Tram Town
Thursday, January 20, 2005
| Category: DDT I can hear you all groaning "Here we go again, another anti-Green rant by Semi". This time I have discovered what is to me a new connection. Until a couple of days ago I was unaware of the comments made by Alexander King the founder of the Club of Rome. In this article from FrontPage, King is quoted thus: My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, 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.That quote is from 1990! In the same article, Dr. Charles Wurster, founding trustee of the Environmental Defense Fund is quoted, in response to a question about the banning of some chemicals causing many deaths, as saying: “Probably – so what? 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.”Near as I can tell, Wurster has questioned the veracity of the person who claimed he said this, but has not denied saying it (you have to scroll down a bit and then spend a little bit of time deciphering the text). What Wurster said is important as far as his reuptation is concerned but the King remark and the general meme that was about at the time that humans need to die in order to save "the planet" is the missing link for mine in trying to determine why William Ruckelshaus decided to completely ban DDT in the US when the vast majority of advisers counselled him otherwise (see items 17, 18 and 19 here). If you were a People Hating Green™ of the era, DDT was definitely your enemy: "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT... In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable."Now, as we watch the aftermath of the Boxing Day Tsunami, many are concerned about the lives that we might still save if we had some DDT. |
