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Trying to honor Rachel Carson ain't easy
Earlier this week Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin announced his intention to offer a resolution to mark the 100th birthday of Rachel Carson . Sen. Tom Coburn from Oklahoma decided that the Senate was the wrong place to honor the woman who launched the national debate that would eventually ban certain dangerous pesticides. So Coburn announced this week that he would block the resolution, claiming Carson’s attempts to educate the public on the potential risks of some pesticides somehow killed millions of people in Africa.
Coburn: "In my opinion she did more to kill more African children than anybody I know. I don't think we ought to be honoring her as the result of that effort."
Under that rationale, the author, scientist and environmentalist Rachel Carson joins a long list of warlords and violent homicidal dictators and their armies of thugs and killers that have ruled Africa through war and terror for decades slaughtering literally millions of innocent people.
The specific pesticide Senator Coburn has focused on during his objection to the Cardin resolution is DDT. DDT was used for years on not only different crops like cotton, but also used to combat malaria in certain parts of the world, and still is used for that reason today. In fact even our own government continues to support the use of DDT in those parts of the world where people are at serious risk of contracting malaria. However, Coburn left out that rather important piece of information.
USAID's Kent R. Hill: “USAID strongly supports spraying as a preventative measure for malaria and will support the use of DDT when it is scientifically sound and warranted.”
I would think that if Rachel Carson were alive today she would agree that in certain instances, like malaria outbreaks in Africa, the use of DDT would be OK. But we do know from scientific research done in the early 1960s that DDT at certain levels can have harmful effects on the reproductive systems of fish and birds in areas where DDT was heavily used. And in fact, following the ban of DDT in the U.S. in the early 1970s wildlife, most notably the osprey and the bald eagle, began to return.