The Green Death

(Courtesy Doctor Zero - http://www.doczero.org/)

Who is the worst killer in the long, ugly history of war and extermination? Hitler? Stalin?
Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all
those fiends put together.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims
(sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to
this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental
Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and
these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the
hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and
banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to
withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.

The resulting explosion of mosquito-borne malaria in Africa has claimed over sixty million
lives. This was not a gradual process – a surge of infection and death happened almost
immediately. The use of DDT reduces the spread of mosquito-borne malaria by fifty to
eighty percent, so its discontinuation quickly produced an explosion of crippling and fatal
illness. The same environmental movement which has been falsifying data, suppressing
dissent, and reading tea leaves to support the global-warming fraud has studiously ignored
this blood-drenched “hockey stick” for decades.

The motivation behind Silent Spring, the suppression of nuclear power, the global-warming
scam, and other outbreaks of environmentalist lunacy is the worship of centralized power
and authority. The author, Rachel Carson, didn’t set out to kill sixty million people – she
was a fanatical believer in the newly formed religion of radical environmentalism, whose
body count comes from callousness, rather than blood thirst. The core belief of the
environmental religion is the fundamental uncleanliness of human beings. All forms of
human activity are bad for the environment… most especially including the activity of large
private corporations. Deaths in faraway Africa barely registered on the radar screen of the
growing Green movement, especially when measured against the exhilarating triumph of
getting a sinful pesticide banned, at substantial cost to an evil corporation.

Those who were initiated into the higher mysteries of environmentalism saw the reduction
of the human population as a benefit, although they’re generally more circumspect about
saying so in public these days. As quoted by Walter Williams, the founder of the
Malthusian Club of Rome, Alexander King, wrote in 1990: “My own doubts came when
DDT was introduced. In Guayana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So
my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population
problem.” Another charming quote comes from Dr. Charles Wurster, a leading opponent of
DDT, who said of malaria deaths: “People are the cause of all the problems. We have too
many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”

Like the high priests of global warming, Rachel Carson knew what she was doing. She
claimed DDT would actually destroy all life on Earth if its use continued – the “silent spring”
of the title is a literal description of the epocalypse she forecast. She misused a quote from
Albert Schweitzer about atomic warfare, implying the late doctor agreed with her crusade
against pesticide by dedicating her book to him… when, in fact, Schweitzer viewed DDT
as a “ray of hope” against disease-carrying insects. Some of the scientists attempting to
debunk her hysteria went so far as to eat chunks of DDT to prove it was harmless, but she
and her allies simply ignored them, making these skeptics the forerunners of today’s
“global warming deniers” – absolutely correct and utterly vilified. William Ruckleshaus
disregarded nine thousand pages of testimony when he imposed the DDT ban. Then as
now, the science was settled… beneath a mass of politics and ideology.

Another way Silent Spring forecast the global-warming fraud was its insistence that
readers ignore the simple evidence of reality around them. One of the founding myths of
modern environmentalism was Carson’s assertion that bird eggs developed abnormally
thin shells due to DDT exposure, leading the chicks to be crushed before they could hatch.
As detailed in this American Spectator piece from 2005, no honest experimental attempt to
produce this phenomenon has ever succeeded – even when using concentrations of DDT
a hundred times greater than anything that could be encountered in nature. Carson
claimed thin egg shells were bringing the robin and bald eagle to the edge of extinction…
even as the bald eagle population doubled, and robins filled the trees. Today, those eagles
and robins shiver in a blanket of snow caused by global warming.

The DDT ban isn’t the only example of environmental extremism coming with a stack of
body bags. Mandatory gas mileage standards cause about 2,000 deaths per year, by
compelling automakers to produce lighter, more fragile cars. The biofuel mania has led
resources to be shifted away from growing food crops, resulting in higher food prices and
starvation. Worst of all, the economic damage inflicted by the environmentalist religion
directly correlates to life-threatening reductions in the human standard of living. The recent
earthquake in Haiti is only the latest reminder that poverty kills, and collectivist politics are
the most formidable engine of poverty on Earth.

Environmental extremism is a breathless handmaiden for collectivism. It pours a layer of

smooth, creamy science over a relentless hunger for power. Since the boogeymen of the
Green movement threaten the very Earth itself with imminent destruction, the
environmentalist feels morally justified in suspending democracy and seizing the liberty of
others. Of course we can’t put these matters to a vote! The dimwitted hicks in flyover
country can’t understand advanced biochemistry or climate science. They might vote the
wrong way, and we can’t risk the consequences! The phantom menaces of the Green
movement can only be battled by a mighty central State. Talk of representation, property
rights, and even free speech is madness when such a threat towers above the fragile
ecosphere, wheezing pollutants and coughing out a stream of dead birds and drowned
polar bears. You can see why the advocates of Big Government would eagerly race
across a field of sustainable, organic grass to sweep environmentalists into their arms, and
spin them around in the ozone-screened sunlight.

Green philosophy provides vital nourishment for the intellectual vanity of leftists, who get to
pat themselves on the back for saving the world through the control-freak statism they
longed to impose anyway. One of the reasons for the slow demise of the climate-change
nonsense is that it takes a long time to let so much air out of so many egos. Calling
“deniers” stupid and unpatriotic was very fulfilling. Likewise, you’ll find modern college
campuses teeming with students – and teachers – who will fiercely insist that DDT thins
egg shells and causes cancer. Environmentalism is a primitive religion which thrives by
telling its faithful they’re too sophisticated for mere common sense.

The legacy of Silent Spring provides an object lesson in the importance of bringing the
global-warming con artists to trial. No one was ever forced to answer for the misery
inflicted by that book, or the damage it dealt to serious science. Today Rachel Carson is
still celebrated as a hero, the secular saint who transformed superstition and hysteria into
a Gospel for the modern god-state. The tactics she deployed against DDT resurfaced a
decade later, in the Alar scare. It’s a strategy that offers great reward, and very little risk.
We need to increase the risk factor, and frighten the next generation of junk scientists into
being more careful with their research. If we don’t, the Church of Global Warming will just
reappear in a few years, wearing new vestments and singing new hymms… but still
offering the same communion of poverty, tyranny, and death.