As Influential as Silent Spring?

Perhaps it was just a bit of wishful thinking, or an effort at priming the pump. We can all hope it will turn out to be as influential as "Silent Spring", or moreso. If it (or its more influential successor) turns out not to be, we're in deep, deep trouble.

Oh dear. Last time a book like this happened we banned DDT and killed millions of malaria.

Wonder what we'll target next. Retrovirals?

Last time a book like this happened we banned DDT and killed millions of malaria.

Busted!! This story is a conservative urban myth. A simple Google search finds that fact. (You begin to wonder if some of these falsehoods were planted intentionally...)

I hope that reviewer's comment is not taken as seriously by some as the Isaac Newton of information theory. Look at the ridicule that brought on.

On the second comment no less.

D, that's simply not true. While contemplated, DDT was never banned worldwide, and is still used in many malaria-infected regions after it was banned in the US. Today, malaria vectors in many countries are now resistant to DDT, making it much less useful for fighting malaria than anti-environmentalists like to claim.

That comparison is indeed overstated, but it is apt.

In my comparative review of Field Notes and Flannery's The Weather Makers, published in the Dallas Morning News on 3/22/06, I use the Silent Spring analogy and compare Flannery's riskier and more detailed approach to Carl Sagan.

Here's an excerpt from my long review. (Full review online at http://www.scienceshelf.com/WeatherMakers_FieldNotes.htm )

Kolbert's style is journalistic and her approach is reminiscent of Rachel Carson, presenting an overview of the scientific analysis in the context of broad human stories and historical trends.... Her skillful presentation leads readers inexorably toward this concluding challenge worthy of Silent Spring:

"As the effects of global warming become more and more disruptive, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing."

They're just trying to get bling for their author, Chris.

Maybe she got a big bonus and they want to ensure their net profits are double-digits even with the bonus.

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Jon Winsor: excellent point but your argument presumes certain groups follow-up their reading with research of their own.

Best,

D

This might be a good point to mention Jared Diamond's superb history, "Collapse", about a variety of defunct societies that each chose the path to self-destruction. In each of his cases the disaster was local. So will ours be, in a way, but life doesn't carry on as usual on any planets nearby.

Jon Winsor - unfortunately, no. I agree - 'banned DDT' was certainly hyperbole on my part. But we DID cut down on the use of the single most effective malaria prevention tool ever. Nothing else, before or since works as well or as cheaply, and we the the general aura of evil that surrounds it means its use in Africa never gets funded.

The Times did this one:

New York Times Magazine - What the World Needs Now Is DDT
Nicholas Kristof Oped - It's time to spray DDT

A provocative snippet from the first on why Silent Spring is pertinent:

"Silent Spring" changed the relationship many Americans had with their government and introduced the concept of ecology and the interconnectedness of systems into the national debate. Rachel Carson started the environmental movement. Few books have done more to change the world.

But this time around, I was also struck by something that did not occur to me when I first read the book in the early 1980's. In her 297 pages, Rachel Carson never mentioned the fact that by the time she was writing, DDT was responsible for saving tens of millions of lives, perhaps hundreds of millions.

I AM an environmentalist, which is why I think it is important to own up to fuckups like the DDT mess or organic farming.

I AM an environmentalist, which is why I think it is important to own up to fuckups like the DDT mess or organic farming.

So, one owes up by lying? (sorry, using hyperbole)

I'm all for getting the truth out about DDT (I'm unfamiliar with the details of DDT policy, other than the fact that there was no ban) but it's hard not to note an irony in skewing the truth in order to straighten it out.
(Especially since the truth in this case seems far from a simple "ban".)

I'm also all for injecting realism into environmentalists' thinking. But I would do it more accurately. After all, who knows who's going to pick up a false "ban" meme like this and run with it? That's why I used the term "conservative urban myth". For right wingers, that's descriptive of their MO. They regularly circulate unexamined memes like this and broadcast them. (I believe I've actually heard conservatives speak of a "DDT ban", which is why I called you on it.)

Oh cmon. Surely hyperbole is an acceptable part of the political discourse ;)

But seriously - "conservative urban myth" is at least as much an instance of hyperbole as "DDT ban" is. There IS a real case here that perfectly well-intentioned goals have caused horrible outcomes. Read the wikipedia articles on DDT or malaria or Silent Spring. Or just search nytimes for those keywords. Or read Malcolm Gladwell's excellent article for the New Yorker.

This one really isn't (just) about the crazy right going, um, crazy. It's more like different sections of the left colliding, in this case the people who worry about pollution and biodiversiry versus the people involved with Africa and disease there. (It goes without saying both are important causes for the left to be involved in.) Of course the right gleefully rejoices but that's neither here nor there.

It's somewhat like those things where you don't know whether to support wind power in some places because of what it does to migratory birds. Except the tradeoff here isn't even a tradeoff - African babies matter more than osprey eggs if you must choose, and to a very real extent we've imposed that tradeoff on the anti-malaria struggle.

As I said before, I think it's important for the left to become vastly more supportive of DDT for Africa, for PR reasons if nothing else. One of these days a Bill O'Reilly might pick up on this, you know.

D, you are dead wrong. If you've read the Gladwell article, and the book mentioned by Gladwell, D'antonio's "Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe," then you should know that the DDT spraying campaign was a failure, and that initial crashes of malaria infection in places like India and Sri Lanka were followed by its subsequent exponential rise, all while the DDT campaign was still in place -- in other words, while DDT was still being USED on a large scale - since, as predicted, it simply destroyed the mosquitos natural predators while the most resistant types of mosquito, bearing the plasmodium f., increased their dominance in their ecological niches in a wholly predictable manner. And as anybody knows who has read the WHO articles about using DDT around nursing mothers, the health benefit from DDT is consistently cancelled out by the fact that the health benefit only accrues if one pursuades said mothers not to nurse -- otherwise, infants imbibe a hazardous amount of DDT poisons. Read the CDC article by Chen and Rogan here:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol9no8/03-0082.htm

Silent Spring is a monument of good research and a biologically informed intelligence. There's absolutely no need to corrupt these things to impress the Bill O'Reillys of the world.