Who knows why this irrational and biased Baidoo guy who is living in England,and enjoying Britain's free socialist HEALTH CARE benefits with his family,is always making senseless criticisms about Socialism
Who knows why this irrational and biased Baidoo guy who is living in England,and enjoying Britain's free socialist HEALTH CARE benefits with his family,is always making senseless criticisms about Socialism
Tim Owusu 8 years ago
It has been confirmed that controversial Baidoo has now been elected the President of the newly created Association of Subjective and Irrational Commentators(ASIC).He beat AHOOFE,DR SAS,SARPONG etc.in a keenly contested elect ... read full comment
It has been confirmed that controversial Baidoo has now been elected the President of the newly created Association of Subjective and Irrational Commentators(ASIC).He beat AHOOFE,DR SAS,SARPONG etc.in a keenly contested election.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Hi Kobina Baidoo,
Consider the statements in the tribute below:
"Yet, Carson called not for an outright ban on agricultural chemicals but for caution, further study, and the development of biological alternatives…The ... read full comment
Hi Kobina Baidoo,
Consider the statements in the tribute below:
"Yet, Carson called not for an outright ban on agricultural chemicals but for caution, further study, and the development of biological alternatives…The years following the controversy over Silent Spring saw the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the passing of numerous laws protecting the environment and human health, including a ban on domestic use of DDT in 1972 due to its widespread overuse and harmful impact on the environment."
Title: "The Legacy of Rachel Carson’s "Silent Spring' (The American Chemical Society, Oct. 26, 2012). Now read on:
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SCIENCE AND PROGRESS
If a civilization is judged by the wisdom of its ways, the 21st century owes considerable gratitude to one woman, Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring, published in 1962, revolutionized how people understand their relationship with the natural environment. Specifically, Silent Spring explained how indiscriminate application of agricultural chemicals, pesticides, and other modern chemicals polluted our streams, damaged bird and animal populations, and caused severe medical problems for humans. But her treatise did much more. Silent Spring introduced a paradigm shift in how chemists practice their discipline and how society at large relates to science.
To understand how radically her book changed the modern mind set, we have to go back to the time between World War II and the late 1950s when Carson first decided to write Silent Spring New technologies flourished during the war as biologists, chemists, physicists, and others were enlisted to aid the military. After the war, science and industry translated these developments and others into commercial products aimed at improving the quality of life for civilians.
DDT (1,1,1-trichloro-2,2-di(4-chlorophenyl)ethane, also known as dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane is one such example. A potent insecticide, DDT was effective at preventing the spread of typhoid, malaria, and other diseases transmitted by insects, and it saved countless lives during the war. After the war, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and corporations promoted DDT and other powerful chemicals to increase domestic productivity and combat a variety of ills. DDT’s widespread use is reflected by the range of products in which it was sold, from large-scale aerial sprays to insecticidal paint and wallpaper. U.S. production of DDT leaped from 4,366 tons in 1944 to a peak of 81,154 tons in 1963.
Carson, who was employed with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) from 1936 until 1952 as a field scientist and writer, was acutely aware of the policies and practices of the day. In her view, government leaders and industry were eager to create sweeping change, but advanced new technologies without knowing the full implications of their decisions. Carson was moved by the relationship between humans and the natural world and worried about the effects of scientific interventions on the environment.
MASTER OF TWO WORLDS
Rachel Carson may have been one of the few people capable of writing with the scientific thoroughness her subject required and the sincerity and engaging writing style that riveted a nation’s attention. Carson was born in 1907 in Springdale, Pa., a rural river town outside of Pittsburgh. Carson’s mother Maria encouraged her daughter to write, and by age 11, Carson was winning writing competitions. In 1925, she entered the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) to pursue a writing career, but after classes in biology Carson changed majors, graduating with honors in 1929. She completed a master’s degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932.
Carson’s fascination and skill with science coupled with her love of and desire to protect natural areas inspired the rest of her life and is revealed in the work she embraced, both for FWS and personally.
In 1951, The Sea Around Us elevated Carson to fame and cemented her credentials as a successful interpreter of science for the public. The book was a bestseller at the outset, selling 250,000 copies in its first year of publication, and the following year, Carson was awarded the National Book Award for nonfiction for the work. In her acceptance speech she outlined her beliefs about the public’s interest in science:
“Many people have commented with surprise on the fact that a work of science should have a large popular sale. But this notion that ‘science’ is something that belongs in a separate compartment of its own, apart from everyday life, is one that I should like to challenge. ...Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our experience. It is impossible to understand man without understanding his environment and the forces that have molded him physically and mentally.”
SILENT SPRING: A CHANGE IN PERSPECTIVE
In Silent Spring, Carson assembled information on chemicals used in aerial sprayings, in industrial settings, and on food to characterize the impacts of these agents in ecological terms rather than simply portraying the effectiveness of the chemical solutions. Carson built her case on science. She did extensive research, citing dozens of scientific reports, conducting interviews with leading experts, and reviewing materials across disciplines.
Silent Spring seeded important new ideas in the public mind: That spraying chemicals to control insect populations can also kill birds that feed on dead or dying insects. That chemicals travel not only through the environment, but through food chains. That chemicals that don’t outright kill can accumulate in fat tissues causing medical problems later on, and that chemicals can be transferred generationally from mothers to their young. These were ideas new to the public consciousness, and paramount among them was the notion that life is much more interconnected and interdependent than people assumed or understood. Yet, Carson called not for an outright ban on agricultural chemicals but for caution, further study, and the development of biological alternatives.
When Silent Spring was released in the fall of 1962, it was met with enormous public interest and substantial criticism. Many government leaders, including President John F. Kennedy and his Secretary of the Interior, Stewart L. Udall, took Carson seriously. Those who stood to be professionally undermined by the policies her ideas would soon help to shape criticized her vehemently. Dr. William J. Darby authored a review of Silent Spring—titled “Silence, Miss Carson”—in the Oct. 1, 1962, issue of Chemical & Engineering News, published by the American Chemical Society. Darby criticized Carson for not adopting the views of “responsible, broadly knowledgeable scientists” and recommended that “in view of her scientific qualifications in contrast to those of our distinguished scientific leaders and statesmen, this book should be ignored.”
RACHEL CARSON’S LEGACY
But Carson’s book was not ignored. Her research and ideas became central testimony at two congressional hearings, and a Presidential Science Advisory Committee report on pesticides in 1963 affirmed Carson’s call for limits on pesticide use and further research into their health hazards. Carson and her book Silent Spring are frequently cited as the catalysts that inspired the environmental movement that began in the 1960s and which gained national and international momentum by the 1970s. The years following the controversy over Silent Spring saw the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the passing of numerous laws protecting the environment and human health, including a ban on domestic use of DDT in 1972 due to its widespread overuse and harmful impact on the environment.
Since the publication of Silent Spring the chemistry discipline has grown to include green chemistry—the design, development, and implementation of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use or generation of substances hazardous to human health and the environment—and a new role for chemists in investigating the impact of human activity on the environment. Scientists, policy makers, and the public now recognize and weigh tradeoffs of new technologies. Several generations have grown up embracing Carson’s ideals of ecological awareness, environmental protection, and conservation.
