Rachel Carson, Science Fiction author and Mass Murderer

J.F. Beck has a great short essay on that great hero of the modern environmental movement: Rachel Carson, who I have described on this blog multiple times, tongue only slightly in cheek, as the greatest mass-murderer of the 20th century after Mao and Stalin (although as malaria continues to take several million lives a year, her totals keep growing while the Mao/Stalin bodycount remains the same, so eventually she will overtake them).

Science Fiction masquerading as science

Rachel Carson’s magnum opus Silent Spring – described on the back cover as “the cornerstone of modern environmentalism” – made her famous and a darling of the left. Silent Spring, first published in 1962, still sells briskly, currently ranked 1,187 in sales at Amazon – not bad for an almost 50 year-old book. It is, of course, required reading for university students and prospective friends of the environment.

In making her case against DDT Carson constructs not a sturdy cornerstone of scientific truth but rather an elaborate tissue of exaggerations and lies. She could have persuasively argued that DDT’s persistence makes it unsuited to agricultural use. This simple, factually correct argument is not the stuff of which best-selling books are made, however. Better to confect the Silent Spring horror story.

Carson’s introduction to chapter three (Elixirs of Death):

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

Several pages later upping the fear factor:

All of this has come about because of the sudden rise and prodigious growth of an industry for the production of man-made or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects.

The first synthetic insecticide on Carson’s list: DDT. As proof of DDT’s threat to human health Carson relies not on scientific studies but rather on anecdotal evidence, citing this improbable scenario:

One [case history] concerned a house-wife who abhorred spiders. In mid-August she had gone into her basement with an aerosol spray containing DDT and petroleum distillate. She sprayed the entire basement thoroughly… As she finished the spraying she began to feel quite ill, with nausea and extreme anxiety and nervousness. Within the next few days she felt better, however, and apparently not suspecting the cause of her difficulty, she repeated the entire procedure in September, running through two more cycles of spraying, falling ill, recovering temporarily, spraying again. After the third use of the aerosol new symptoms developed: fever, pains in the joints and general malaise, acute phlebitis in one leg. When examined by Dr. Hargraves she was found to be suffering from acute leukemia. She died within the following month.

All of this is nonsense. Humans have forever been “subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals”: literally thousands of dangerous chemicals are ubiquitous in nature – hydrogen cyanide, oxalic acid, carbon monoxide, lead, hydrogen sulphide, aflatoxin, the soup of toxins in smoke from fires for warmth and cooking, and many more natural nasties can cause illness or death.

Contrary to Carson’s suggestion, no amount of DDT can cause leukemia or any other form of cancer to develop in a matter of months, if ever, and the chemical is not acutely toxic: no one is known to have died of DDT poisoning. The massive quantities of DDT dispersed into the environment caused no silent springs or cancer epidemics.

The rest here.