Long term food supply

Company ABC makes a product. In the process of making that product a hundred acres of strip-mined and dug into. After leaving the mine the shafts fill with rain water and, due to minerals in the ground, become extremely toxic. Company ABC leaves and area and has nothing else to do with the situation.

The product is sold to people on the other side of the world who do not or care about the environmental impact that company ABC's methods had. The locals who live near the now toxic site are left to deal with the mess.

Does Government now pick up the bill?
Do we wait for some rich "save the world" person to donate the millions of dollars needed?
Do the locals start saving their money?
Do we just ignore it and hope it doesn't effect anyone?

Or do we pass a law that requires businesses to factor in environmental cleanup for the products they produce?



Look at Love Canal, the vinyl chloride cover up, DDT, nicotine, chlorofluorocarbons, ect. Dangerous chemicals true nature were either knowingly or unknowingly exposed to unknowing citizens.

What is the economic incentive for someone to invest millions into developing new chemicals? Well obviously there's a huge incentive, just look at the thriving chemical/pharmaceutical companies.

Now what is the economic incentive for those companies to invest the millions of dollars into researching the harmful effects of those chemicals? Or the billions of dollars required to invest on the potential harmful effects of drug *combinations*?

(do some research on chemical interactions, it's scary how little we know)

Imho, governments has to step in and do the things capitalism doesn't want to do cause there's no money to be made doing it.

(sorry if this was a bit of a ramble :o )
 
Tony, it just bothers me that we all curse the oil companies for gas prices being so high, but yet California refuses to let a new refinery be built in their State because of "ecological" issues. So, the very thing that could help to bring prices down (since refining more heavy crude from other sources than the Middle East could help the demand issue) has been demonized by those who bitch about gas prices. The same with drilling in Alaska. These same people then lobby Congress to "do something" about high gas prices and those "evil" oil barons. They don't want a true Capitalistic fix, they just want a subsidy in the form of Congress forcing the oil companies to lower it's profits and give the "poor" folks something. I say if you're pissed about the oil companies making so much money, then my suggestion is to buy stock in the oil companies or start riding a bicycle - no one is holding a gun to your head making you pump gas into your vehicle. The only reason I curse the oil companies is not because of their profit levels, but because they take subsidies from the government just like the mega farmer and all these other supposed "Capitalistic" businesses do. I have ZERO problems with a company making as much profits as it can. I have ZERO problems with a company only worried about its own self-interests. I DO have problems with government sticking their noses into anything that thwarts free enterprise and Capitalism. I DO have a problem with anyone thinking they are owed something they didn't work for. Again, government only exists (in its true form) to settle disputes among parties and to protect the rights of the Individual.

As far as global warming goes, there has been no absolute proof that it exists in the form that everyone states - from me driving a gas vehicle, etc., since scientists are still debating the issue. It could very well be true or it may be natural. The glaciers and ice caps are melting. True. They have done this before in the history of the world. Maybe we should sue God for allowing natural things to occur, if this proves to be a natural event? That's the whole point...everyone needs a real villain, they need some tangible person or entity they can blame for things...." So and so got lung cancer because he saw someone smoking a cigarette one day."

I, for one, am all for alternative energy sources. I think it's a great thing, but mark my word, once it gets going it will be so heavily subsidized by government that the actual Return on Investment will not be worth it in the long run. Big Oil is on a downhill swing and the oil companies realize it. It is now in vogue to be "green" and you're seeing the oil companies go further towards that. Guess who will be getting those subsidies and get praise for alternative energy solutions? It's a big money making game folks and it's not honorable money made by men who produce. It's money made by looters. Nothing more. No one in any real power cares whether we are truly "green" or not. If you believe otherwise you're kidding yourself.
 
Have you ever truly researched DDT? It is a proven fact that more people have died from Malaria due to banning DDT than has ever died from DDT itself.
 
As for your question on who cleans up and pays the bill. Again, government exists to settle disputes among parties and to protect the Rights of Individuals. If a company poisons the earth and that directly causes harm to others then it is government's role to prosecute those who caused harm to others. Simple. That is Capitalism in its purest form.
 
R.A.T. said:
Have you ever truly researched DDT? It is a proven fact that more people have died from Malaria due to banning DDT than has ever died from DDT itself.
Click to expand...