A more telling measure of how attitudes have changed is reflected in a letter penned by Rudy M. Baum, Editor-in-Chief of Chemical & Engineering News, published in the June 4, 2007, edition:
“At a time when humans largely believed themselves to be apart from nature and destined to control it, Carson argued passionately that nature is, in fact, a network of interconnections and inter-dependencies and that humans are a part of that network and threaten its cohesion at their own peril...What is mainstream today was heretical in 1962, and I think this part of Carson’s argument is what earned her such enmity when Silent Spring was published.
Carson, who died in 1964, inspired a new paradigm of thinking—where humanity is not the center of life on earth, but part of nature. The legacy of Silent Spring continues today in the scientific community’s increased focus on environmentally friendly practices and the public’s heightened support for sustainability in all areas of our lives.
The Legacy of Rachel Carson’s
A National Historic Chemical Landmark
The American Chemical Society designated the legacy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a National Historic Chemical Landmark in a ceremony in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during the Rachel Carson Legacy Conference on October 26, 2012. The commemorative plaque at Chatham University reads Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, was a landmark in the development of the modern environmental movement. Carson’s scientific perspective and rigor created a work of substantial depth and credibility that sparked widespread debate within the scientific community and the broader public about the effect of pesticides on the natural world. These discussions led to new policies that protect our air, our water, and, ultimately, our health and safety. Carson’s book promoted a paradigm shift in how chemists practice their discipline and helped to establish a new role for chemists in investigating the impact of human activity on the environment. The legacy of Silent Spring continues today in the chemistry community’s increased focus on green chemistry practices and the public’s heightened support for sustainability in all areas of our lives.
About the National Historic Chemical Landmarks Program
The American Chemistry Society established the National Historic Chemical Landmarks program in 1992 to enhance public appreciation for the contributions of the chemical sciences to modern life in the United States and to encourage a sense of pride in their practitioners. The program does this by recognizing seminal achievements in the chemical sciences, recording their histories, and providing information and resources about Landmark achievements. Prospective Landmarks are nominated by ACS local sections, divisions, or committees; reviewed by the ACS National Historic Chemical Landmarks committee; and approved by the ACS Board Committee on Public Affairs and Public Relations. The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 164,000 members, ACS is the world’s largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals, and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
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Shabi 8 years ago
Oh my God. What in the name of the Good Lord is the matter with this chap? The man is as rabid as a bat out of hell.
Just listen to him in his frenzied submission. "Rachel Carson achieved the establishment of the EPA many ... read full comment
Oh my God. What in the name of the Good Lord is the matter with this chap? The man is as rabid as a bat out of hell.
Just listen to him in his frenzied submission. "Rachel Carson achieved the establishment of the EPA many years after her death through fraud and lies." Does he want to imply that after her death, Rachel Carson achieved the establishment of the EPA through the continued application of fraud and lies or what?
One is at a loss as to where or even how or which angle to deal with Baidoos far-right stance which attacks everything and anything which does not appear to be pro-imperialist. This is a hopeless case.
All I can say for now is that, after reading the two articles by Baidoo, I can now better understand and appreciate the age-old maxim that asserts that, "a little learning is dangerous". Reading Francis Kwarteng is like relaxing on a tropical beach under clear blue skies. Struggling through Philip Baidoos unprincipled outbursts is like being caught in a tropical thunderstorm and surrounded by flood waters at Odawnaa in Accra.
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
Hello Shabi, at least, you are fun and more original. Thank you for your effort.
Hello Shabi, at least, you are fun and more original. Thank you for your effort.
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
Hello Tim, I think you can be a bit innovative, because you posted this very comment the last time. It is alright to say Philip is silly, idiot and all those word you can think of, but be more novel.
Hello Tim, I think you can be a bit innovative, because you posted this very comment the last time. It is alright to say Philip is silly, idiot and all those word you can think of, but be more novel.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Dear Readers,
Author: William Souder
Source: Pitssburgh Post-Gazette (Sept. 9, 2012).
Title: "Rachel Carson, Killer of Africans?"
I should point out that readers may want to read "On A Farther Shore: The Life And ... read full comment
Dear Readers,
Author: William Souder
Source: Pitssburgh Post-Gazette (Sept. 9, 2012).
Title: "Rachel Carson, Killer of Africans?"
I should point out that readers may want to read "On A Farther Shore: The Life And Legacy Of Rachel Carson" which, among other things, which exposes the lies being peddled about Carson, "Silent Spring," and DDT-chemeical industry.
In fact on the use of pesticides (including DDT), a New York Times reviewer of Sounder's book notes (see "The Posined Earth," Elizabeth Boyd, Sept. 14, 2014:
"IN FACT, THE BOOK [SILENT SPRING] ONLY ARGUED FOT LIMITS AND RESTRAINT IN THEIR USE."
Of course, I am familiar with Prof. Gordon Edwards but readers may still have to read Sounder's book, where he brings out alive Carson's statments before a U.S. Subcommities, what exactlt the likes of Prof. Edawrds says that are not even in "Silent Spring," what Prof. Edwards' takes from the book that is grossly decontextualized and misrepresented, what President John F. Kennedy's commissioned committe of top American sientists, etc., all had to say about Carson and her views at the time.
Again readers want to read what other scientists have to say about much of what Carson's writings got right (see the book "Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Fertility?" and Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Discipline").
The following is what Brand writes in his book (the controversy on Carson's position on DDT):
"Environmentalists were right to be inspired by marine biologist Rachel Carson’s book on pesticides, Silent Spring, BUT WRONG TO PLACE DDT IN THE CATEGORY OF ABSOLUTE EVIL (WHICH SHE DID NOT)…In an excess of zeal that Carson did not live to moderate, DDT was banned worldwide, and malaria took off in Africa."
I have recommended both books for others to read to understand what "Silent Spring" say and does not say. Given what I know about Carson's and Baidoo's misguided piece, I ma forced to conclude that he has not read Carson's book!
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Silent Spring," Rachel Carson's landmark warning about the indiscriminate use of pesticides, turns 50 this month. By extension, that puts the environmental movement also at the half-century mark -- along with the bitter, divisive argument we continue to have over both the book and the movement it spawned.
The terms of that argument, which emerged in the brutal reaction to "Silent Spring" from those who saw it not as a warning but as a threat, haven't changed much. And they leave us with a vexing question: Why do we fight? How is it that the environment we all share is the subject of partisan debate? After all, the right and the left inhabit the same planet, even if it doesn't always seem that way.
Carson's book was controversial before it even was a book. In June 1962, three long excerpts were published by The New Yorker magazine. They alarmed the public, which deluged the Department of Agriculture and other agencies with demands for action, and outraged the chemical industry and its allies in government. In late August 1962, after he was asked about pesticides at a press conference, President John F. Kennedy ordered his science adviser to form a commission to investigate the problems brought to light, the president said, by "Miss Carson's book."
