The Island of Doubt

If hell was real, a place of honor would be reserved for Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who blocked a plan to honor Rachel Carson last week. We named our cat after Carson, so you can guess how angry this makes me.

From a Reuters report a couple of days ago"

"Rachel Carson's work both directly and indirectly created a climate of hysteria and misinformation about the impact of DDT on the human populations," said John Hart, a spokesman for Coburn, in explaining why the Oklahoma Republican withheld his support for the plan to honor her.

"Obviously her central claim about what it does to ecosystems was largely correct," Hart said by telephone. "But her approach was consistent with a lot of environmental rhetoric which tends to sensationalize the facts."

For those who aren't intimately familiar with Carson's legacy, she practically jump-started the environmental movement with Silent Spring in 1962, setting in motion a shift in the zeitgeist that led directly to the US Clean Air and Clean Water acts. Ten years before that, her book The Sea Around Us changed the way humans related to the oceans, and, among other things, a few decades later inspired the creation of The Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia's Fisheries Centre, a group that has pioneered modern analysis of ocean ecosystems.

For the US Senate, honoring Carson should have been a no-brainer. Fortunately, not everyone is as feeble-minded as Coburn, who seems to have bought into the nonsensical propaganda that DDT really isn't all that dangerous.

The New Yorker, the magazine that published the articles later collected as Silent Spring, has a wonderful tribute here.