Yes i have (albeit at the undergrad level). And no, it is not a proven fact. What you are stating is anti-environmental myth.

DDT was not banned in the US till 1972 and is still used today to combat malaria in developing countries. Most of the deaths in the 60s came from resistance to DDT developing in the mosquito populations.

" Reductions in the use of DDT did occur in a number of developing nations after the US ban in 1972. This reflected concerns over environmental consequences of DDT, but was also a result of many other factors. One of the important factors in declining use of DDT was decreasing effectiveness and greater costs because of the development of resistance in mosquitoes. Resistance was largely caused by the indiscriminate, widespread use of DDT to control agricultural pests in the tropics. This problem, in fact, was anticipated by Carson (author of The Silent Spring): "No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored . . . The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse."

-Dr Alan Lymbery
Professor Andrew Thompson
Parasitology Unit
Division of Health Sciences
Murdoch University
 
The bottom line is what the good professor says is not altogether true either, and I guess it just matters which side of the issue you are on politically on who the "experts" are. If I remember correctly from the discussions I had with Cresson Kearney he noted that mosquito populations declined when the use of DDT was allowed and increased when other methods/ chemicals were used. In fact he spent years studying mosquitoes since his whole deal was how to keep soldiers alive in tropical zones, thus the reason he did so much research at the jungle training center in Panama. I guess my next question would be this: if DDT is not that great at combating mosquito populations due to resistance issues then why is it still be used, as you stated above to, to control mosquitoes in Malaria prone regions?
 
I would imagine for the same reason we still use penicillium. The resistance was being a proglem due to the "wide spread" usage of DDT (ie spaying it all over town to "keep those annoying bugs away"). When used for isolated/serious situations the chance for developing resistance is less (as is the environmental impact).

The point is that we have to be aware of the true effects of chemicals. We need people researching those chemicals and we need a government to fund that research for the public good.
 
To me the world is full of different views on different subjects and therefore the person or company "thinking outside the box" sees profit to be made on the different view of "the people" . You just can not please every one at the same time, cater to your Clientele and try to be profitable at it.
No one like the cost of fuel but that does not mean I am trading in my Silverado for a Kia...I just adjust my budget because I will always drive a truck.Things cost more nowadays that is life in genereal everything has gone up,More people live in the world ,more demand for basic products....Translates to more cost of basic living
 
But we haven't banned penicillin in this country.

Well, I can agree to disagree with you on this. Private industry can do just as well (better) at funding research, just like the many independent pharmaceutical companies do (without subsidies) as long as they are also free to charge whatever the price they want for the invention they come up with. Ahhh...that's the catch...most folks don't want to pay someone for what they invent or for their intellectual property, thinking that since it benefits the whole it should be given away to everyone, including those that can't afford it. Bullshit! The benefit of a society does not have to be from an altruistic mindset. That's just the problem in this country nowadays. Every time there is a problem everyone screams: "government to do something!" thus going further and further down that road to socialism.

Maybe Peru should quit using DDT and get some better mosquito repellant for the jungle, eh? :D

018.jpg
 
Reject Environmentalism, Not DDT
By Keith Lockitch (Orange County Register, September 19, 2004; Australia's Herald Sun, January 13, 2005; Providence Journal, September 25, 2006)

The World Health Organization has announced that it will encourage the use of DDT to fight malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that kills a million people a year. This announcement is a positive development, but it is tragic that malaria was allowed to persist unchecked for so long.

Though nearly eradicated decades ago, malaria has resurged with a vengeance because DDT, the most effective agent of mosquito control, had been essentially discarded--discarded based not on scientific concerns about its safety, but on environmental dogma.

The environmental crusade against DDT began with Rachel Carson's antipesticide diatribe "Silent Spring," published in 1962 at the height of the worldwide antimalaria campaign. The widespread spraying of DDT had caused a spectacular drop in malaria incidence--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 as public opinion 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 over 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.

So if scientific facts are not what has driven the furor against DDT, what has? 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, "the 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy." Nature, they hold, is intrinsically valuable and must be kept free from human interference.

On this environmentalist premise the proper attitude to nature is not to seek to improve it for human benefit, but to show "humility" before its "vast forces" and leave it alone. 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.