A month later, when "Silent Spring" was published, the outlines of the fight over pesticides had hardened. Pesticide makers launched a well-funded attack aimed at discrediting "Silent Spring" and destroying its author. The offensive included a widely distributed parody of Carson's famous opening chapter about a town where no birds sang, and countless fact sheets extolling the benefits of pesticides to human health and food production. "Silent Spring" was described as one-sided and unbalanced to any media that would listen. Time magazine called the book "hysterical" and "patently unsound."
Carson's critics pushed her to a remote corner of the freaky left fringe that at the time included organic farmers, food faddists and anti-fluoridationists. One pesticide maker, which threatened to sue if "Silent Spring" was published, claimed Carson was in league with "sinister parties" whose goal was to undermine American agriculture and free enterprise in order to further the interests of the Soviet empire. "Silent Spring," said its more ardent detractors, was un-American.
There the two sides sit 50 years later. On one side of the environmental debate are the perceived soft-hearted scientists and those who would preserve the natural order; on the other are the hard pragmatists of industry and their friends in high places, the massed might of the establishment. Substitute climate change for pesticides, and the argument plays out the same now as it did a half-century ago. President Kennedy's scientific commission would ultimately affirm Carson's claims about pesticides, but then as now, nobody ever really gives an inch.
Carson was also accused of having written a book that, though it claimed to be concerned with human health, would instead contribute directly to death and disease on a massive scale by stopping the use of the insecticide DDT in the fight against malaria. One irate letter to The New Yorker complained that Carson's "mischief" would make it impossible to raise the funds needed to continue the effort to eradicate malaria.
The claim that Rachel Carson is responsible for the devastations of malaria, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, has gained renewed traction in recent years. The American Enterprise Institute and other free-market conservatives have defended the safety and efficacy of DDT -- and the charge of Carson's "guilt" in the deaths of millions of Africans is routinely parroted by people who are clueless about the content of "Silent Spring" or the sources of the attacks against it.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-enterprise think tank, maintains the website rachelwaswrong.org, which details Carson's complicity in the continuing plague of malaria. In 2004, the late writer Michael Crichton offered an easy-to-remember indictment of Carson's crime: "Banning DDT," Crichton wrote, "killed more people than Hitler."
Rachel Carson, who stoically weathered misinformation campaigns against her before her death from breast cancer in 1964, would find the current situation all-too-predictable. As she said once in a speech after the release of "Silent Spring," many people who have not read the book nonetheless "disapprove of it heartily."
RACHEL NEVER CALLED FOR BANNING PESTICIDES. SHE MADE THIS CLEAR IN EVERY PUBLIC PRONOUNCEMENT, REPEATED IT IN AN HOUR-LONG TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY ABOUT "SILENT SPRING," AND EVEN TESTIFIED TO THAT EFFECT BEFORE THE U.S. SENATE. CARSON NEVER DENIED THAT THERE WERE BENEFICIAL USES OF PESTICIDES, NOTABLY IN COMBATING HUMAN DISEASES TRANSMITTED BY INSECTS, WHERE SHE SAID THEY HAD ONLY BEEN PROVEN EFFECTIVE BUT WERE MORALLY "NECESSARY."
"It is not my contention," Carson wrote in "Silent Spring," "that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge."
Many agreed. The New York Times wrote that Carson had struck the right balance: "Miss Carson does not argue that chemical pesticides must never be used, but she warns of the dangers of misuse and overuse by a public that has become mesmerized by the notion that chemists are the possessors of divine wisdom and that nothing but benefits can emerge from their test tubes."
Rachel Carson wrote at a time when it was all but impossible to escape exposure to pesticides. Aerial insecticide spraying campaigns over forests, cities and suburbs; the routine application of insecticides to crops by farmers at concentrations far above what was considered "safe;" and the residential use of insecticides in everything from shelf paper to aerosol "bombs" had contaminated the landscape in the same manner as the fallout from the then-pervasive testing of nuclear weapons -- a connection Carson made explicit in "Silent Spring."
"In this now universal contamination of the environment," Carson wrote, "chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world -- the very nature of its life."
The Competitive Enterprise Institute -- to its credit -- acknowledges that Carson did not call for the banning of pesticides in "Silent Spring." But it claims Carson's caveat about their value in fighting disease was so overwhelmed by her general disapproval of their use that "negative publicity" around "Silent Spring" halted the use of DDT against malaria, notably in sub-Saharan Africa, where some 90 percent of the world's malaria cases occur.
It's true that Carson found little good to say about DDT or any of its toxic cousins developed in the years after World War II. But it's a stretch to see how the mood surrounding "Silent Spring" was the prime cause of DDT's exit from the fight against malaria.
DDT had been effective against malaria in Europe, in Northern Africa, in parts of India and southern Asia, and even in the southern United States, where the disease was already being routed by other means. But these were mostly developed areas. Using DDT in places like sub-Saharan Africa, with its remote and hard-to-reach villages, had long been considered problematic. It was an old story and one still repeated: Africa was everybody's lowest priority.
The World Health Organization had begun to question its malaria-eradication program even before "Silent Spring" was published. One problem was that the heavy use of DDT in many parts of the world was producing new strains of mosquitoes resistant to the insecticide. Much as it can happen with antibiotics, the use of an environmental poison clears susceptible organisms from the ecosystem and allows those with immunity to take over. The WHO also faced declining interest in the disease among scientists and sharp reductions in funding from the international community.
In 1972 the recently created Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT for most domestic uses, but this ruling had no force in other parts of the world and the insecticide remained part of the international anti-malaria arsenal. The United States continued to manufacture and export DDT until the mid-1980s, and it has always been available from pesticide makers in other countries.
One result is that DDT is still with us -- globally adrift in the atmosphere from spraying operations in various parts of the world, and also from its continuing volatilization from soils in which it has lain dormant for decades. The threat of DDT to wildlife -- as a deadly neurotoxin in many species and a destroyer of reproductive capabilities in others -- has never been in doubt.
Rachel Carson's claims in "Silent Spring" about DDT's connection to human cancer and other disorders have not been completely resolved. The National Toxicology Program lists DDT as "reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen." The same holds for two of its common break-down products, DDD and DDE, which are also suspected of causing developmental problems in humans.
These are cloudy but worrisome presumptions. DDT is stored in fat tissues -- including ours -- and that storage amplifies with repeated exposures over time, as well as through food chains, with unpredictable consequences. We walk around with our personal load of DDT, a poison we still consume both from its decades-old residuals and its ongoing uses. If Rachel Carson hoped to end the use of DDT and our exposure to it, she did a lousy job.
In 2006, the World Health Organization announced a renewed commitment to fighting malaria with DDT, mainly in Africa -- where the WHO had never lifted its approval for this purpose. The move was backed by environmental groups, as it surely would have been by Rachel Carson had she been with us still.
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Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
Mr Ababio, for your information I am a normal person like you. It is just that I have got an independent mind. This is what I will say to your comment. There is no such thing as free lunch. The NHS is not free; somebody pays ... read full comment
Mr Ababio, for your information I am a normal person like you. It is just that I have got an independent mind. This is what I will say to your comment. There is no such thing as free lunch. The NHS is not free; somebody pays for it. Of course, it is free for the scroungers, but not for me. I pay through my direct income tax and other stealth taxes such as VAT on petrol, utility bill among many others. You must be dreaming if you think that it is free. Thank you.
