timeimmortal

Ed Darrell just can’t get enough, I guess. Not satisfied with my most recent response to him, he returns to this “frustrating”, “not the place to carry on a discussion” blog to ask for more information.

Ed claims that there are a thousand studies that confirm Carson’s claims. Personally, I don’t see them — certainly Ed doesn’t link to all of them (in fact, between the two incredibly lengthy articles of his that I have now linked to, he links to very few studies indeed).

But then, you can’t find a single link to any study which contradicts anything Carson wrote. You criticize me for pointing to the studies that do exist, while Milloy functions on misrepresentation, outright falsehood, and non-existent studies.

I challenge you again: Find a study that says eagles were not harmed by DDT. Don’t cite a third-hand, hearsay piece from Milloy: Cite the study.

Go to Discovery Magazine and looke at the number of studies they cite. Milloy doesn’t offer numbers of studies, only misquotes from a few — Discover counted those that corroborated Carson’s work. 1,000 to how many? Count ‘em, if you can find ‘em.

When your side is down 1,000 to one, it’s an expected tactic for you to call me a liar. Shame on you.

I’m not actually threatened by the prospect of being “down” a thousand to one, so long as the one that I do have is correct. It’s like John da Fiesole always asks: but is it true? So long as I have one that’s true, the other side is welcome to their thousand.

For example, the reason I’m calling Ed a liar is because I caught him in a lie by demonstrating that a statement which he made is false. Predictably, in keeping with the general modus operandi of a biased activist, Ed has not yet retracted his erroneous statement — a crime he accuses Steven Milloy of being guilty of, mind — but has instead persisted in saying that nothing out there exists which challenges Rachel Carson’s writings.

Ed insists I cite the study. Okay, fine, I can cite the study. But Milloy cites studies as well, and Ed doesn’t accept those — some he dismisses as non-existent, others he dismisses as invalid for a host of nebulous reasons. Perhaps, dishonestly, Ed only accepts as valid those studies which agree with his biases? That would certainly be typical of a biased activist, wouldn’t it, O Reader?

But to humour his demands one more time, here’s a few things I was able to cobble together in the 20 or so minutes I had left in the day when this latest bit of correspondence from Ed arrived in my mailbox. Just to be clear: every article or study I link to here, I found online within twenty minutes. Given a day, or a week, and both the internet and a comprehensive database of old articles on microfiche, how many other gems might I find?

Remember also Ed’s claim that nothing has been published which refutes Carson’s claims. All I need is one.

First, in an analysis of DDT and its derivatives, the International Programme on Chemical Safety found that “DDT and its derivatives DDE and TDE have moderate to low toxicity to birds when given as an acute oral dose or in the diet.” Moreover, it was found that there “is no obvious pattern of relative toxicity between the three compounds. In some species it is DDT that is the most toxic, while in other species it is TDE.” (and remember: what toxicity exists is rated as “moderate to low”) The study does not specifically address eagles, however, noting that in the wild, “the most severely affected species of birds are raptors at the top of food chains. There is little direct laboratory data on toxicity to these birds.”

That should begin to paint us an interesting picture, O Reader, one which I will come back to later. There is “little laboratory data” on the toxicity of DDT and its byproducts to high-level predatory birds like eagles. And yet some people assert with terrifying certainty (when is science ever certain?) that DDT is the causitive factor in the bald eagle’s near brush with extinction.

The study goes on to note that whether or not DDT exposure affected hatchability of eggs (particularly due to eggshell thinning) varied greatly between bird species — some were succeptible to it, some were not. Care must be taken in looking at the results, however, because some of the test birds were also fed a low-calcium diet, which would also negatively impact eggshell thickness. This was specifically being tested for, as earlier studies (most notably by Joel Bitman of the United States Department of Agriculture, in 1969) had exposed the test birds not only to DDT or one of its derivatives, but had also fed them a low-calcium diet.

