Certain people have a standing in the world that is almost saint like. So it is for Mother Teresa who is fact a Saint. Another is Rachel Carson a biologist and former editor and writer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service. Writing in the 1960s this demure spinster with no agricultural experience rocked the agricultural status quo with her intelligent and eminently readable book-length essay on the damages done by application of the pesticide DDT to birds, animals, fish, and people.
What made Carson’s book different from other books on the same topic was it was written by a writer who was not purely a scientist. Thus it was readable for a wide audience. Writing the introduction to the 40th anniversary edition Linda Lear says:
“Headlines in The New York Times in July 1962 captured the national sentiment: ‘Silent Spring is now noisy summer.”…When Carson died barely eighteen months later in the spring of 1964, at the age of fifty-six, she had set in motion a course of events that would result in a ban on the domestic production of DDT and the creation of a grass-roots movement demanding protection of the environment through state and federal regulation.” In other words Rachel Carson launched the Environmental Protection Agency.
Carson’s book was serialized in “The New Yorker” magazine, a general interest magazine that mixes original reporting with literature. Even today articles that appear in “The New Yorker” often make headlines on television and in the newspapers—this is made more difficult for a magazine which has a deadline of months or weeks. For one hundred years “The New Yorker” has been the home to the best writing in America. J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” first appeared here as did Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”. The publisher of a competing magazine, the 150 year old “Atlantic”, said in speech in Rappahannock County that “The New Yorker” is the best magazine in America. So it was from this forum that Carson wrote the story of the destruction wrought by DDT in a book-length essay where she was given enough pages to turn this otherwise technical discussion into a non fiction narrative that stirred the emotions of many. She introduced her story by writing:
“Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere there was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families.”
But then she added:
“This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world.”
Carson might have been the first writer to make widespread the notion that pesticides were not widely used before World War II but became popular after the war as chemical weapons manufacturers stumbled upon their effectiveness against insects. Now practically every book you read today on organic farming repeats this statement. Carson levied her ire against DDT, a chlorinated hydrocarbon and Parathion, an organic phosphate, saying that the Germans had turned it into nerve gas and that it had become a favorite for suicide in Finland. She railed against arsenic, a naturally occurring compound that was once widely used as a pesticide. It is still fed to chickens to increase their appetite. Rachel Carson says it ends up in their manure.
Another target is malathion, also an organophosphate. Carson says it is rendered safe by the human liver but quite dangerous when mixed with other organic phosphates that interfere with this ability of the liver.
In Georgetown, South Carolina when I was a boy, the county used to drive around our neighborhood spraying a cloud of malathion to control mosquitoes. We had a farm in nearby McClellanville that my stepfather had converted into a duck hunting club. All those ponds and canals were ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. The mosquitoes there were worse than any I have ever encountered anywhere. They were so fierce that at certain times of the year you literally could not go outside for more than a minute. So we mixed kerosene and malathion into a sprayer that was attached to our lawnmower and marched around the yard belching a cloud of gas into the azalea, myrtle and camellia bushes and into the live oak trees and Spanish moss.
Alex deToqueville wrote in “Democracy in America” that there is a certain “tyranny of the majority” in the USA. Here we are not as free as we are led to believe. If you hold a point of view which runs counter to conventional wisdom you will be excoriated, hounded from your position, run out of town on a rail. Once an idea has achieved critical mass proponents of that idea claim the moral high ground and use this position to bully the opposition. So it is with pesticides. Conventional wisdom—at least among people who are not farmers—holds that all chemical pesticides are bad. This is why the idea of organic farming has take such a grip on the nation’s conscience where for a few dollars more you can buy peaches and pears, parsnip and parsley that is chemical free and protect you kids and the environment from the evils of agribusiness and pesticide poison. But farm chemicals have done some good and a the risk of invoking the ire of the mob let me offer some example.
This morning when I woke up I read two articles. First in the “Washington Post” was a piece on atrazine saying that this widely used preemergence herbicide has shown up in streams. But the EPA still allows its use because they have not been able to quantify the damage it does to frogs and other aquatic creatures. Farmers like it because it is cheap and effective keeping weeds out of corn and sorghum by blocking their ability to photosynthesis.