Tim Owusu 8 years ago
Baidoo,stop beating about the bush.Do you specifically pay HEALTHCARE TAX in Britain,and what do you call free Healthcare for scroungers in Britain? Is it CAPITALISM or SOCIALISM.
Baidoo,stop beating about the bush.Do you specifically pay HEALTHCARE TAX in Britain,and what do you call free Healthcare for scroungers in Britain? Is it CAPITALISM or SOCIALISM.
Thomas Osei 8 years ago
Biased and subjective Baidoo could not answer Tim Owusu's question.
Biased and subjective Baidoo could not answer Tim Owusu's question.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Hello Baidoo,
Author: Eliza Griswold (is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship).
Title: "How 'Silent Spring' Ignited The Environmental Movement"
Source: The New Yo ... read full comment
Hello Baidoo,
Author: Eliza Griswold (is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship).
Title: "How 'Silent Spring' Ignited The Environmental Movement"
Source: The New York Times (Sept. 12, 2012)
PLEASE TAKE NOTE OF PARAGRAPH 27 (take note of LAST BUT FIVE/SIX PARAGRAPHS on criticism of Carson and the book "Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival" (I have read this scientific work) to see how much of Carson's science was right (Authors: Dr. Theo Colborn, John P. Meyer, and Dianne Dumanoski).
The question is: Where exactly does Baidoo link Carson's "mistakes" with capitalism and Pres. Richard Nixon, under whose leadership the environmental activaism occassioned by Carson's "Silent Spring," led to the extablishment of the Environemntal Protection Agency (EPA) together with the endorsement of Crson's and other leading scientists' views on pesticides.
Was Pres. Nixon not a proponent of free-market capitalism?
How far did Carson's ideas go as far as socialism and "communism"? Where is the link?
Where does Carson's ideas go as far as Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Kenneth Galbraith, and Paul Erlich (we shall have more to say about Paul and Galbraith later)?
Here we go (Paragraphs 25):
"Then, in June 1963, Carson made her appearance before the SENATE SUBCOMMITEE. In her testimony, Carson didn’t just highlight the problems that she identified in “Silent Spring”; she presented the policy recommendations she’d been working on for the past five years. WHEN FACED WITH A CHANCE TO DO SO, CARSON DIDN'T CALL FOR A BAN ON PESTICIDES. “I THINK CHEMICALS HAVE A PLACE," she testified" (our emphasis).
Here is the full article:
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On June 4, 1963, less than a year after the controversial environmental classic “Silent Spring” was published, its author, Rachel Carson, testified before a Senate subcommittee on pesticides. She was 56 and dying of breast cancer. She told almost no one. She’d already survived a radical mastectomy. Her pelvis was so riddled with fractures that it was nearly impossible for her to walk to her seat at the wooden table before the Congressional panel. To hide her baldness, she wore a dark brown wig.
“Every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history,” Senator Ernest Gruening, a Democrat from Alaska, told Carson at the time.On June 4, 1963, less than a year after the controversial environmental classic “Silent Spring” was published, its author, Rachel Carson, testified before a Senate subcommittee on pesticides. She was 56 and dying of breast cancer. She told almost no one. She’d already survived a radical mastectomy. Her pelvis was so riddled with fractures that it was nearly impossible for her to walk to her seat at the wooden table before the Congressional panel. To hide her baldness, she wore a dark brown wig.
“Every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history,” Senator Ernest Gruening, a Democrat from Alaska, told Carson at the time.
“Silent Spring” was published 50 years ago this month. Though she did not set out to do so, Carson influenced the environmental movement as no one had since the 19th century’s most celebrated hermit, Henry David Thoreau, wrote about Walden Pond. “Silent Spring” presents a view of nature compromised by synthetic pesticides, especially DDT. Once these pesticides entered the biosphere, Carson argued, they not only killed bugs but also made their way up the food chain to threaten bird and fish populations and could eventually sicken children. Much of the data and case studies that Carson drew from weren’t new; the scientific community had known of these findings for some time, but Carson was the first to put them all together for the general public and to draw stark and far-reaching conclusions. In doing so, Carson, the citizen-scientist, spawned a revolution.
“Silent Spring,” which has sold more than two million copies, made a powerful case for the idea that if humankind poisoned nature, nature would in turn poison humankind. “Our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves,” she told the subcommittee. We still see the effects of unfettered human intervention through Carson’s eyes: she popularized modern ecology.
If anything, environmental issues have grown larger — and more urgent — since Carson’s day. Yet no single work has had the impact of “Silent Spring.” It is not that we lack eloquent and impassioned environmental advocates with the capacity to reach a broad audience on issues like climate change. Bill McKibben was the first to make a compelling case, in 1989, for the crisis of global warming in “The End of Nature.” Elizabeth Kolbert followed with “Field Notes From a Catastrophe.” Al Gore sounded the alarm with “An Inconvenient Truth,” and was awarded the Nobel Prize. They are widely considered responsible for shaping our view of global warming, but none was able to galvanize a nation into demanding concrete change in quite the way that Carson did.
What was it that allowed Carson to capture the public imagination and to forge America’s environmental consciousness?
Saint Rachel, “the nun of nature,” as she is called, is frequently invoked in the name of one environmental cause or another, but few know much about her life and work. “People think she came out of nowhere to deliver this Jeremiad of ‘Silent Spring,’ but she had three massive best sellers about the sea before that,” McKibben says. “She was Jacques Cousteau before there was Jacques Cousteau.”
The sea held an immense appeal to a woman who grew up landlocked and poor as Carson did. She was born in 1907 in the boom of the Industrial Age about 18 miles up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, in the town of Springdale. From her bedroom window, she could see smoke billow from the stacks of the American Glue Factory, which slaughtered horses. The factory, the junkyard of its time, was located less than a mile away, down the gently sloping riverbank from the Carsons’ four-room log cabin. Passers-by could watch old horses file up a covered wooden ramp to their death. The smell of tankage, fertilizer made from horse parts, was so rank that, along with the mosquitoes that bred in the swampland near the riverbank called the Bottoms, it prevented Springdale’s 1,200 residents from sitting on their porches in the evening.
Her father, Robert Carson, was a ne’er-do-well whose ventures inevitably failed; Carson’s elder sister, Marian, did shift work in the town’s coal-fired power plant. Carson’s mother, Maria, the ambitious and embittered daughter of a Presbyterian minister, had great hopes that her youngest daughter, Rachel, could be educated and would escape Springdale. Rachel won a scholarship to Pennsylvania College for Women, now known as Chatham University, in Pittsburgh. After graduation, she moved to Baltimore, where she attended graduate school for zoology at Johns Hopkins University and completed a master’s degree before dropping out to help support her family. The Carsons fared even worse during the Depression, and they fled Springdale, leaving heavy debts behind.
