Reassessing Silent Spring After 50 Years

A New Book By The Cato Institute

Judging by its introduction, excerpts, and table of contents available, the new book titled “Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson” appears to be well worth reading.

This reassessment should already have happened 20 or more years ago.

A Pseudoscientific Scaremonger

I believe, this sums up the book, I never read, but which I only know through what others have said or wrote about it. This is the impression I had for a long time.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter of the above Cato book (Emphasis added):

“Perhaps Rachel Carson’s greatest sin of omission in Silent Spring was that she focused almost entirely on pesticide use in agriculture and essentially ignored pesticides’ public health role, particularly that of DDT in controlling malaria and other diseases transmitted by insects. This gap is all the more puzzling because DDT’s popularity in the 1950s stemmed from its use in public health campaigns during World War II—which many soldiers personally witnessed. Saving many lives and greatly reducing human misery was the reason Dr. Paul Müller received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 for his role in the discovery of DDT’s insecticidal properties. In Chapter 8, Donald Roberts and Richard Tren, who have devoted decades to malaria control, review the evidence about DDT’s use for public health purposes—including significant benefits for the poor in the South in the United States—that was known at the time Carson wrote and explore the legacy of its fall from grace.”

Just One Book In A Line Of Similar Biased Publications

Friedrich Engels “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844” first published in German in 1845 and in English in 1887.

“The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair published in 1906.

I am sure there are more publications to be listed here, but you get the idea that there were a number of such publications that had a significant, long lasting influence despite their bias and incorrectness.

Hopefully, in the future we will be able to debunk such publications much earlier before their negative influence spreads.