The reduction of calcium in the diet of test birds was found to be a significant factor in the outcome of the studies (which shouldn’t come as a surprise): “In contrast to the earlier studies, there was no effect of either DDT or DDE on shell thickness or egg weight when dietary calcium was higher. There was an increased incidence of egg breakage in birds fed DDT and DDE, but this was less pronounced than with the low calcium diets.”

Moreover, “Robson et al. (1976) studied the effects of DDE and DDT fed to Japanese quail in two different diets containing adequate or low calcium. DDT was fed at 100 mg/kg diet, whereas DDE was given at 0, 199, or 300 mg/kg diet, and the two calcium levels were 0.5% and 3%.

DDE at 300 mg/kg was detrimental to adult body weight, fertility, and survivability. There was no effect of either DDT or of DDE at up to 100 mg/kg diet on adult body weight, food consumption, egg production, egg weight, fertility, hatchability, cracking of eggs, or eggshell thickness. Low dietary calcium had the effect of reducing the thickness of eggshells, increasing the incidence of cracked shells and decreasing egg production and hatchability.” In other words, DDT and its derivatives (DDE is the most common — it is formed when DDT sheds a hydrogen cholride molecule) did not have at all the same effect on eggshell thickness in test birds as it was found to have in previous studies, because those studies had also involved feeding the birds a calcim-deficient diet, something they probably wouldn’t have been exposed to as frequently in the wild.

It’s not just the Bitman study that is thrown into doubt, either — researchers from the University of Alberta, writing to Nature Magazine, also question the findings of Wiemeyer and Porter’s work with American kestrels, pointing out that in the Wiemeyeer/Porter study, it was the control group of birds who had the thinnest eggshells. This was written in response to an article in Nature Magazine by Blus, Gish, Belisle and Prouty in 1972. The U of A researchers, in their letter, note that to “support their conclusions, the authors [Blus, Gish, Belisle and Prouty] state that concentrations of residues in the female determine shell thickness, a claim which is unreferenced, largely hypothetical, and without consideration of contradictory experimental evidence.”

Now, when one does even as little as a Google search for DDT and eagles, one finds a lot of different articles alleging that there is a connection between DDT usage and the decline in the eagle population. Keeping in mind that there isn’t that much laboratory data available on high-end predatory raptors, most of these studies and articles tend to cite earlier studies, such as those by Bitman or Wiemeyer and Porter, in support of their conclusions. Certainly, that was the case in the Nature Magazine article mentioned above (Nature, 235, 376 (1972)). In that specific case, it was shown, quickly and rather easily, that the authors of the article not only incorrectly interpreted the evidence that they considered, but also that they ignored evidence which contradicted their conclusions.

Ed asserts that there are a thousand studies done. I see a number of studies, to be sure, but I also see a number of articles drawing upon the same pool of studies. Perhaps I’m in error to suspect this, but if we assume that Ed’s hyperbolic claim of a thousand studies is actually an accurate number, how many of those studies are unique inquiries, and how many are follow-up articles in scientific publications which draw upon the same pool of earlier research data? And how many of those ignored contrary evidence? Was it just the writers at Nature, or were some of the writers at, say, Discovery also guilty of sweeping under the rug later studies which contradicted some of their conclusions?

As recently as 2003, IBIS - the International Journal of Avian Science, published by the British Ornithologists Union, found that their revisiting of the DDE/eggshell thickness issue in American condors “revealed major problems in using the thickness or DDE content of shell fragments from eggs of unknown size to study contamination problems.” They urged that “future studies of the effects of DDE on shell thinning in any species be limited to whole-egg samples when possible. DDE analyses of shell fragments should be regarded as inherently suspect, unless they are run immediately after eggs are fragmented, and direct shell thickness measurements should always be interpreted in the light of egg-size effects on thickness. Studies in which egg size is neglected can miss potentially important effects of egg size on shell thickness and DDE on egg size.