Carson became a science editor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an agency founded under the New Deal. Eager to be a writer, she freelanced for The Atlantic and Reader’s Digest, among other publications. Driven by her love of the sea, she wrote on everything from where to go for summer vacation to what to do with the catch of the day to the life cycles of sea creatures. Carson believed that people would protect only what they loved, so she worked to establish a “sense of wonder” about nature. In her best-selling sea books — “The Sea Around Us,” “The Edge of the Sea” and “Under the Sea-Wind” — she used simple and sometimes sentimental narratives about the oceans to articulate sophisticated ideas about the inner workings of largely unseen things.
Carson was initially ambivalent about taking on what she referred to as “the poison book.” She didn’t see herself as an investigative reporter. By this time, she’d received the National Book Award for “The Sea Around Us” and established herself as the naturalist of her day. This was a much folksier and less controversial role than the one “the poison book” would put her in. Taking on some of the largest and most powerful industrial forces in the world would have been a daunting proposition for anyone, let alone a single woman of her generation. She tried to enlist other writers to tackle the dangers of pesticides. E.B. White, who was at The New Yorker, which serialized Carson’s major books, gently suggested that she investigate pesticides for The New Yorker herself. So she did.
“Silent Spring” begins with a myth, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” in which Carson describes “a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” Cognizant of connecting her ideal world to one that readers knew, Carson presents not a pristine wilderness but a town where people, roads and gutters coexist with nature — until a mysterious blight befalls this perfect place. “No witchcraft,” Carson writes, “no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”
Carson knew that her target audience of popular readers included scores of housewives. She relied upon this ready army of concerned citizens both as sources who discovered robins and squirrels poisoned by pesticides outside their back doors and as readers to whom she had to appeal. Consider this indelible image of a squirrel: “The head and neck were outstretched, and the mouth often contained dirt, suggesting that the dying animal had been biting at the ground.” Carson then asks her readers, “By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being?”
Her willingness to pose the moral question led “Silent Spring” to be compared with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” written nearly a century earlier. Both books reflected the mainstream Protestant thinking of their time, which demanded personal action to right the wrongs of society. Yet Carson, who was baptized in the Presbyterian Church, was not religious. One tenet of Christianity in particular struck her as false: the idea that nature existed to serve man. “She wanted us to understand that we were just a blip,” says Linda Lear, author of Carson’s definitive biography, “Witness for Nature.” “The control of nature was an arrogant idea, and Carson was against human arrogance.”
“Silent Spring” was more than a study of the effects of synthetic pesticides; it was an indictment of the late 1950s. Humans, Carson argued, should not seek to dominate nature through chemistry, in the name of progress. In Carson’s view, technological innovation could easily and irrevocably disrupt the natural system. “She was the very first person to knock some of the shine off modernity,” McKibben says. “She was the first to tap into an idea that other people were starting to feel.”
Carson’s was one of several moral calls to arms published at the start of the ’60s. Jane Jacobs’s “Death and Life of American Cities,” Michael Harrington’s “Other America,” Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed” and Betty Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique” all captured a growing disillusionment with the status quo and exposed a system they believed disenfranchised people. But “Silent Spring,” more than the others, is stitched through with personal rage. In 1960, according to Carson’s assistant, after she found out that her breast cancer had metastasized, her tone sharpened toward the apocalyptic. “She was more hostile about what arrogant technology and blind science could do,” notes Lear, her biographer.
“No one,” says Carl Safina, an oceanographer and MacArthur fellow who has published several books on marine life, “had ever thought that humans could create something that could create harm all over the globe and come back and get in our bodies.” Safina took me out in his sea kayak around Lazy Point, an eastern spoke of Long Island, to see three kinds of terns, which zipped around us over the bay. We then crossed the point in his red Prius to visit thriving osprey, one species of bird that was beginning to die out when “Silent Spring” made public that DDT weakened their eggshells. As we peered through binoculars at a 40-foot-high nest woven from sticks, old mops and fishnets, a glossy black osprey returned to his mate and her chicks with a thrashing fish in his talons. Safina told me that he began to read “Silent Spring” when he was 14 years old, in the back seat of his parents’ sedan.
“I almost threw up,” he said. “I got physically ill when I learned that ospreys and peregrine falcons weren’t raising chicks because of what people were spraying on bugs at their farms and lawns. This was the first time I learned that humans could impact the environment with chemicals.” That a corporation would create a product that didn’t operate as advertised —“this was shocking in a way we weren’t inured to,” Safina said.
Though Carson talked about other pesticides, it was DDT — sprayed aerially over large areas of the United States to control mosquitoes and fire ants — that stood in for this excess. DDT was first synthesized in 1874 and discovered to kill insects in 1939 by Paul Hermann Müller, who won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for this work. During World War II, DDT applied to the skin in powder form proved an effective means to control lice in soldiers. But it wasn’t just DDT’s effectiveness that led to its promotion, Carson maintained; it was a surfeit of product and labor. In her speeches, Carson claimed that after the war, out-of-work pilots and a glut of the product led the United States government and industry to seek new markets for DDT among American consumers.
By the time Carson began to be interested in pesticides, in the mid-1940s, concerns related to DDT were mounting among wildlife biologists at the Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel, Md., which was administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and elsewhere. Controversy over pesticides’ harmful effects on birds and plants led to high-profile lawsuits on the part of affected residents who wanted to stop the aerial spraying.
Carson used the era’s hysteria about radiation to snap her readers to attention, drawing a parallel between nuclear fallout and a new, invisible chemical threat of pesticides throughout “Silent Spring.” “We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation,” she wrote. “How then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?”
Carson and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, knew that such comparisons would be explosive. They tried to control the response to the book by seeking support before publication. They sent galleys to the National Audubon Society for public endorsement.
The galleys landed on the desk of Audubon’s biologist, Roland Clement, for review. Clement, who will turn 100 in November, currently lives in a studio on the 17th floor of a retirement community in New Haven, about a mile from Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where Carson’s papers are kept. “I knew of everything she wrote about,” he told me over lunch at his home this summer. “She had it right.”
The book, which was published on Sept. 27, 1962, flew off the shelves, owing largely to its three-part serialization in The New Yorker that summer. “Silent Spring” was also selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club, which delighted Carson. But nothing established Carson more effectively than her appearance on “CBS Reports,” an hourlong television news program hosted by a former war correspondent, Eric Sevareid. On camera, Carson’s careful way of speaking dispelled any notions that she was a shrew or some kind of zealot. Carson was so sick during filming at home in suburban Maryland that in the course of the interview, she propped her head on her hands. According to Lear as well as William Souder, author of a new biography of Carson, “On a Farther Shore,” Sevareid later said that he was afraid Carson wouldn’t survive to see the show broadcast.
The industry’s response to “Silent Spring” proved more aggressive than anyone anticipated. As Lear notes, Velsicol, a manufacturer of DDT, threatened to sue both Houghton Mifflin and The New Yorker. And it also tried to stop Audubon from excerpting the book in its magazine. Audubon went ahead and even included an editorial about the chemical industry’s reaction to the book. But after “Silent Spring” came out, the society declined to give it an official endorsement.