Carson's current heirs agree. Earth First! founder Dave Foreman writes: "Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as 'disease' (e.g., malaria) and 'pests' (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere."

In the few minutes it has taken you to read this article, over a thousand people have contracted malaria and half a dozen have died. This is the life-or-death consequence of viewing pestilent insects as a "necessary" component of a "vibrant biosphere" and seeking a "reasonable accommodation" with them.

The WHO's support for DDT use is an encouraging step toward stopping this global health catastrophe. But even more important is to reject the environmental ideology on which opposition to DDT is based.

Keith Lockitch, PhD in physics
 
Just bought four more bags of brown rice, to put with my other food stash & three lbs. of salt. always going to need salt! I just buy a little each week as I can afford it. next week beans!
 
Good point. Salt is something we forget about until we don't have it.
 
So why don't people get serious about this and tear out those 5 acre lawns in front of their McMansions and plant a garden and a few fruit trees? Two 50 ft rows of potatoes keeps us supplied for about 7 to 8 months out of the year. Add a couple of more rows and we could stop buying at the store.

Beans, squash and corn (the "three sisters") aren't that hard to grow and your carbon foot print will go way down.

Of course, subsistence farming may come too close to work for some people.
 
Exactly! I've been gardening since I was old enough to walk behind my mom, dad and granddad planting seeds. I guess a lot of folks don't have the room for a garden and the rest are like you said...lazy. We can a lot of food during the summer and eat on it all winter long. This country is in for a rude awakening one day when they all holler for Uncle Sam to "do something" and Uncle can't do anything. Just wait until the food supplies really get short and they socialize and ration it for the "betterment of the whole." This whole thread, no matter the twists it has taken, is still about self-sufficiency and Individualism, which are not synonymous with altruism when the shit hits the fan. That neighbor that you thought would do anything to help out his fellow man will cut your throat when his family gets hungry. Socialism, on any scale, DOES NOT work in the long run.
 
Outside of the really big cities, this country is covered in pampered lawn grass. All of which could be growing food.

My German grandfather told me over and over when I was growing up that back in the old country all those lawns would have been potatoes!

Like you say, when times get tough, modern folks think the government should step in and feed them. And that farmers will just have to work harder and bear the cost of it.
 
Sorry this is so long, but it provides a good rebuttle of the Herald article...

Not So Fast with the DDT
Reed Karaim . The American Scholar . Washington: Summer 2005. Vol. 74
, Iss. 3; pg. 53 , 7 pgs

Rachel Carson's warnings still apply

What the World Needs Now Is DDT" read the headline in The New York Times Magazine early last year. If you need more proof that the current decade is dedicated to driving a stake through the heart of the 1960s, those seven words ought to do it. The story itself, by Times editorial writer Tina Rosenberg, lives up to the stridency of its headline. As she surveys the alarming incidence of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, Rosenberg builds the case that Western environmental sensibilities about DDT use are handicapping the battle against this deadly disease. She writes more than 2,000 words before she gets to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the 1962 book credited with spurring concerns about DDT's continuing presence in the ecosystem. But when she finally gets there, she lands a haymaker.

Yes, Carson's book may have saved a bald eagle or two in its day, Rosenberg acknowledges, but "Silent Spring is now killing African children because of its persistence in the public mind." When a writer for the paper that embodies American liberalism accuses a patron saint of the environmental movement of killing African babies, the world has undergone a sea change. If nothing else, we can say that DDT, the once and future miracle pesticide, is back.

The cause has become urgent because of a treaty on organic pollutants signed in Stockholm in 2001 by 91 countries, including the United States. Nine organic pollutants were banned outright. DDT was placed in a secondary category, which calls for a gradual phaseout but allows continued use under certain conditions. DDT supporters believe the treaty-along with widespread disapproval of the pesticide, led by environmental groups-is keeping African nations from using it effectively.

