The legacy of 'Silent Spring'

This September marks the 45th anniversary of the publication of "Silent Spring," Rachel Carson's antipesticide manifesto credited with inspiring the environmentalist movement.

But this anniversary is no cause for celebration. The legacy of "Silent Spring" includes more than a million deaths a year from the mosquito-borne disease malaria. Though nearly eradicated decades ago, malaria has resurged with a vengeance because DDT, the most effective agent of mosquito control, has been essentially discarded -- not based on scientific concerns about its safety, but on environmental dogma.

Published in 1962 at the height of the worldwide anti-malaria campaign, "Silent Spring" sparked a crusade against DDT. The widespread spraying of DDT had caused a spectacular drop in malaria. Sri Lanka, for example, reported 2.8 million malaria victims in 1948, but by 1963 it had only 17. Yet Carson's book made no mention of this. It said nothing of DDT's crucial role in eradicating malaria in industrialized countries, or of the tens of millions of lives saved by its use.

Instead, Carson filled her book with misinformation alleging, among other claims, that DDT causes cancer. Her unsubstantiated assertion that continued DDT use would unleash a cancer epidemic generated a panicked fear of the pesticide that endures to this day.

But the scientific case against DDT was, and still is, nonexistent. Almost 60 years have passed since the malaria-spraying campaigns began -- with hundreds of millions of people exposed to large concentrations of DDT -- yet, according to international health scholar Amir Attaran, the scientific literature "has not even one peer-reviewed, independently replicated study linking exposure to DDT with any adverse health outcome." Indeed, in a 1956 study, human volunteers ate DDT every day for more than two years with no ill effects then or since.

Abundant scientific evidence supporting the safety and importance of DDT was presented during seven months of testimony before the newly formed EPA in 1971. The presiding judge ruled unequivocally against a ban. But the public furor against DDT -- fueled by "Silent Spring" and the growing environmental movement -- was so great that a ban was imposed anyway. The EPA administrator, who hadn't even bothered to attend the hearings, overruled his own judge and imposed the ban in defiance of the facts and evidence. And the 1972 ban in the United States led to an effective worldwide ban, as countries dependent on U.S.- funded aid agencies curtailed their DDT use to comply with those agencies' demands.

Estimates put today's malaria incidence worldwide at around 300 million cases, with a million deaths every year. If this enormous toll of human suffering and death is preventable, why do environmentalists -- who profess to be the defenders of life -- continue to oppose the use of DDT?

The answer is that environmental ideology values an untouched environment above human life. The root of the opposition to DDT is not science but the environmentalist moral premise that it is wrong for man to "tamper" with nature.

The large-scale eradication of disease-carrying insects epitomizes the control of nature by man. This is DDT's sin. To Carson and the environmentalists she inspired, nature must be kept free from human interference. We should seek, Carson wrote, not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead "a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves." If the untouched, "natural" state is one in which millions contract deadly diseases, so be it.

In the few minutes it has taken you to read this article, more than a thousand people have contracted malaria, and half a dozen have died. This is the lifeor death consequence of viewing pestilent insects as a "necessary" component of a "vibrant biosphere" and seeking a "reasonable accommodation" with them. This anniversary of "Silent Spring" should be commemorated, not with laudatory festivities, but with rejection of the environmental ideology the book inspired.

Keith Lockitch is a Ph.D. in physics and a resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. He may be contacted at media@aynrand.org.