Rachel Carson was wrong.

I recently stumbled across these old articles concerning DDT...

World Health Organization drops 30 year old ban on DDT citing new evidence. Also favoring its use for malaria control.

The UN is in on it too, encouraging the use of DDT as anti-malarial.

And discuss. Was the DDT ban the right thing to do now that we know differently than the days of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring?

Somehow I knew it would be you posting this thread, Tom. You're making yourself into a straw parody.

On topic, while the particulars of Silent Spring have now come under criticism, the basic message it sends of human beings needing to be responsible for all the crap we dump into the environment remains valid. I don't think we should throw out decades of progress in regulating hazardous chemical emissions just because "zomg Carson was wrong!!111"

That said, if we can get some decent studies on the long-term effects of DDT and it is demonstrated to be both effective and reasonably safe, I don't have any rational objection to reintroducing it to the market.

In my mind, the deeper issue is that due to the way in which we use pesticides, resistance to them is becoming widespread and may soon render chemical defenses worthless. Hey, one positive way to look at it is that we're providing evidence of natural selection!

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

(I'm getting a little sick and tired of being dismissed as some kind of strawman because a lot of people are intolerant of differing opinions around here. Just to let you know.)

Well think of it this way, Carson's advocacy for stewardship of the environment while admirable in intention was horribly executed and similarly poorly informed. If we got DDT wrong, what else did we get wrong? Coal technologies? Nuclear power? Shallow water oil drilling? What?

I still favor investing more into genetic engineering. And all the genetic engineering labs should all have Tesla coils.

Fight smart, not fair.

And yet you engage in the basest of apologetic tactics, Tom, with that argument. Silent Spring was the catalyst for modern environmental regulation, with which we have developed methods for understanding the environmental consequences of the actions we take. Going back and reapplying those methods to the original catalyst is just good science.

We're not talking about someone proving that 2+2=3 and upsetting the foundations of mathematics. We're talking about newer and more sophisticated research calling into question the results of older, less sophisticated research, something that occurs all the time when the scientific method is applied. At no point does this require throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Unless you'd rather live in smoggy, carcinogenic environments with no idea whether the food you put in your mouth is laden with enough chemicals to drop a horse, or whether your kids will be born with three heads.

edited 20th Jan '11 8:14:44 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

But it does keep raising questions, if we were wrong about something like DDT the first time what makes us think we didn't make the same mistakes on other subjects?

Do we have to ban everything of value only to find out 40 years later it was working and the doomsayers' predictions were wrong? I'm not against science, but a lot of these decisions at the political and economic level have incomplete or downright inaccurate science behind them. (Intentional inaccuracy or otherwise) And if the science wasn't fully understood or accurate, what makes the political decisions better? Going back to DDT, how many millions of lives in the last 40 years could we have saved from malaria if we knew then what we know today? 40? 50? Basically the point I'm getting at, is the baby was thrown out with the bathwater on the first go regarding the matter. Instead of addressing improper use of DDT, they outright got rid of it entirely no matter the human consequences or the fact it had an intended and safe use as anti-malarial described in the articles. Think for a minute, could we have done the same on other subjects? Hindering the progress of the human species based on a misinformed prediction that would never come true?

edited 20th Jan '11 8:31:59 AM by MajorTom

I don't have the stomach for slippery slope arguments. The science used to ban, say, Thimerosal, is far stronger than the science used to ban DDT. And regardless, it's quite likely that pests would simply have become resistant to it as well were it to have been applied as liberally as it was at the start.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

^ And there's the thing. Thimerosal had more accurate science thus was less likely to be contested or have unintended side effects including human costs. DDT and other environmental causes are not so fortunate.

I don't know if pests would have become resistant to it however. There are some things in this world biology just can't yet adapt to.

edited 20th Jan '11 8:35:53 AM by MajorTom

The smart idea would be to keep checking old results to see if they still match modern science.

Let's throw some facts into the mix. Rachel Carson was not wrong. DDT was being hideously and inappropriately overused at the time she wrote, and it was causing widespread environmental damage. Not because it was bad in itself, but because it was being hideously and inappropriately overused.

Even the articles you linked, Tom, got that right:

(the BBC article) and (the UN article). Note that both of them are saying that it is safe when used properly. Rachel Carson never said that it wasn't.

The point of Silent Spring was that we weren't using DDT properly and that it was doing unknown amounts of damage. Silent Spring wasn't a call for the complete abandonment of pesticides, it was a call for responsibility in their use.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

"There are some things in this world biology just can't yet adapt to."