The Times Magazine story proves that the revisionist view is gaining traction. "The tide has clearly been turning the last year or two," says Thomas DeGregori, a University of Houston economics professor who argues for greater use of DDT. Advocates like him insist there is no better weapon in the battle against the mosquitoes that spread malaria. They propose far greater indoor spraying of DDT in African nations. Along the way, they take a healthy slap at the original health concerns about the pesticide. The most extreme proponents of its use (not Rosenberg or DeGregori) even question the evidence that DDT had a deleterious impact on raptors and other wildlife. The United States banned DDT use in 1972, as one of the first big decisions of the government's new Environmental Protection Agency. But reading today's pro-DDT literature, you could easily dismiss that decision as an artifact from a time when muzzy-headed, idealistic longings substituted for hard facts.

DDT probably does have a role to play in battling malaria; indeed, a few African nations use it right now. But the newfound enthusiasm for dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane comes with a few hitches. The first is that
the pro-DDT people largely ignore evidence that greater use of the pesticide might kill as many African babies as it could save. A second problem is that the insecticide's proponents, either willfully or through ignorance, misrepresent the extent and conditions of the malaria epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. A third is that they grossly simplify the complexity of disease control in the African environment. A final problem might not be equal in significance to the others, but it should matter to anyone who sees enduring
virtue in great writing: DDT's high priests are unfair to a subtle and beautiful book and the courageous woman who wrote it.

Any re-reconsideration of DDT ought to begin with a look at malaria. Advocates of the pesticide cite two statistics over and over again as justification for greatly expanding DDT use. The first is that malaria is killing between 1.1 million and 2 million people a year. The second, to quote Rosenberg, is that "each year, 300 to 500 million people get malaria." (This is often phrased as "malaria infects" 300 to 500 million people every year.) The first number is chilling, particularly when you consider that malaria is
largely concentrated in Africa and most often kills children under the age of five. But if mortality rates are the measure of a disease problem in the developing world, the truth is that malaria ranks fourth. It trails respiratory infections, diarrheal diseases and, in Africa, AIDS. Among children under five worldwide, the World Health Organization ranks the leading causes of death by disease as "acute lower respiratory infections, mostly pneumonia (19 percent of all deaths), diarrhea (18 percent), malaria (8 percent), measles (4 percent), and HIV/AIDS (3 percent)."

The HIV/AIDS number is deceptive since children born with the HIV virus do not necessarily die in the first years of their life. The largest killer of young children is not even on that list. The World Health Organization has a catchall category called "neonatal conditions," which includes preterm birth,
low birth weight, and other immediate problems that kill 37 percent of the 10.6 million children the World Health Organization estimates die every year before their fifth birthday.

It's important to be clear here. Malaria is a serious problem, a disease that often kills. But if saving children in the developing world is the paramount concern, the most attention should be paid to basic issues of health: clean drinking water, which could greatly reduce diarrheal disease; adequate diet,
which would make a big difference in preterm and infant deaths; and healthier living conditions, which would reduce the awful number of children dying from respiratory infections. But what about the 300 to 500 million people who "get" malaria annually? When most people hear that, I believe they think "new cases." (After all, you can't get it if you got it, right?) If that were true, then we would be in the middle of terrifying global epidemic. There are only 6.4 billion people on the planet, so we're all going to be sick within the next 13 years or so.

But that's not what the number means at all. Eline Korenromp, the World Health Organization analyst in Geneva behind the study cited when the figure is used, told me that the statistic is an estimate of "incidence of clinical disease episodes" of malaria in a year. In other words, it's the number of times people exhibited symptoms of malaria-not new cases, or even existing cases. The malaria parasite can be eliminated from the body with the right treatment, but in certain parts of the world it persists in many people for years, and they face recurring symptoms. Others have the disease but show no symptoms. The World Health Organization, Korenromp says, has no estimate of how many new people catch malaria each year.

Three hundred million to 500 million incidences of malarial symptoms does not mean the disease is sweeping the globe (the number of people infected with tuberculosis worldwide has been estimated to be as high as two billion). But it does mean that if we have a completely safe tool to battle the disease, we should use it, no matter where malaria ranks in the hierarchy of developing-world ills. And this is how DDT is being portrayed by supportersas the misunderstood little pesticide that could save the world.