The personal attacks against Carson were stunning. She was accused of being a communist sympathizer and dismissed as a spinster with an affinity for cats. In one threatening letter to Houghton Mifflin, Velsicol’s general counsel insinuated that there were “sinister influences” in Carson’s work: she was some kind of agricultural propagandist in the employ of the Soviet Union, he implied, and her intention was to reduce Western countries’ ability to produce food, to achieve “east-curtain parity.”
But Carson also had powerful advocates, among them President John F. Kennedy, who established a presidential committee to investigate pesticides. Then, in June 1963, Carson made her appearance before the Senate subcommittee. In her testimony, Carson didn’t just highlight the problems that she identified in “Silent Spring”; she presented the policy recommendations she’d been working on for the past five years. When faced with a chance to do so, Carson didn’t call for a ban on pesticides. “I think chemicals do have a place,” she testified.
She argued vehemently against aerial spraying, which allowed the government to dump pesticides on people’s property without their permission. She cited dairy farmers in upstate New York, whose milk was banned from the market after their land was sprayed to eradicate gypsy moths. As Carson saw it, the federal government, when in industry’s thrall, was part of the problem. That’s one reason that she didn’t call for sweeping federal regulation. Instead, she argued that citizens had the right to know how pesticides were being used on their private property. She was reiterating a central tenet of “Silent Spring”: “If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.” She advocated for the birth of a grass-roots movement led by concerned citizens who would form nongovernmental groups that she called “citizen’s brigades.
The results of her efforts were mixed, and even her allies have different opinions of what Carson’s legacy actually means. Carson is widely credited with banning DDT, by both her supporters and her detractors. The truth is a little more complicated. When “Silent Spring” was published, DDT production was nearing its peak; in 1963, U.S. companies manufactured about 90,000 tons. But by the following year, DDT production in America was already on the wane. Despite the pesticide manufacturers’ aggression toward Carson and her book, there was mounting evidence that some insects were increasingly resistant to DDT, as Carson claimed. After Roland Clement testified before the Senate subcommittee, he says, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, the Democrat from Connecticut who was chairman of the committee, pulled him aside. “He told me that the chemical companies were willing to stop domestic use of DDT,” Clement says, but only if they could strike a bargain: as long as Carson and Clement would accept the companies’ continued export of DDT to foreign countries, the companies would consider the end of domestic use. Their message was clear, Clement says: “Don’t mess with the boys and their business.”
Though Clement was a supporter of Carson’s, he believes that she got both too much credit and too much blame after “Silent Spring” came out. “It’s a fabrication to say that she’s the founder of the environmental movement,” Clement says. “She stirred the pot. That’s all.” It wasn’t until 1972, eight years after Carson’s death, that the United States banned the domestic sale of DDT, except where public health concerns warranted its use. American companies continued to export the pesticide until the mid-1980s. (China stopped manufacturing DDT in 2007. In 2009, India, the only country to produce the pesticide at the time, made 3,653 tons.)
The early activists of the new environmental movement had several successes attributed to Carson — from the Clean Air and Water Acts to the establishment of Earth Day to President Nixon’s founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1970. But if “Silent Spring” can be credited with launching a movement, it also sowed the seeds of its own destruction.
The well-financed counterreaction to Carson’s book was a prototype for the brand of attack now regularly made by super-PACs in everything from debates about carbon emissions to new energy sources. “As soon as ‘Silent Spring’ is serialized, the chemical companies circle the wagons and build up a war chest,” Souder says. “This is how the environment became such a bitter partisan battle.”
In a move worthy of Citizens United, the chemical industry undertook an expensive negative P.R. campaign, which included circulating “The Desolate Year,” a parody of “A Fable for Tomorrow” that mocked its woeful tone. The parody, which was sent out to newspapers around the country along with a five-page fact sheet, argued that without pesticides, America would be overrun by insects and Americans would not be able to grow enough food to survive.
One reason that today no single book on, say, climate change could have the influence that “Silent Spring” did, Souder argues, is the five decades of political fracturing that followed its publication. “The politicized and partisan reaction created by ‘Silent Spring’ has hardened over the past 50 years,” Souder says. Carson may have regarded “Silent Spring” and stewardship of the environment as a unifying issue for humankind, but a result has been an increasingly factionalized arena.
Carson was among the first environmentalists of the modern era to be charged with using “soft science” and with cherry-picking studies to suit her ideology. Fifty years later, the attacks on Carson continue. Her opponents hold her responsible for the death of millions of African children from malaria; in Michael Crichton’s novel “State of Fear,” one character says that “banning DDT killed more people than Hitler,” a sentiment Crichton publicly agreed with. The Web site rachelwaswrong.org, which is run by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy group based in Washington, makes a similar charge: “Today, millions of people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm.”
But much of Carson’s science was accurate and forward-looking. Dr. Theo Colborn, an environmental health analyst and co-author of a 1996 book, “Our Stolen Future,” about endocrine disrupters — the chemicals that can interfere with the body’s hormone system — points out that Carson was on the cutting edge of the science of her day. “If Rachel had lived,” she said, “we might have actually found out about endocrine disruption two generations ago.”
Today, from Rachel Carson’s old bedroom window in Springdale, you can see the smokestacks of the Cheswick coal-fired power plant less than a mile away: an older red-and-white, candy-striped stack and a newer one, called a scrubber, installed in 2010 to remove sulfur dioxide. It later needed repairs, but with the approval of the Allegheny County Health Department, it stayed open, and the plant operated for three months without full emission controls. The plants says it is in compliance with current E.P.A. emissions standards for coal-fired plants, though new ones will take full effect in 2016.
Springdale’s board of supervisors supports the plant’s business. As David Finley, president of Springdale Borough put it, the noise from the plant used to bother a handful of residents, but it “sounds like money” to many others. The plant buys fresh water from an underground river that runs through the borough and has paid for things like Little League uniforms and repairs to the municipal swimming pool. Springdale has been nicknamed “Power City” since the days Carson lived there. The high-school sports teams are called the Dynamos; their mascot is Reddy Kilowatt, the cartoon character of the electricity lobby.
A few months ago, two citizens in Springdale volunteered to be representatives in a class-action suit, which charges that the coal-fired plant “installed limited technology” to control emissions that they claim are damaging 1,500 households. One of the plaintiffs, Kristie Bell, is a 33-year-old health care employee who lives in a two-story yellow-brick house with a broad front porch, a few blocks from Carson’s childhood home. Bell said it was “Silent Spring” that encouraged her to step forward. “Rachel Carson is a huge influence,” Bell said, sitting at her kitchen table after work on a sultry evening last summer. “She’s a motivator.” For Bell, Carson’s message is a call to mothers to stand up against industry to protect the health of their families.
Detractors have argued that the lawsuit is the creation of personal-injury attorneys. (Because of the difficulty of making a clear health case, the plaintiffs are claiming property damage caused by corrosive ash.) But Bell said that it’s not about money. “I never sit outside on my front porch because I don’t know what’s coming out of that smokestack,” she said. One hundred years ago, when Carson was a child, residents of Springdale had the same concern — one that informed Carson’s worldview. “When we start messing around with Mother Nature,” Bell said, “bad things happen.”
