Rachel Carson, Mass Murderer?

Junk Science Kills

"Who is the next Rachel Carson? It's a question you hear a lot in environmental circles. Where is the writer who can bridge the gap between poetry and science?" - Baltimore Sun Book review; The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring", and the Rise of the Environmental Movement  How about Al Gore? This book review is one of at least four articles the Baltimore Sun ran on this misinformed twit last Sunday.  Carson of course is the author of 1962's Silent Spring, her era's  An Inconvenient Truth.  The book led to the world-wide banning of the pesticide DDT.  Here are some truths about that. While DDT is highly toxic to insects and fish and can poison other animals in large enough doses, in moderate amounts it's not especially harmful to birds and mammals, including humans. (Ironically, the EPA's own judge [Edmund Sweeney]  agreed, but was overruled by its chief administrator [William Ruckelshaus].) [Source] What are "large amounts?" To prove how safe it was to warm blooded animals, humans included, Carson skeptics ate it by the bowl full.  Controlling the over spraying near ponds and rivers was relatively easy. Today, the greatest killer and disabler is malaria, which kills a person every 30 seconds. By the 1960s, DDT had brought malaria near to extinction. "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable," said the National Academy of Sciences. [source] I won't compare Carson to Jos. Stalin, but it is likely that she is responsible for millions of deaths world-wide, especially in underdeveloped nations. More ... much more Junk Science kills.