially regulated by Congress in 1910 and generations of scientists and farmers took care to avoid contaminating crops for obvious reasons.

Fifty years after the book’s publication we are experiencing a coast-to-coast plague of bedbugs that has occurred in the past decade and continues today. The problem could have been eliminated if DDT was still in use. The media, which has covered the “bedbug problem” extensively, has never mentioned this salient fact, or the fact that the EPA has just one pesticide registered for use against bedbugs and routinely refuses to allow licensed pest control professionals to use it.

Malaria, once on the brink of being eliminated, has made a dramatic resurgence since the ban of DDT.

These events, and others that could be mentioned are Rachel Carson’s true and lethal legacy.

“Silent Spring” is the base document for the programs that so much of the environmental movement advocates. Ranging from the United Nations to non-governmental-organizations like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, and dozens of others their programs always seems to end up killing people in the name of saving the Earth.

Throughout history there have been a few books that doomed millions to death. “Das Capital” by Karl Marx kicked off the worst economic system of the modern era, claiming the lives of millions of Russians and Chinese, along with others in the process.

Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” mobilized Nazi Germany, led to World War Two in Europe, and was responsible for the deliberate killing of over 11 million Jews and Christians in its concentration camps, not counting the millions more in war dead.

I think it interesting that the Nazi leaders were ardent environmentalists, and wonder if we are not seeing a resurgence of their philosophy of wanting to  kill off all those who do not agree with the progressive vision for the future.