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Prof Lungu 8 years ago
PROF LUNGU SAYS: Because (We) believe Mr. Philip Kobina Baidoo's essay was written to "further misinform the public, the media, and our legislators...", Prof Lungu is hereby making this submission on behalf of all objective, ... read full comment
PROF LUNGU SAYS: Because (We) believe Mr. Philip Kobina Baidoo's essay was written to "further misinform the public, the media, and our legislators...", Prof Lungu is hereby making this submission on behalf of all objective, Ghana-centered people.
We know that mosquitoes breed in standing water. If we eliminate standing water from human habitats to the maximum extent, we do not need DDT to control malaria! This is the cheapest, most effective, most enduring way to control malaria.
So, in this essay, we have what we will chracterize as a Glen Beck, David Howowitz, Alex Jones "Talking Point". It is a right-wing Talking Point about government regulations, control of DDT in this case, as found on right wing website such as "Discoverthenetwork", Glen Beck Radio, and Fox News.
READ: "...(Alex) Jones is a conspiracist and repeat Fox News guest who mingles dire warnings of the "New World Order" with stories of government complicity in the 9-11 attacks. DiscoverTheNetworks is a website claiming to track "the individuals and organizations that make up the left." It's run by David Horowitz, a former leftist who has reinvented himself as a right-wing propagandist. (www.mediamatters.org/research/2010/10/11/who-is-alex-jones/171722).
ABOUT SILENT SPRING:
Silent Spring...was published by Houghton Mifflin on 27 September 1962...The book described the harmful effects of pesticides on the environment, and is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement. In 1994, an edition of Silent Spring was published with an introduction written by Vice President Al Gore. In 2012 Silent Spring was designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society for its role in the development of the modern environmental movement. (https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Rachel_Carson).
Prof Lungu's Own Knowledge of DDT:
DDT is a controlled substance/was always a controlled substance. But "control" in Ghana is different from "control" in a place such as the US.
ITEM: Growing up in Ghana many years ago, there were many cases where farmers would pour DDT into rivers to harvest fish by stunning them. This is an eye witness report! But DDT is a dangerous chemical with lasting effects on animals (plankton, birds) that are exposed to DDT.
READ:
Daily Graphic Date : Tuesday, 03 June 2014 07:31
Ministry investigates use of DDT in fishing
"...The Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture Development (MoFAD) has despatched a team of experts to Axim, a coastal town in the Western Region, to assess the impact of the use of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing methods among fisher folk.The team, which is made of representatives from MoFAD and some key stakeholders within the fisheries sector, has been tasked to carefully assess the situation on the ground to enable the ministry to come up with measures to curtail the situation. - (www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/24202-ministry-investigates-use-of-ddt-in-fishing.html).
READ:
United State Environmental Protection Agency Position on EPA
DDT - A Brief History and Status | Ingredients Used in ...
www2.epa.gov/.../ddt-bri...
United States Environmental Protection Agency
Jan 6, 2015 - DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was developed as the first of the modern synthetic insecticides in the 1940s. It was initially used with great effect to combat malaria, typhus, and the other insect-borne human diseases among both military and civilian populations. It also was effective for insect control in crop and livestock production, institutions, homes, and gardens. DDT's quick success as a pesticide and broad use in the United States and other countries led to the development of resistance by many insect pest species...//
...//Regulation Due to Health and Environmental Effects
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the federal agency with responsibility for regulating pesticides before the formation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, began regulatory actions in the late 1950s and 1960s to prohibit many of DDT's uses because of mounting evidence of the pesticide's declining benefits and environmental and toxicological effects. The publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring stimulated widespread public concern over the dangers of improper pesticide use and the need for better pesticide controls...//
//...In 1972, EPA issued a cancellation order for DDT based on its adverse environmental effects, such as those to wildlife, as well as its potential human health risks. Since then, studies have continued, and a relationship between DDT exposure and reproductive effects in humans is suspected, based on studies in animals. In addition, some animals exposed to DDT in studies developed liver tumors. As a result, today, DDT is classified as a probable human carcinogen by U.S. and international authorities.
DDT is:
• known to be very persistent in the environment,
• will accumulate in fatty tissues, and
• can travel long distances in the upper atmosphere.
After the use of DDT was discontinued in the United States, its concentration in the environment and animals has decreased, but because of its persistence, residues of concern from historical use still remain.
Current Status
Since 1996, EPA has been participating in international negotiations to control the use of DDT and other persistent organic pollutants used around the world. Under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme, countries joined together and negotiated a treaty to enact global bans or restrictions on persistent organic pollutants (POPs), a group that includes DDT. This treaty is known as the Stockholm Convention on POPs. The Convention includes a limited exemption for the use of DDT to control mosquitoes that transmit the microbe that causes malaria - a disease that still kills millions of people worldwide.
In September 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared its support for the indoor use of DDT in African countries where malaria remains a major health problem, citing that benefits of the pesticide outweigh the health and environmental risks. The WHO position is consistent with the Stockholm Convention on POPs, which bans DDT for all uses except for malaria control.
DDT is one of 12 pesticides recommended by the WHO for indoor residual spray programs. It is up to individual countries to decide whether or not to use DDT. EPA works with other agencies and countries to advise them on how DDT programs are developed and monitored, with the goal that DDT be used only within the context of programs referred to as Integrated Vector Management. IVM is a decison-making process for use of resources to yield the best possible results in vector control, and that it be kept out of agricultural sectors. (www.www2.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/ddt-brief-history-and-status/).
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Dear Baidoo,
Anyway, these comments should have been the first but I had to suspend that in order to respond to areas I could easily remember (I mean my sources. Also, I did not respond to your article before this one afte ... read full comment
Dear Baidoo,
Anyway, these comments should have been the first but I had to suspend that in order to respond to areas I could easily remember (I mean my sources. Also, I did not respond to your article before this one after more than three-hours of waiting. I saw it in the morining around 11:45 and it was too late for me to provide a lengthy riposte.)
"Usually, I enjoy this before waking up the next so that readers will have the time to read them and compare them with your articl. I CAN ASSURE YOU THAT THE ARTICLE BEFORE THIS ONE WAS PROBABLY THE MOST SHALLOWLY ARGUED OF ALL THE ARTICLES IN THE SERIES.
I am glad some of the readers pointed them out. For instance, I had already told you that the "communism" Marx and Engels talked about is not the same concept you use in your articles. No society in human history has been able to practice it. It is an idea, as Kojo T pointed out to you, and hardly attainable.
In discussing the history of "communism" In Aparta (Greece), for instance, you failed to mention the so-called Lycurgus of Sparta who lived and praticed some form of "communism" before Plato wrote "The Republic." I myself forgot to include because I was overwhelmed with references/source materials. So much for what is already gone!
I still have my ripostes ready and will readily reproduce them any time that shallowly and porously argued article is reproduced on Ghanaweb.).
That said, where is this "juvenile" statement coming from:
"Well, he could have let sleeping dogs lie, but he didn’t" sounds very childish."
