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Rachel Carson: The woman behind the book
By Lisa Frack
Known, of course, for her movement-launching 1962 book, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson understood the important relationship between nature and chemicals. She raised her voice to inform others and protect the environment long before it was popular.
Carson's biographer, Linda Lear, describes her courageous role questioning the norms of her day:
Disturbed by the profligate use of synthetic chemical pesticides after World War II, Carson reluctantly changed her focus in order to warn the public about the long term effects of misusing pesticides. In Silent Spring (1962) she challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and called for a change in the way humankind viewed the natural world.Carson was attacked by the chemical industry and some in government as an alarmist, but courageously spoke out to remind us that we are a vulnerable part of the natural world subject to the same damage as the rest of the ecosystem. Testifying before Congress in 1963, Carson called for new policies to protect human health and the environment. Rachel Carson died in 1964 after a long battle against breast cancer. Her witness for the beauty and integrity of life continues to inspire new generations to protect the living world and all its creatures.
A Sense of Wonder: The documentary
In their 2008 documentary, A Sense of Wonder, Kauilani Lee and Bullfrog Films offer us a chance to remember (or, for some of us, to experience for the first time) what was going on with our country's environment and the quickly-expanding use of synthetic chemicals when Ms. Carson was in the thick of it, recognizing what others failed to see and courageously speaking out.
Since she put pen to paper about DDT, a lot has happened, hasn't it?
[Thanks to Wikipedia for the historical book image]
Too bad millions of people have died from malaria when DDT could have killed the mosquito instead....
Kev, make sure you get the history right.
WHO had a campaign to eradicate malaria. They called it off in the middle 1960s because overuse of DDT for other reasons had bred resistance and immunity into African and Asian mosquitoes, and too many nations could not do the other thing the eradication campaign required, which was cure malaria in all the humans in the short period DDT would hold mosquito populations down. DDT without better medical care is a prescription to disaster.
EPA's ban on agricultural use of DDT in the U.S. came years later, in 1972. DDT has never been banned in Africa.
This shouldn't be news to you, but a U.S. ban on spraying DDT in Texas didn't cause WHO to slow use of DDT in Africa seven years earlier. Not spraying DDT in the U.S. does not cause mosquitoes to migrate across the Atlantic to Africa. In short, the U.S. ban on DDT had zero effect on malaria in Africa, and anyone who can read a calendar and a map can see that.
Ironically, malaria is lower now in the world than it was when DDT use was at its peak. More ironically, African nations who have adopted Rachel Carson's proposed program of integrated pest management, have reduced their malaria rates far more than they could have by simply spraying DDT.
All mosquitoes in the world are at least resistant to DDT now, if not immune to. DDT is not the panacea it was once thought to be -- an it never was.
Fighting malaria requires that we fight malaria, not snip at good dead woman scientists. If you wish to join with Rachel Carson's program and strike a blow at malaria, why not send $10 to Nothing But Nets, today?
And, as I understand it, DDT remains in the environment for an unknown number of years. DDT sprayed on Cape Cod in the 1960s has been found in dust here by Silent Spring Institute, during recent studies of Cape households, in the effort to figure out why Barnstable County has such a high rate of breast cancer ....
Dra. Rachel Carson was iluminated woman.
She offer her life to save us.
She should get the novel price.
Eternal enemy of all of us is the money: the chemical industry.
Dr. A. Ducrot.