The failure of many previous avian DDE studies to investigate potential DDE effects on egg size or egg-size effects on thinning does not necessarily invalidate any of these studies, especially if the species involved suffered no changes in egg size during periods of contamination. However, results with the California Condor suggest that re-analyses taking egg-size information into account might modify conclusions in some cases.”

Now, admittedly, none of these articles addresses bald eagles directly — but that is because there is very little lab data available on eagles to begin with. What the studies I have linked to do is point to a trend that calls into question earlier studies on the relationship between DDT or one of its derivatives and eggshell thickness in different bird species, especially in light of the suspect nature (see the IBIS article, above) of studies of eggshell thickness done on eggshell fragments that were not collected and analyzed at or very near the moment of fragmentation.

In Photography, there is a technique that shooters sometimes use which is called bracketing. Bracketing can mean many things, but in essence distills down to this: one aspect of the camera’s operation or image capture parameters is varied over a series of shots, while the subject of the picture is held constant. For example, let us say that one is taking a picture of someone who is backlit by a strong light source. One could use bracketing to take a series of pictures, varying the exposure each time, in order to try and capture an image that strikes a balance between overexposing the background and underexposing the subject in the foreground. Bracketing is used, in essence, to extract an optimal, if not a maximum, level of detail from a scene, especially a scene in which harsh conditions concerning dynamic range are present.

What does this have to do with eagles?

Science News, in 1998, noted that “[l]ong before DDT was a glimmer in a farmer’s eye, some other menace, as yet unknown, was sapping the strength of eggshells.” This could possibly have been a result of acidification as a result of early industrialization, but at any rate it was found that a thinning trend in the eggshell thickness of various bird species could be traced back as far as 1850, predating DDT by many decades (the same study noted that some bird species have “withstood eggshell declines of up to 15 percent”). The Reader will have to pardon the rather “dated” look of the Science News article archives — evidently, the changeover in format that has been done to their main site has not yet been bubbled down to all the old content.

Moreover, the American Council on Science and Health, in their Facts Versus Fears publication (Edition 3, June 1998 — an extract of the ACSH article can be found here) noted that “[i]n 1968 two researchers, Drs. Joseph J. Hickey and Daniel W. Anderson, reported that high concentrations of DDT were found in the eggs of wild raptor populations. The two concluded that increased eggshell fragility in peregrine falcons, bald eagles, and ospreys was due to DDT exposure. Dr. Joel Bitman and associates at the U.S. Department of Agriculture likewise determined that Japanese quail fed DDT produced eggs with thinner shells and lower calcium content.

In actuality, however, declines in bird populations either had occurred before DDT was present or had occured years after DDT’s use. A comparison of the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Counts between 1941 (pre-DDT) and 1960 (after DDT’s use had waned) reveals that at least 26 different kinds of birds became more numerous during those decades, the period of greatest DDT usage. The Audubon counts document an overall increase in birds seen per observer from 1941 to 1960, and statistical analyses of the Audubon data confirm the perceived increases. For example, only 197 bald eagles were documented in 1941; the number had increased to 891 in 1960.

At Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania, teams of ornithologists made daily counts of migrating raptors for over 40 years. The counts — published annually by the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary Association — reveal great increases in most kinds of hawks during the DDT years. The osprey counts increased as follows: in 1946, 191; in 1956, 288; in 1967, 457; and in 1972, 630.13 In 1942 Dr. Joseph Hickey — who in 1968 would blame DDT for bird population decline — reported that 70 per-cent of the eastern osprey population had been killed by pole traps around fish hatcheries. That same year, before DDT came into use, Hickey noted a decline in the population of peregrine falcons.

Other observers also documented that the great peregrine decline in the eastern United States occurred long before any DDT was present in the environment. In Canada peregrines were observed to be “reproducing normally” in the 1960s even though their tissues contained 30 times more DDT than did the tissues of the midwestern peregrines allegedly being extirpated by the chemical.18 And in Great Britain, in 1969, a three-year government study noted that the decline of peregrine falcons in Britain had ended in 1966 even though DDT levels were as abundant as ever. The British study concluded that “There is no close correlation between the decline in population of predatory birds, particularly the peregrine falcon and the sparrow hawk, and the use of DDT.