Silent Spring originally sparked concern by tracing how DDT accumulates in the food chain. Evidence that the pesticide was hurting the population of birds of prey, particularly by thinning the walls of their eggshells, was one of Carson's more vivid examples of the damage being done by the widespread outdoor spraying of the toxin that took place in the 1950s and early 1960s. The evidence that DDT can harm wildlife is extensive. Early studies also indicated that DDT might be a carcinogen in humans, particularly with regard to breast cancer. (The compound concentrates in fatty tissue.) Subsequent studies did not bear out the cancer link, and it is brushed aside by DDT proponents. They also say that spraying DDT on the indoor surfaces of huts subjects people to smaller doses than aerial spraying. "Sometimes people will condemn a technology for the way it was used before we know how to use it right," says DeGregori. "If you use DDT properly, it has a record of safety and effectiveness for humans that is really unmatched."

Continued.....
 
DDT advocates have even downed shots of it as a way of demonstrating how harmless it is. Barely mentioned in this rosy picture is a study published in the August 2003 edition of the medical journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. The piece takes data from earlier studies that examined the incidence of preterm delivery of babies born to women with DDT residue in their systems, along with studies that measured the length of time women who had been exposed to the pesticide breast-fed their children. Researchers Walter J. Rogan and Aimin Chen then used those results to extrapolate what might happen in sub-Saharan Africa if indoor spraying of DDT were greatly expanded. Their conclusion: "We estimate an increase in infant deaths that is of the same order of magnitude as that from eliminating infant malaria. Therefore, the
side effects of DDT spraying might reduce or abolish its benefit from the control of malaria in infants."

Rogan and Chen serve on the staff of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health, and can hardly be dismissed as a pair of environmental extremists. Rogan, in particular, has a long history of studying DDT's effects on women and infants. He authored the
original studies in the late 1970s and 1980s that found women with higher concentrations of the chemical residuals of DDT breast-fed for significantly shorter periods-about 40 percent less, on average. If saving children is what this is all about, his work merits serious consideration. DDT's supporters have rejected or challenged the results. But when I spoke to Rogan, his response was carefully measured: "No one has come up with a flaw in these studies," he said, "and they've been around for a while now." In fact, he said, when researchers completed the first study among women in North Carolina, the results on breast-feeding were so "clean and strong," he felt compelled to do another study to further examine the phenomenon. The results in Mexico were the same.

I asked Rogan about DDT supporters downing cocktails of their favourite pesticide. "None of them are lactating mothers," he said dryly. Preterm delivery and breast-feeding are important in Africa for obvious reasons. Children born into subsistence conditions in areas with little health care face greater hurdles in their earliest days, period. Preterm delivery lengthens the odds of their survival. Mothers in sub-Saharan Africa also breast-feed, on average, longer than mothers in Western nations. The median length of their breast-feeding is about 18 months. The benefits of breast milk are well established, and many African mothers have no suitable alternative.

If lactation were reduced jdue to DDT spraying in a proportion comparable to what Rogan found in Mexico and North Carolina, the result would be inescapable: more children would die. At the very least, Rogan's work calls for further study within the African environment. The determination of the pro-DDT camp to proclaim the case closed when it comes to health concerns regarding the insecticide seems curious at first. But many of the most fervent apostles of greater DDT use made their careers by tracking its immediate consequences. The pesticide can be devastating to malaria-bearing mosquito populations, at least for a while.

DDT's supporters claim those benefits were ignored by Carson and the environmental movement. Rosenberg writes, "In her 297 pages, Rachel Carson never mentioned the fact that by the time she was writing, DDT was responsible for saving tens of millions of lives, perhaps hundreds of millions." But Carson didn't ignore the subject of mosquitoes and malaria. On page 266 of the 40th-anniversary edition of Silent Spring, you find: The relation between various insects and many diseases of man is an ancient one. Mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles may inject into the human bloodstream the single-celled organism of malaria. Other mosquitoes transmit yellow fever. Still others carry encephalitis. ... The list of diseases and their insect carriers, or vectors, includes typhus and body lice, plague and fat fleas, African sleeping sickness and tsetse flies, various fevers and ticks, and innumerable others. These are important problems and must be met. No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse.