The second article I read was in the aforementioned “New Yorker”. An aphid-sized imported exotic Asian insect called “adelgid” has laid waste to most of the hemlocks found in the Eastern USA. This includes the few patches of forest in the Great Smoky Mountains that have never been logged, ever. So the forest rangers—a group of people who by their nature would not be considered pro-chemical agribusiness pawns—have been trying to raise private and public funds to buy and apply a chemical manufactured by the German mega company called “imidacloprid” which is similar to nicotine. This chemical does not persist in the environment like DDT—it breaks down when exposed to light. While this pesticide is broad spectrum--meaning it kills both the good pests and the bad ones--Bayer has invented a technique whereby imidacloprid can be injected in to the roots of the tree thus not harming the surrounding forest were it to be sprayed from an airplane. As America’s greatest trees east of California fall over dead the forest rangers fret that more money has been spent to build a new highway through that national park than has been dedicated to stopping this pest. There is hope that a predatory beetle imported from Asia can stop this pest but they are difficult to mass produce and currently cost $2.50 apiece. Foresters in North Carolina do not want their hemlock trees to go the way of the American Chestnut which is practically disappeared from America because of a similar problem that appeared in the 1990s.
Today we have the billionaire Bill Gates whose philanthropy makes news but before Gates there was the Rockefeller foundation. With the billions that J.D. Rockefeller made driving gasoline dealers into insolvency his family spent money on among other projects including mosquito eradication in of all places Italy. Swamps were drained and DDT sprayed to rid the Italian peninsula of the mosquitoes that spread malaria. Of course Rockefeller could not do that today as wetlands have been given legal protection but there are those that would say that DDT is certainly better than dying a horrible death with the fever and chills brought on my the mosquito which vectors malaria.
The fear of pesticides has blocked efforts by farmers to protect their most valuable crops. Winemakers in Sonoma County, California have reason to fear the sharpshooter insect because it spreads the deadly virus Pierce’s Disease. Once this shows up in your vineyard grape vines fall over dead and grapes cannot be planted in that vineyard again, ever. So in an area where farmland goes for the eye popping $100,000 per acre the citizens of Sonoma blocked efforts by the farmers to spray the whole county against the insect. The farmers sit and fret.
PANA uses hyperbole and vitriol to bully public policy. They cannot entirely be faulted for this, however, as grass roots activists quickly learn that in order to affect public policy you must adopt a few dogmatic phrases and make that your mantra. So it is, for example, with the anti-illegal-immigration movement. Rather than state their obvious concerns—that the mass migration of Mexicans to Manassas and beyond will change this country into a Spanish speaking feudal society like Mexico to the South—they say stop illegal immigration because terrorists are coming over the boarder. The actual number of terrorists who have walked from Mexico to the USA could be counted on one hand but it’s effective sloganeering. So it is with PANA as they embrace the same sort of illogical logic—not because they believe it, rather it’s an effective tactic for lobbying.
Consider the position of PANA on the use of DDT. Because of Rachel Carson and her book “Silent Spring” the words “DDT” conjured up images as horrific as Agent Orange. So when the World Health Organization (WHO)—a conservative, slow moving worldwide bureaucracy that is as nimble as a glacier—decided recently to advocate DDT to control malaria they invoked the ire of PANA.
Malaria is a killer that ravages Africans living in mud huts. The WHO said DDT is safe for humans so these mud huts should be painted inside with a mix of DDT and a paste to make it cling to the walls. Of course DDT is toxic to wildlife and fish but it’s also deadly to mosquitoes. The WHO said we don’t want to feed mosquitoes something they enjoy---we want to kill them. And their approach did not use spraying so there would be no runoff into streams. So it’s safe and reasonable, yes?
DDT is not the only target of ire for the PANA. Another is a whole class of pesticides called “organophosphates”. There is no doubt that this is dangerous stuff, yet it is widely used in agriculture. These are dangerous because they are what are called “cholinesterase inhibitors” which means they interferes with nerve functions—of course this is what causes insects to roll over and die. People are safe unless they use it day in and day out without proper protective clothing and mask.