In addition, later research refuted the original studies that had pointed to DDT as a cause for eggshell thinning. After reassessing their findings using more modern methodology, Drs. Hickey and Anderson admitted that the egg extracts they had studied contained little or no DDT and said they were now pursuing PCBs, chemicals used as capacitor insulators, as the culprit.”

This is what I’m getting at, O Reader, when I talk about bracketing — looking at the data outside a single frame of reference. The fact is, eggshell thicknesses were already in decline by the time DDT usage became widespread, and that decline continued in some species well past the time when DDT began to fall out of use (the early 1960s), and well past the time when it was banned. To a truly critical mind, that detail, plus the fact that there is now grounds for doubt about the conclusions of many of the studies done demonstrating a direct correlation between DDT concentration and the welfare of various bird species, should be cause enough for a re-evaluation of whether or not the doom prophecies of Silent Spring were really all that correct in the first place.

Yes, nothing I have cited pertains directly to eagles…but given the studies that I have dug up, we must now diverge our thinking. Either eagles were uniquely succeptible to DDT and its derivatives, and were particularly vulnerable to it, or else they — like many other bird species — were already under pressure from a variety of other environmental factors at the same time. One cannot help but note that around the same time that DDT was falling out of use and heading toward its eventual banning, both automobiles and various industries were being subjected to steadily more strict environmental regulations, and were installing better emission control systems. How can the effects of those changes be measured separately from any perceived changes brought on by a reduction or cessation of DDT usage if, as may well be possible, acidification due to industrial pollution also had a detrimental effect on eggshell thickness?

And finally, there is one other consideration. “In Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) DDT spraying had reduced malaria cases from 2.8 million in 1948 to 17 in 1963. After spraying was stopped in 1964, malaria cases began to rise again and reached 2.5 million in 1969. The same pattern was repeated in many other tropical — and usually impoverished — regions of the world. In Zanzibar the prevalence of malaria among the populace dropped from 70 percent in 1958 to 5 percent in 1964. By 1984 it was back up to between 50 and 60 percent. The chief malaria expert for the U.S. Agency for International Development said that malaria would have been 98 percent eradicated had DDT continued to be used.

In addition, from 1960 to 1974 WHO screened about 2,000 compounds for use as antimalarial insecticides. Only 30 were judged promising enough to warrant field trials. WHO found that none of those compounds had the persistence of DDT or was as safe as DDT. (Insecticides such as malathion and carbaryl, which are much more toxic than DDT, were used instead.) And—a very important factor for malaria control in less developed countries—all of the substitutes were considerably more expensive than DDT.”

Nearly three million people die every year (another of Ed’s lies was to claim that only 1 million people die each year from this disease — he has yet to retract that statement as well) from malaria. Perhaps it is callous of me to say so, but for some reason, I cannot bring myself — in the face of statistics that basically mean one malarial death every thirty seconds — to care more about eight hundred observed eagles as opposed to merely three hundred.

Ed mentions shame. Yes, it would be a shame if the bald eagle went extinct — but it’s a bigger shame that 2.7 million people die every year from a disease that was on the road to eradication at one point.

Ed will just have to forgive me if I don’t get all misty over the plight of a bird that isn’t even a food source for humans.

What do you do, O Reader, when the discussion just isn’t going your way? Some people bow out gracefully, others concede a point or two, and others try and shift their angle of attack. Apparently, however, if you’re Ed Darrell, you abandon all pretense of rational discussion and fling a little mud.

Your nearly impossible to read comments box, your not posting remarks unedited by you, and your intransigence in repeatedly posting “citations”from the avoiwed liar Steven Milloy suggest this is not the place to carry on a discussion.

I had hoped you’d bother to read what I wrote, and follow my links, after I followed yours and was so sorely disappinted.