She then returns to one of Silent Spnng's central themes, the resistance that develops within insect populations to any insecticide over time and the problem when a new, hardier breed spreads across the landscape. Her argument was for recognizing the limitations of the widely touted "miracle pesticides" of the time. It was an argument for recognizing that the world is not a static model that humankind can remake at will, but a living environment that fights back and has an evolutionary system of response and survival.
Burt Singer, a professor of demography and public affairs at Princeton and a leading expert in malaria control, believes that DDT has a role to play in the battle. But he also believes that many of DDT's advocates place too much faith in its ability to solve the problem. "There is a substantial portion of people from North America," Singer says, "who have what I call a magic-bullet approach."

Over-reliance on any insecticide, including DDT, brings results that validate Carson's concern, Singer says. 'You're carrying out an act of selection. Pretty soon what you have are insects that are very good malaria carriers, but resistant to DDT." Any chemical magic bullet seems to lose its charge within six to eight years. DDT's supporters often speak as if there is no alternative. This is not true. A World Health Organization working paper on malaria control notes that compounds known as "synthetic pyrethroids provide an effective alternative to DDT." They are safer to apply than most other insecticides, and break down
more quickly in the environment. Treated mosquito nets have also proven effective in many areas. There are pluses and minuses to both options, including, in some cases, an increase in cost. But the world is hardly unarmed without DDT. Singer suggests the first step to effective malaria control is to see the problem within a larger context: 'You need to repair the health system; that's really what's broken all over Africa." He cites a program in Tanzania known as the "essential health intervention system," which provides aid that allows local doctors and health-care workers to establish a basic system of care and to direct resources where they are most needed. "It's not sexy," Singer says. "It doesn't allow you to say we're going to wipe out this one problem. But it might be the best thing you can do."

Although the pro-DDT camp suggests otherwise, most major environmental groups support the 2001 Stockholm treaty, which allows indoor spraying of the pesticide when warranted. The issue, says Rich Liroff, a senior fellow with the World Wildlife Fund, is not "DDT or malaria," but what role DDT should play. Liroff echoes Singer when he calls for a case-by-case approach that weighs the options and the health and environmental consequences before proceeding. There are circumstances, he believes, where other options have become ineffective, and DDT needs to be used. But this commonsense approach seems to run up against a deeply ingrained human need for the sweeping solution. Silent Spnng provoked a furious counterreaction when it first influenced public opinion. Carson was attacked personally, and her conclusions were subject to microscopic, seemingly unending reexamination that, inevitably, poked some holes in her facts. The heart of the reaction seemed to be fury that anyone should question the corporate/scientific/governmental community's ability to master our environment. You hear that continuing frustration in the words of the more strident advocates of greater DDT use today.

Those who rail against Carson must be baffled that her vision continues to have an impact 40 years after her book was published. But the power of Silent Spring was, never solely in the facts. Carson wasn't a statistician, but a writer: her gift was to envision humanity's place in the world as a place of
careful humility. She understood that our ability to create often outstrips our ability to see the long-term consequences of our creation. The study by Rogan and Chen indicates this has not changed. What the world needs now is DDT? What the world really needs is prudence and a willingness to recognize our limits. What the world needs is compassion tempered by wisdom. There are ways to battle malaria that do not rely on DDT.

They might cost more and they might take more time, but they can have better and more profound long-term consequences. In many cases, the only real problem is that those of us in the developed world are too cheap to help our poorer neighbors pay for these solutions. The worst kind of arrogance is to embrace the simple answer because it makes you feel righteous and then ignore all possible consequences or options. It's
a mistake we make over and over again when balancing the role of different technologies in our lives. The gift of Silent Spring, the wisdom of Rachel Carson, was that she saw this long before most other people did. The caution for which she argued, her appreciation of nature's complexity, and her rejection of easy solutions are as timely today as they have been at any moment since she put them down on paper. One of the things the world needs now is a rereading of Silent Spring.
 
I guess it all depends on what expert you want to believe and what side you're on politically. Especially since none of us have the time to do our own objective research and are merely accepting the word of other scientists who are obviously conflicting each other (Not even sure if this last one was by a scientist). I'm obviously on the side that Man, and his personal happiness, comes first before the Environment or the Spotted Owl. And since there is no absolute proof that we are killing ourselves by carbon emissions, and since we can't sue God if it's natural, then I say MAN AND HIS PERSONAL HAPPINESS COMES FIRST.

Excuse me while I go release some flourocarbons into the air from my old air conditioner unit.
 
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