Yeah, and those things are usually universally toxic, too. I bet we could wipe out mosquitoes by salting marshes with radioactive cobalt, but that would have slightly negative side-effects on all the other life nearby.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Something that is dangerous in large amounts is relatively safe in small amounts.

Who woulda thunk it?

Democracy is the process in which we determine the government that we deserve

I'm not understanding the argument of the OP here. Are we saying we should have no regulations even when we have evidence that something is harmful?

This is why I accused Tom of being a Straw Parody.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I won't go as far to say that Tom is a Straw Parody. I will go as far to say that painting Carson as a simplistic "don't make any chemical with more carbon atoms than butane!" hippy is a strawwoman. Saying "we need to cut back on how much we use this junk" doesn't make you a Luddite, and the natural self-correcting nature of science doesn't make the scientific community into a fickle and untrustable social club.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Can I have some tesla coils and a cobalt-laced marsh? If the radiation doesn't kill the blood-suckers, the coils will.

But the thread title is a bit misleading. I think it would read "Rachel Carson's message was taken out of context", if all she wanted to say was that we shoudl cut back on usage, rhater than outright banning the chemical in question.

I'm all for responsible use. However, as someone mentioned, the widespread use of pesticides may lead to a variant of critter that flat-out laughs at the current pesicides, so we have to draw up new ones, and although I'm not sure how long it takes to get a product from a concept to the market, but I'd wager it could be at least a year.

I'd like it if we could use MEK at work to clean parts - a lot of the part cleaners and degreasers we have now aren't very strong, but Methyl Ethyl Keytone, otherwise known as Methyl Ethyl Death is kind of a health hazard. Uh, engineering and administrative controls? How about adequate PPE? We make do with mineral spirits, though.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

I'm not sure I understand the discussion here. The book seems to be about the environmental damages caused by DDT, and the articles are about DDT's usage to combat malaria...

How do these two things contradict each other at all?

This is why you sound like a strawman, Tom, targeting all of environmentalism because DDT is good for combating malaria (coincidentally, they never stopped using it for this), and a book once talked about extreme environmental damage caused by DDT overuse.

If there was talk that DDT hadn't in fact caused this damage, that would be cause to say Rachel Carson was wrong. What you have here is totally unrelated.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

Look. Pesticide companies spent millions of dollars and forty years trying to discredit Rachel Carson, and they have not succeeded. Just because DDT works as an anti-malariat doesn't mean that it doesn't cause extensive ecological damage to many forms of life.

Never be without a Hat! Hot means heat. I don't care if your usage dates to 1300, it's my word, not yours. My Pm box is open.

We learned about this book—briefly—in biology.

~shrug~

As noted, Don't Shoot the Message. DDT may not be as bad as we thought, but we still dump untold amounts of crap into the environment when there are better ways to do it, in theory. For every not-quite-so-harmful chemical there are a hundred horrific ones that don't get used because of regulations...

I am now known as Flyboy.

If DDT is still used to combat malaria, what's with the giant upswing in malaria deaths since it was banned?

Ah well, there's plenty of innovative mosquito-killing technology under research. We can move past DDT soon enough. (Though one of the options is all shades of James Tiptree. Better avoid that one, what with mosquitoes being a nutritious staple for like a gajillion small carnivores and all.)

Hail Martin Septim!

Hail Martin Septim!

Percentage or total deaths? Population has increased pretty dramatically in a lot of the places with the most cases of malaria (Southeast Asia, Africa).

Like I said waaaay back before this abominable thread was necroed, the reports don't actually contradict Rachel Carson. The reports say the stuff is fine in small dosages for malarial control, Rachel Carson's book was about how people were deploying DDT by crop-duster.

Fun fact: DDT almost wiped out the bald eagle. The chemical makes their shells thinner and more brittle, such that less eggs survive.

edited 12th Sep '11 7:29:32 PM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

I say the DDT ban was right. Why? Because we can only make decisions based on the information we have currently available. If you get different information available later, that's when you change what you're doing. And as it is, it doesn't seem like the information has actually changed all that much. Regulating how much DDT is put into the environment is still a good idea. Hell, how much of any chemical we make and put into the environment should be regulated; it's all well and good to destroy the disease spreading insect, but it doesn't do us much good to poison our food in the process. And apparently they never really stopped using it to kill the mosquitoes, they just cut back drastically to avoid other severe damage.

Science is not a static world, Tom. Saying something was entirely wrong at the time is a bit short sighted if you're only taking into account what we know now, and not what they were working with at the time. People can only make decisions based on current knowledge, not on knowledge learned at some vague time in the future.