E.B. White on Rachel Carson

"Why should a poison...spray enjoy immunity [while] endanger[ing] the public health?"

Circa 1964. In The New Yorker. Right here. With nary a mention of Charlotte or her web.

Add it to Tim's posts about poorly equipped, intellectually speaking, Rachel Carson critics.

A quote from White:

In the lower Mississippi, fish have been dying from a cause as yet undetermined. In Oklahoma, quail are not hatching their full clutches of eggs. In Maine, salmon bearing a rich payload of DDT have been taken from Sebago. In the Gulf of Mexico, shrimpers are wondering whether their catch will be next on the list of victims. In Washington, representatives of a chemical company that makes endrin have testified that no "substantial" amounts of the poison enter the Mississippi from the company's plant, but, as Miss Carson pointed out in her last book, no one can yet say what a "substantial" amount of a modern poison really is.

The link is to a brief account, after Carson's death, about "man's carelessness, shortsightedness, and arrogance."