Appearance
Silent Spring
Rachel Carson wrote so beautifully that any few pages of SILENT SPRING, or its predecessor, the majestic THE SEA AROUND US, throb with the vitality and yearning of the greatest poetry. SILENT SPRING caused an enormous sensation forty years ago, as it married a highly evolved lyric writing style with a hardcore expose of DDT and other insecticides, a topic which was quite flammable and which provoked the wrath of a host of leading scientists and others invested in the big business of "nature cleansing." To some, Carson was a renegade, and a retro one at that, a conservative who wished to take the world back to the days before "scientific progress."As many conservationists have been called before and since. But conservation does not automatically imply "conservative," and I think Carson, in her own way, was quite radical in her thinking and in her prognosis for the future. This book is lovely, but to my mind not well served by the insipid introduction by Terry Tempest Williams who is an OK writer but nothing special, particularly when compared to Carson. My advice is, skip the intro, you don't need it, and get right to the heart of the book and the wonderful limpid prose, the most evocative since Thoreau's.
Silent Spring
This is the definitive book about ecological issues. Sadly it is just as applicable today as it was almost three decades ago when it was written, except that there are even more eco-problems facing our ravaged world such as global warming, the Ozone Hole, high UV-radiation, increased industrial and automobile pollution etc. We obviously did not pay enough heed to Rachel Carson's sound caveats! Could it be that Silent Spring is too information oriented for our entertainment seeking 21st Century world? If so, maybe another book just recently published, entitled, ACCUSED BY FACET-EYES (by scientist-author, C.B. Don) might help to bridge this gap as there is an interesting tie-in with Silent Spring. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson mentions the devastating effects of pesticides sprayed on orchards and the decimated honeybee pollinator colonies...essential for our agriculture! "Accused By Facet-Eyes" takes Silent Spring one step further. It is a well researched contemporary science-fiction eco-novel, which presents a fantastic, thought-provoking storyline through "honeybee facet-eyes". I am a long-time fan of Silent Spring and yet I loved this new, imaginative eco-novel. Both books share a strong ecological message presented in different ways. Silent Spring and "Accused By Facet-Eyes" are rare eco-books, both truly worthwhile reading and reflecting upon!
Silent Spring
Over 35 years ago, this book, which would give aid and comfort to all those who would destroy our way of life, was written. Consider how the advocates of a certain policy (i.e. banning of pesticides) will skew "scientific" data to support a pre-ordained conclusion. A fine example of that in this book would be the "finding" of thin eagle eggshells, due to (we're told) DDT. Not mentioned was the diet fed to the mother eagles in the study, one containing only 20% of their normal, natural calcium intake.Stop for a minute to think about how many millions of lives in the world were saved from malaria by DDT - and how many that were not saved since banning it. But, to the new "environmental" Marxists, what's a few million human lives in the battle to enslave all of humanity? Those who have written to praise this monument to junk science ought to consider the harm done by polemics such as this. This same sentiment is in control of the EPA today. One need only look at the environment of former Soviet satellite nations of Eastern Europe to see what a disaster totalitarian governments (with no oversight) have made. Continue along our current course of Washington-dominated command-and-control bureaucratic decision-making (as well as more government funded and controlled "science"), and we will have a dirtier and more unhealthy world, with lower life expectancy for everyone.Undoubtedly, such an outcome would be praised as "fair" by our would-be dictators.
Silent Spring
Would you believe the case could be made that this book is responsible for as many deaths as Hitler or Stalin were responsible for? It is quite a claim but there are millions of people in third world countries, primarily Africa, dying of malaria every year. These deaths could cheaply and easily be nearly eliminated by spraying homes with DDT. This book led to the banning of DDT and was based on a good deal of bad research methods. You don't have to take my word for it. Check out JunkScience.com, fightingmaliria, TechCentral, or event the Wall Street Journal. JunkScience.com gives many details of the troubles with the research that went into this book regarding DDT and how effective it is and nowhere near as harmful as this book would lead you to believe. We don't see all these MILLIONS of people dying on the nightly news so many people are quite apathetic. Using DDT only in homes would save millions of lives a year. It wouldn't even have to be used for agriculture.The enviro-fascists have a lot of blood on their hands in this case.
Silent Spring
Along with acid rain the alarmist like to bring up DDT referring back to R. Carson's "Silent Spring" that led to the restrictive use of DDT that is one of the oldest pesticides & is still the best for controlling mosquitoes. Spraying DDT in houses and on mosquito breeding grounds was the primary reason that rates of malaria around the world declined dramatically after the Second World War. Nearly one million Indians died from malaria in 1945, but DDT spraying reduced this to a few thousand by 1960. Today there are once again millions of cases of malaria in India, and over 300 million cases worldwide-most in sub-Saharan Africa. Cases of malaria in South Africa have risen by over 1000 percent in the past five years. Only those countries that have continued to use DDT, such as Ecuador, have contained or reduced malaria. It appears that if you can't see it from your house, it is no problems. Dead birds or dead people, there would be neither if DDT was allowed to be wisely applied.Seems that Al Gores loves a convent lie, such as this one: "#27 - Mosquitoes "climbing to higher altitudes"Gore says that, because of "global warming", mosquitoes are climbing to higher altitudes. They are not. Most recent outbreaks have been at lower levels than those of a century and more ago. He says that Nairobi was founded 1000 m above sea level so as to be above the mosquito line. It was not. In the period before anthropogenic warming could have had any significant effect, there were ten malaria outbreaks in Nairobi, one of which reached as far up as Eldoret, almost 3000 m above sea level. Malaria is not a tropical disease. Mosquitoes do not need tropical temperatures:they need no more than 15 degrees Celsius to breed. The largest malaria outbreak of modern times was in Siberia in the 1920s and 1930s, when 13 million were infected, 600,000 died and 30,000 died as far north as Arkhangelsk, on the Arctic Circle. There is no reason to suppose that malaria will spread even if the climate continues to become warmer.[...]The lies continue and so do people dying because of them. Is that part of the plan?
Silent Spring
Perhaps her cause was just in writing this book, but her short-sighted ignorance of the repercussions was inexcusable. Because of the ban on DDT which largely resulted from Silent Spring, the WHO has estimated that around 20 MILLION children have died of malaria.DDT was, & still is, one of the very best insecticides to control mosquitoes, the sole transporter of this deadly disease. Best of all, DDT is very NON-toxic to humans.The need for DDT is so urgent that even the Sierra Club is justifying it's use inside houses in malaria stricken locations of Africa, South America, & Asia.Way to go Rachel. Save the Birds, Kill the Children...Wake Up People!!