Milloy is a liar. You obviously have never bothered to try to track down his citations — they can’t be tracked. Those aren’t citations. They are primates flinging feces.

Alas.

If anyone has a question as to whether or not I post remarks unedited by me, I’ll be more than happy to provide the original emails that arrived in my inbox. I sometimes — very occasionally — correct spelling mistakes in what arrives, but only if the error is egregious and would serve only to embarrass the sender. But apart from those rare instances, what I display for the Reader in these postings is the unedited text of the original message that I receive. The only parts of the message which get redacted are the sender’s email address, IP address, and ISP information.

And as I say, I have backup copies of all the original emails to prove that with, which I can easily display upon request.

As to the complaint about the contact form being a bit hard to read — well, it’s not hard for me to read, and nobody else has yet complained. But the colour palette is a bit narrow, and for what it’s worth I’ve tracked down the relevant bits of CSS and made a few modifications — textarea and input backgrounds are now darker, and the text is the same gold colour as the hyperlinks.

There, that sets aside Ed’s form criticisms. Now, let’s look again at a more serious charge that he makes.

Just for fun, I went through the list of DDT factoids at Junk Science to see how easy it would be to verify some of the citations. Selecting citations at random, I tried to cross-reference them against Internet-available sources. Some of the older citations, I would have had to visit a library with a comprehensive database of old journals to obtain (and my ability to access the University of Alberta’s online journal services have been revoked due to my no longer being a student of that institution).

Others, however, were more easily tracked down. Here’s a handful of examples from the list of references that could be demonstrated as being accurate citations from works published in medical or scientific journals.

Citation: Bull World Health Organ 1998;76(1):11-6
Verified at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9615492

Citation: J Am Mosq Control Assoc 1998 Dec;14(4):410-20
Verified at: http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:10084135

Citation: Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. 1989.Public Health Statement: DDT, DDE, and DDD
Verified at: http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/phs35.html#bookmark05

Citation: Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 1999 Jun;8(6):525-32
Verified at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10385143

Citation: Occup Environ Med 1998 Aug;55(8):522-7
Verified at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9849538

Citation: National Toxicology Program, TR-131 Bioassays of DDT, TDE, and p,p’-DDE for Possible Carcinogenicity (CAS No. 50-29-3, CAS No. 72-54-8, CAS No. 72-55-9)
Verified at: http://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/index.cfm?objectid=0704C8A4 F52A BE78 5C81C16C5C1F14C9

Citation: N Engl J Med 1997;337:1253-8
Verified at: https://content.nejm.org/cgi/reprint/337/18/1253.pdf

Citation: BMJ 1997 Jul 12;315(7100):81-5
Verified at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9240045

Now, all I’m doing by listing these here is demonstrating that it is Ed, currently, who can be shown conclusively to be a liar. Whether Steven Milloy is a liar or not is still up for discussion — certainly, Ed is convinced that Milloy is a liar of epic proportions, while I remain agnostic on the matter. But the above list demonstrates, conclusively, that Ed’s earlier statements (i.e. that no serious scientific publications have carried articles disputing Rachel Carson’s theories or the conclusions published in her book Silent Spring, and that Milloy’s citations can’t be tracked) are falsehoods.

To be clear: based on the above, it can be said now that Ed Darrel has been conclusively demonstrated to be a liar.

I have read a sampling of content at Ed’s site, and admittedly do enjoy some of his content (his commentary on Galileo — and the generally good relationship between the Church and science — is very reasonable, for example). And I would even go so far as to charitably suggest that he makes a convincing case for a multi-vectored solution to the problem of malaria; his advocacy for mosquito nets is, I think, important (even if mosquito nets are an incomplete solution, as anyone with sufficient backcountry camping experience should know), and both passive and active methods of preventing mosquitos from reaching humans will be necessary in eradicating malaria from the world.