Any substance taken to excess can be toxic. You can drink enough water to drown yourself and with not much effort you can drink enough alcohol to kill you. But when is a substance toxic such that its benefit to agriculture is less than its danger? If the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration have said it is O.K. to spray a certain chemical on fruit and vegetables then what is all the fuss about?
What made Carson’s book different from other books on the same topic was it was written by a writer who was not purely a scientist. Thus it was readable for a wide audience. Writing the introduction to the 40th anniversary edition Linda Lear says:
“Headlines in The New York Times in July 1962 captured the national sentiment: ‘Silent Spring is now noisy summer.”…When Carson died barely eighteen months later in the spring of 1964, at the age of fifty-six, she had set in motion a course of events that would result in a ban on the domestic production of DDT and the creation of a grass-roots movement demanding protection of the environment through state and federal regulation.” In other words Rachel Carson launched the Environmental Protection Agency.
Carson’s book was serialized in “The New Yorker” magazine, a general interest magazine that mixes original reporting with literature. Even today articles that appear in “The New Yorker” often make headlines on television and in the newspapers—this is made more difficult for a magazine which has a deadline of months or weeks. For one hundred years “The New Yorker” has been the home to the best writing in America. J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” first appeared here as did Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”. The publisher of a competing magazine, the 150 year old “Atlantic”, said in speech in Rappahannock County that “The New Yorker” is the best magazine in America. So it was from this forum that Carson wrote the story of the destruction wrought by DDT in a book-length essay where she was given enough pages to turn this otherwise technical discussion into a non fiction narrative that stirred the emotions of many. She introduced her story by writing:
“Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere there was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families.”
But then she added:
“This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world.”
Carson might have been the first writer to make widespread the notion that pesticides were not widely used before World War II but became popular after the war as chemical weapons manufacturers stumbled upon their effectiveness against insects. Now practically every book you read today on organic farming repeats this statement. Carson levied her ire against DDT, a chlorinated hydrocarbon and Parathion, an organic phosphate, saying that the Germans had turned it into nerve gas and that it had become a favorite for suicide in Finland. She railed against arsenic, a naturally occurring compound that was once widely used as a pesticide. It is still fed to chickens to increase their appetite. Rachel Carson says it ends up in their manure.
Another target is malathion, also an organophosphate. Carson says it is rendered safe by the human liver but quite dangerous when mixed with other organic phosphates that interfere with this ability of the liver.
In Georgetown, South Carolina when I was a boy, the county used to drive around our neighborhood spraying a cloud of malathion to control mosquitoes. We had a farm in nearby McClellanville that my stepfather had converted into a duck hunting club. All those ponds and canals were ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. The mosquitoes there were worse than any I have ever encountered anywhere. They were so fierce that at certain times of the year you literally could not go outside for more than a minute. So we mixed kerosene and malathion into a sprayer that was attached to our lawnmower and marched around the yard belching a cloud of gas into the azalea, myrtle and camellia bushes and into the live oak trees and Spanish moss.
Alex deToqueville wrote in “Democracy in America” that there is a certain “tyranny of the majority” in the USA. Here we are not as free as we are led to believe. If you hold a point of view which runs counter to conventional wisdom you will be excoriated, hounded from your position, run out of town on a rail. Once an idea has achieved critical mass proponents of that idea claim the moral high ground and use this position to bully the opposition. So it is with pesticides. Conventional wisdom—at least among people who are not farmers—holds that all chemical pesticides are bad. This is why the idea of organic farming has take such a grip on the nation’s conscience where for a few dollars more you can buy peaches and pears, parsnip and parsley that is chemical free and protect you kids and the environment from the evils of agribusiness and pesticide poison. But farm chemicals have done some good and a the risk of invoking the ire of the mob let me offer some example.
This morning when I woke up I read two articles. First in the “Washington Post” was a piece on atrazine saying that this widely used preemergence herbicide has shown up in streams. But the EPA still allows its use because they have not been able to quantify the damage it does to frogs and other aquatic creatures. Farmers like it because it is cheap and effective keeping weeds out of corn and sorghum by blocking their ability to photosynthesis.
