Aaron Swartz has written a nice article giving the story of the anti-environmentalist war on Rachel Carson.
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Anti-environmentalist writers frequently claim that after DDT had all but eliminated malaria from Sri Lanka, environmentalist pressure forced Sri Lanka to ban DDT, leading to a resurgence of malaria:
Roger Bate in Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking writes:
Some…
A NY Times article on Arata Kochi, new chief of the World Health Organization's global malaria program wrongly stated that DDT was banned and had to be corrected:
An article in Science Times on Tuesday, profiling Dr. Arata Kochi, the new chief of the World Health Organization's campaign against…
Tim Lambert over at Deltoid links to this article, by Aaron Swartz, about the relentless right-wing smear campaign against Rachel Carson. Carson was the author of the 1962 book Silent Spring, where she argued, among other things, that pervasive use of pesticides such as DDT was leading to long-…
Nick Matzke finds that Michael Finkel in the National Geographic is guilty of some sloppy reporting:
The article, for once, actually sensitively discusses the issue of DDT use, and notes accurately (for once) that environmental groups and governmental agencies were not and are not opposed to…
Tonight I happened to hear Naomi Klein discuss her latest book "The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Captalism".
This story fits all too neatly into her thesis that corporatists (such as AFM) use the suite of think tanks to create and disseminate ideas and talking points to weaken regulations and restrictions on corporations; to make environmentalists, labor rights activists and others look positively evil.
That they succeed so easily even in the MSM like NYT and WashPo is sickening and scary.
Astonishingly, Adam Smith himself predicted as much more than 200 years ago. Discussing the disputes between workmen and masters, Smith said: " the masters [desire] to give as little as possible [in wages]. . . The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily . . . In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer." (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, page 74.)
Adam Smith knew what dirty dogs the masters (corporatists) are.
Very good overview - thanks for linking it Tim.