To be completely fair, I’m no advocate for rampant use of any potentially toxic substance, but I do believe in using what works to solve a problem. DDT worked in many countries; we should still consider it a valid part of the arsenal of methods we should employ in our efforts to eradicate malaria world-wide, especially since many of the effects it supposedly has — on humans and on avian species — have since been cast into doubt*. That’s not to say that DDT is the only weapon we should use in our struggle against this disease. But neither should we disallow its use as we have — millions have died for that mistake.

* And that would be another lie Ed is guilty of — his assertion that none of Rachel Carson’s conclusions have been successfully disputed.

Ed Darrell writes in again to correct what he regards as some errors in my previous response to him. Actually, to be completely correct, he wrote in twice, once to correct me and once to correct both me and himself. I’m just going to bundle the two bits of mail into one posting, because it’s easier that way, and because the two messages are related.

Ed’s first message read thusly:

Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was not a scientific study or a comprehensive research paper. It was a novel, and then a fictional one.

Carson’s book was solidly based on the 20 years of experience with DDT and more experience with other, similar chemicals. She provided 53 pages of citations to studies, papers in biology, chemistry and medical journals, and correspondence with the worlds’ greatest experts in the fields she wrote about.

There is not a single study done and published anywhere in any peer-reviewed journals that contradicts any finding Ms. Carson states. The in 1963 reported to President Kennedy that Carson was correct in all her conclusions, but that she was too optimistic about how soon and how hard the governmentt should act to reduce DDT use and control other hazardous chemicals.

How can you claim otherwise? There is not a single science organization that would disagree. I see you cite industry lobbying organizations — but the facts are as I stated them.

Consequently, your premise is in error, and everything that flows from such a poisoned tree will be poisoned as well. An appropriate analogy when we talk about DDT.

We could eliminate malaria next year in Africa without DDT. WE can’t eliminate malaria in Africa without the other actions I cited, which Ms. Carson noted in her book in 1962.

Santayana was right: Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. How sad that the children of Africa must bear the burden of those mistakes.

The children of Africa are already bearing the burden of a terrible Western mistake — the full-scale banning of DDT. Malaria presently causes 2.7 million human deaths annually [Africa News, January 27, 1999] — at one point in time, the use of DDT in antimalarial campaigns was credited with preventing, through its careful application, as many as 500 million human deaths [National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences of the Committee on Science and Public Policy, 1970].

I’d like to post Ed’s other letter first before launching into a full-length reply, but let me make one observation here. The use of tautological statements is always a risk, and I draw the good Reader’s attention to the number of times that Ed uses, above, statements of the form “there is not a single X that would disagree”

Such a statement can only be truthful if, for every instance of X, X does not in fact disagree. If even a single X can be shown to disagree, the statement is false.

As will be demonstrated presently, the statement is indeed false.

But first, Ed corrects himself slightly, after accusing me of having no basis for my statements.

On looking again, I see you pull out the junk science from Junk Science. Truth in labeling laws are not required, but don’t you think you should check some of the claims made by a group that advertises its stuff as junk?

Very little of what Milloy and Edwards allege at that site is accurate, and much of it is the fiction you wrongly accuse Rachel Carson of writing.

I’d urge you to check your sources. I have dissected several of Milloy’s claims at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, and I invite you to peruse those posts, at www.timpanogos.wordpress.com. Let the facts shine from under the bushel, please.

I am willing, O Reader, to grant that the tagging system I use on the site here does not always make spotting valid hyperlinks in my blog posts easy, in that a tag link and an actual hyperlink to a new article look identical (both use the ‘a’ tag, and so draw upon the same CSS style). That said, Junk Science (a site dedicated not to the promulgation and propagation of junk science, but to the exposure of various “scientific” studies and claims as junk (not surprisingly, most of their material concerns the pseudo-science of the climate change alarmists).

It’s a pity that Ed is so quick to dismiss J. Gordon Edwards and Steven Milloy as purveyors of fiction, when in fact the detailed list of facts about DDT and its banning contains nearly a hundred sourced statements from a wide range of scientists and scientific organizations.

