The Silent Spring will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its publication next week and at Taki’s Magazine Kathy Shaidle looks at the author, Rachel Carson, and her deadly legacy:
The fact that noble, selfless humanitarians such as Rachel Carson are typically smug, self-satisfied misanthropes has been a truism since Dickens invented Mrs. Jellyby. Yet in the case of the DDT ban, good intentions didn’t pave another liberal road to hell. They bulldozed the way for an Audubon autobahn to Hades on Earth.
The Ford Foundation had pretty much wiped out malaria in the 1950s by funding the spraying of DDT to kill mosquitos that carried it, especially in Africa. However, that campaign ceased in the wake of Silent Spring hysteria. The millions of deaths Carson had predicted came true all right, but not because of pesticide—because of its absence.
One estimate puts the post-DDT-ban malaria death toll at “tens of millions dead—mostly pregnant women and children under the age of 5” and cites the ban’s economic cost at “$1 trillion dollars [sic] in lost GDP in sub-Saharan Africa alone.”
The effects of environmentalist hysteria, which puts the Earth before people, includes the death of human beings. The Green Movement loves the Earth but dislikes people (or doesn’t care about them), so is indifferent about the cost in human lives when their agenda is carried out. A point we made in an editorial two years ago is apt:
The problem is not the carbon footprint, but the person who leaves it; the problem is not carbon consumption, but the carbon consumer; the problem is not even pollution, but the hidden polluter. The real pollution is always the same thing, and it is always a person.