The second article I read was in the aforementioned “New Yorker”. An aphid-sized imported exotic Asian insect called “adelgid” has laid waste to most of the hemlocks found in the Eastern USA. This includes the few patches of forest in the Great Smoky Mountains that have never been logged, ever. So the forest rangers—a group of people who by their nature would not be considered pro-chemical agribusiness pawns—have been trying to raise private and public funds to buy and apply a chemical manufactured by the German mega company called “imidacloprid” which is similar to nicotine. This chemical does not persist in the environment like DDT—it breaks down when exposed to light. While this pesticide is broad spectrum--meaning it kills both the good pests and the bad ones--Bayer has invented a technique whereby imidacloprid can be injected in to the roots of the tree thus not harming the surrounding forest were it to be sprayed from an airplane. As America’s greatest trees east of California fall over dead the forest rangers fret that more money has been spent to build a new highway through that national park than has been dedicated to stopping this pest. There is hope that a predatory beetle imported from Asia can stop this pest but they are difficult to mass produce and currently cost $2.50 apiece. Foresters in North Carolina do not want their hemlock trees to go the way of the American Chestnut which is practically disappeared from America because of a similar problem that appeared in the 1990s.
Today we have the billionaire Bill Gates whose philanthropy makes news but before Gates there was the Rockefeller foundation. With the billions that J.D. Rockefeller made driving gasoline dealers into insolvency his family spent money on among other projects including mosquito eradication in of all places Italy. Swamps were drained and DDT sprayed to rid the Italian peninsula of the mosquitoes that spread malaria. Of course Rockefeller could not do that today as wetlands have been given legal protection but there are those that would say that DDT is certainly better than dying a horrible death with the fever and chills brought on my the mosquito which vectors malaria.
The fear of pesticides has blocked efforts by farmers to protect their most valuable crops. Winemakers in Sonoma County, California have reason to fear the sharpshooter insect because it spreads the deadly virus Pierce’s Disease. Once this shows up in your vineyard grape vines fall over dead and grapes cannot be planted in that vineyard again, ever. So in an area where farmland goes for the eye popping $100,000 per acre the citizens of Sonoma blocked efforts by the farmers to spray the whole county against the insect. The farmers sit and fret.
PANA uses hyperbole and vitriol to bully public policy. They cannot entirely be faulted for this, however, as grass roots activists quickly learn that in order to affect public policy you must adopt a few dogmatic phrases and make that your mantra. So it is, for example, with the anti-illegal-immigration movement. Rather than state their obvious concerns—that the mass migration of Mexicans to Manassas and beyond will change this country into a Spanish speaking feudal society like Mexico to the South—they say stop illegal immigration because terrorists are coming over the boarder. The actual number of terrorists who have walked from Mexico to the USA could be counted on one hand but it’s effective sloganeering. So it is with PANA as they embrace the same sort of illogical logic—not because they believe it, rather it’s an effective tactic for lobbying.
Consider the position of PANA on the use of DDT. Because of Rachel Carson and her book “Silent Spring” the words “DDT” conjured up images as horrific as Agent Orange. So when the World Health Organization (WHO)—a conservative, slow moving worldwide bureaucracy that is as nimble as a glacier—decided recently to advocate DDT to control malaria they invoked the ire of PANA.
Malaria is a killer that ravages Africans living in mud huts. The WHO said DDT is safe for humans so these mud huts should be painted inside with a mix of DDT and a paste to make it cling to the walls. Of course DDT is toxic to wildlife and fish but it’s also deadly to mosquitoes. The WHO said we don’t want to feed mosquitoes something they enjoy---we want to kill them. And their approach did not use spraying so there would be no runoff into streams. So it’s safe and reasonable, yes?
DDT is not the only target of ire for the PANA. Another is a whole class of pesticides called “organophosphates”. There is no doubt that this is dangerous stuff, yet it is widely used in agriculture. These are dangerous because they are what are called “cholinesterase inhibitors” which means they interferes with nerve functions—of course this is what causes insects to roll over and die. People are safe unless they use it day in and day out without proper protective clothing and mask.
Any substance taken to excess can be toxic. You can drink enough water to drown yourself and with not much effort you can drink enough alcohol to kill you. But when is a substance toxic such that its benefit to agriculture is less than its danger? If the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration have said it is O.K. to spray a certain chemical on fruit and vegetables then what is all the fuss about?
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