My own links included articles from Milloy, John Stossel at Real Clear Politics, Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine, and Dr. D. Rutledge Taylor of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). Each article in turn noted the findings of other groups — including the American Environmental Protection Agency — that discredit, in whole or in part, both the claims Rachel Carson made in Silent Spring and the wholesale banning of DDT use.

To be fair, Ed’s website makes the fair observation that other factors also contribute to a truly effective antimalarial campaign — mosquito nets on beds, for example. But I think the point to be made is that a comprehensive antimalarial campaign does not involve any one solution, but rather utilizes a “multi-vectored approach” to the problem. Mosquito populations have to be reduced for a generation or two — hence the need for DDT. In the meantime, mosquitos that escape the chemical have to be prevented from reaching humans — lower concentrations of DDT applied in houses and mosquito netting are both needed here.

Even when there were observed incidences of DDT resistance in mosquitos — a trend blamed more on heavier usage of DDT by cotton growers than on the strictly regulated doses administered in antimalarial campaigns, mosquitos nevertheless showed a strong avoidance behaviour in regard to areas where DDT had been applied. One need not kill a mosquito to keep it away from a human.

Ed, in his previous letter, mentioned bald eagles, which are commonly thought to have been driven to the brink of extinction by DDT poisoning (Ed calls them our “canary in the coal mine”). The facts — and it is a curious thing that Ed, so passionate as he is about “the facts”, missed these details — would appear to dictate otherwise:

• Bald eagles were threatened with extinction as early as 1921, well before DDT usage became commonplace
• In 1960, the Audubon Society counted a 25% increase in bald eagle observations as compared to the previous census done 19 years prior (i.e. before the widespread use of DDT)
• Eggshell thickness and environmental DDT concentration, as was discovered by Krantz in the Pesticides Monitoring Journal in 1970, simply do not correlate. There is no reason to suspect that DDT causes eggshell thinning.
• The leading causes of bald eagle mortality were, and remain, shooting, electrocution from power lines, poisoning from mercury and lead contamination of food sources, and collisions — DDT was not found to be a factor in eagle mortality

Moreover, DDT has not been shown to have any harmful effect on humans, either. In both humans and lab animals, heavy exposure to DDT could not be correlated with increased rates of toxicity or cancer, as has been reported in numerous scientific papers, and even in carcinogenicity bioassays done by the American National Toxicity Program.

I think this is a good time to revisit Ed’s tautology. As can be seen, numerous scientific studies, organizations, and publications dispute the findings of Rachel Carson and other anti-DDT campaigners. More and more, it is being demonstrated that the banning of DDT was not justified in its day by the science done concerning its health and ecological impact. By the standards of today, there is precious little in the way of genuine scientific justification for the continuation of the DDT ban.

And even as malaria begins to make periodic reappearances in North America, it continues to kill nearly 3 million people a year, globally, most of them in Africa. To be completely fair, I agree with Ed on one thing — DDT alone is not the answer. But any answer that does not involve the use of DDT will be insufficient, contrary to an assertion Ed makes on his blog. The use of mosquito nets is important, but people can be exposed to mosquitos in other places than their bedrooms; years of camping in the backcountry of Alberta has taught me that much. Passive measures would be insufficient in stopping malaria world-wide. A combination of active and passive measures will be necessary.

So can we please cut the B.S. and get DDT back on the shelves, already?

Ed Darrell writes in with a response to this article, in which I remark on David Warren’s observations that once again, the latest fad among the rich and trendy in the West (that is, environmentalism) is serving only to further oppress those who live in poverty in Third World nations, as the biofuel craze drives the price of food through the roof world-wide.

…environmentalism seems to have become just one more playground for wealthy Westerners, a way we can wring our hands and make ourselves feel good for having done something, the same as when we banned DDT. And yet we do not, by our actions, achieve any meaningful positive environmental impact. Indeed, the only impact we manage to achieve is that, in our selfish desire to be “green,” we further impoverish and condemn to a most terrible fate thousands or millions of people living in poorer nations. And in the end, our selfishness backfires on us as well — the same “green” fuels we might desire to use in our cars are, in fact, very difficult to produce, and the production processes far more polluting than those used to refine crude oil into petrol.

But then, that pollution happens elsewhere, and not in our back yards or on the roads upon which we drive. We do not see it, and so can safely pretend it does not exist.

But, had we listened to the “environmentalists” about DDT in 1962, and dramatically reduced its broadcast use, it would still be effective against mosquitoes that carry malaria. Rachel Carson was right about DDT — it’s a killer, especially released willy-nilly in the wild. Bald eagles were just big canaries in our mine.

If we must designate a culprit in the DDT annals, it would be those who thought we could just poison the heck out of Africa and forget about the people there, rather than make serious efforts to fight malaria. Malaria is a complex problem, and throwing poison into the wild won’t improve the health care system, make governments stable, educate people how to look out for their own health and well being, or stimulate the economies so people can afford adequate housing to protect them from malaria-bearing mosquitoes.

Environmentalism is based in increasing our knowledge about God’s creation and where humans can and should fit in, and asking the question, “How can we be better stewards of this planet?” I think you may have given short shrift to those grander ideas.

Malaria really isn’t that complex a problem to solve — the ancient Romans knew exactly what they were doing when they dredged the swamps of Old Italy and wiped out mosquito breeding grounds on that little archipelago. In South American nations where comprehensive DDT programs were implemented, the same effects were achieved without the need to dredge swamps and destroy the natural habitats of other forms of wildlife.

The fact of the matter is, even the WHO ended its ban on DDT because the resurgence in malaria-related deaths marched in lockstep with the DDT ban in the first place. And in much the same way as Western use of biofuels is killing the poor in the Third World, the countries primarily afflicted by a resurgence in malaria (and the countries in which most malarial deaths occur as a result of the pressure by the West to ban the use of DDT) are poor, Third World countries. Western environmentalism, like every other fashionable trend, piggy-backs itself on the suffering and blood of the poor elsewhere in the world, and all so rich white folks can pump an alternative fuel into their SUV and tell themselves that they’re working to save the planet (even though that fuel cost more, in terms of pollutants released, to produce than normal petroleum does).

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was not a scientific study or a comprehensive research paper. It was a novel, and then a fictional one. And on the merits of the picture she painted with that novel, the West rushed to ban the use of DDT world-wide, despite the fact that DDT was later demonstrated to cause none of the harmful effects it was blamed (and banned) for. It does not cause eggshell thinning in avian populations, the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concedes that it does not pose a carcinogenic risk to human beings, and that it likewise poses no mutagenic/teratogenic danger. It does not appear to have any damaging effect on freshwater aquatic ecosystems either.

It was banned because of a work of fiction and the knee-jerk, guilt-ridden emotionalism of Western liberalism. And the poor, globally, in many Third World countries, will and have paid with their lives for that particular Western fad.

The thing is, DDT was effective — damn effective. In Venezuela, it reduced the number of cases of malaria from over eight million in 1943 to eight hundred by 1958. India and modern Italy saw similar dramatic reversals (Italy, in particular, recorded only 37 cases of malaria in 1967, down from over 400,000 roughly fifteen years earlier).

It would be nice to believe that environmentalists only want to increase our knowledge about the creation that God has made us stewards over. But the evidence on the ground tends to paint a different picture, and then not a pleasant one. environmentalism may have had noble intentions at its origin, as feminism did. But, like feminism, environmentalism has shaped itself into something much more malevolent. In the case of environmentalism, it has become a weird mash-up between those who would use it as a vehicle to advance an explicitly socialist (if not outright Marxist) political and economic agenda, and those who would use bad science to play upon the knee-jerk guilt of the modern Western liberal and by so doing enrich themselves (Al Gore would be a great example here).