What do you think you have said in the entire article that I am (and others?) not already familiar with? Nothing (I did papers on "Silent Spring," Carson, environmental activism, etc., for for two classes I took in General Biology/Anatomy & Physiology, and Microbiology (I said to your in 2014 that I came across Paul Ehrlich during this time; more later).
For instance, in one of my general biology class I have to evaluate a number of the authoritative sources on "artemisia" and its effectiveness (or lack thereoff) against malaria, the connections between malaria and sickle cell anemia (via Darwinian evolution), etc! Anyway you may learn from the scientific work of Dr. Robert Gwadz (Chief Assistant of NAID's Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases). NAID stands for the National Institution of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
CERTAINLY MY FAMILIARITY WITH SOME OF THE SOURCE MATERIALS I HAVE PROVIDED HERE (AND ELSEWEHER) CAME ABOUT AS A RESULT OF MY RESEARCH AND WORK I DID FOR SOME OF MY PROFESSORS WHICH ENDED UP BEING PUBLISHED IN PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS.
You appeared not to have taken into consideration the little I said to you about Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring," Al Gore, and socialism (please go back to my comments on your 2014 piece on Nkrumahism and you will find out what I am trying to say).
Why did they attack Carson of being a socialist or "communist" when the government she reprsented (John F. Kennedy) and her colleagues, friends, and "organizations" of which she was associated were openly free-market capitalism?
Anyway your next article should show how Carson's book "Silent Spring" laid the foundation for environmental activism in America (and the rest of the world), the creation of the America's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (which has served as a model for Ghana's Environemtal Protection Agency and several of such across Africa and the world), its impact on Al Gore's environmental activism and Nobel Peace prize(and on his books "An Inconvenient Truth," "Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," "Earth in the Balance," etc).
The other question is: Why did Jimmy Carter posthumously award Crason the prestigious "Presidential Medal of Freedom? And why did her "scienfic" writings earned her the prestigious "National Book Award"?
How may lives have the EPA saved in America? How many lives have Alfred Nobel's "dynamite" invention killed? THERE IS MORE I COULD SAY BY WAY OF CONTRIBUTION BUT I THINK I HAVE TO ALLOW OTHERS TO CONTINUE.
Well, here is more for you:
........................................................................................................................................................ Source: National Geography
Author: Michael Finkel
But it was also clear that the campaign was far too ambitious. In much of the deep tropics malaria persisted stubbornly. Financing for the effort eventually withered, and the eradication program was abandoned in 1969. In many nations, this coincided with a decrease in foreign aid, with political instability and burgeoning poverty, and with overburdened public health services.
In several places where malaria had been on the brink of extinction, including both Sri Lanka and India, the disease came roaring back. And in much of sub-Saharan Africa, malaria eradication never really got started. The WHO program largely bypassed the continent, and smaller scale efforts made little headway.
Soon after the program collapsed, mosquito control lost access to its crucial tool, DDT. The problem was overuse—not by malaria fighters but by farmers, especially cotton growers, trying to protect their crops. The spray was so cheap that many times the necessary doses were sometimes applied. The insecticide accumulated in the soil and tainted watercourses. Though nontoxic to humans, DDT harmed peregrine falcons, sea lions, and salmon. In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, documenting this abuse and painting so damning a picture that the chemical was eventually outlawed by most of the world for agricultural use. Exceptions were made for malaria control, but DDT became nearly impossible to procure. "The ban on DDT," says Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health, "may have killed 20 million children."
Then came the biggest crisis of all: widespread drug resistance. Malaria parasites reproduce so quickly that they evolve on fast-forward, constantly spinning out new mutations. Some mutations protected the parasites from chloroquine. The trait was swiftly passed to the next generation of parasites, and with each new exposure to chloroquine the drug-resistant parasites multiplied. Soon they were unleashing large-scale malaria epidemics for which treatment could be exceedingly difficult. By the 1990s, malaria afflicted a greater number of people, and was harder to cure, than ever.
The story of malaria is currently being written—by hand, in ballpoint pen—by the staff of Zambia's Kalene Mission Hospital. Every morning, soon after dawn, a nurse's aide who has just finished the night shift records a brief update on each child in the intensive care ward. The report is written on lined notebook paper and clipped into a weathered three-ring binder. The day workers add frequent notations on the small patient cards, kept at the nurses' station. Together, the night report and the cards form a compelling, immediate account of a deadly disease.
Many entries are simply terse, staccato jottings. "Mary: Has malaria. Unconscious." "Belinda: Malaria. Seizures." But others are far longer, enumerating clinical details about medicines and dosages and checkup times, as well as offering vivid glimpses into the struggle for survival in one of the world's most malarious places. Leaf the pages; flip through the cards—there are thousands upon thousands of entries—and the stories emerge
Here's Methyline Kumafumbo, a skinny three-year-old who was taken to Kalene hospital by her grandmother. They journeyed ten miles from their home village, and by the time they arrived, malaria parasites had already latched onto Methyline's brain. "Admitted yesterday," the night report reads. "Fevers and seizures. Malaria." The right side of Methyline's head was shaved, and an IV line inserted. Quinine, which remains Kalene hospital's frontline drug for severe cases, was administered, dose after dose, each treatment dutifully recorded.
For almost a week, Methyline languished in a coma. A malarial coma can be a horrible thing to observe: arched back, rigid arms, twisted hands, pointed toes. A still life of agony. The reports continue their unblinking assessment. "Unconscious. Continues on IV quinine." "Still unconscious though not measuring." "Still unconscious."
Then the seizures started again. There are times when the night report reads almost like a personal diary. "I was worried," the aide wrote about Methyline. "So I informed Sister"—the honorific bestowed on the hospital's two nurses—"who came and ordered Valium, which was given with relief."
Finally, the entries turn hopeful. "She's opening up her eyes but she still looks cerebral." "Drinking and eating porridge." And then: "Is conscious and talking!!" Three days later, Methyline was released from the hospital. "Looking bright," says the report. "But still not walking well."
One insidious thing about malaria is that many who don't die end up scarred for life. "Her walking issues point to larger problems," Robert Gwadz says after reviewing the progression of Methyline's sickness. "She may have permanent neurological damage." This legacy of malaria has sobering repercussions for people and nations. "It's possible," says Gwadz, "that due to malaria, almost every child in Africa is i
some way neurologically scarred."
And Methyline has to be considered one of the fortunate ones. The Kalene hospital night report is filled with heartbreak. Christabel: "The patient is in bad condition. Grunting and weary. Irregular breathing. Sister was informed. Midnight she collapsed and died. The body was taken home. May her soul Rest in Peace." There's an entry like this on nearly every page. Ronaldo: "Semi-conscious. IV for quinine. Seizure. Valium. Pain suppository. Fever. More pain suppository. At 0500 hrs, child had gasping respiration. Finally, child suddenly collapsed and died. His body was taken home."
All of Zambia, it seems—from the army to the Boy Scouts to local theater troupes—has been mobilized to stop malaria. In 1985, the nation's malaria-control budget was 30 thousand dollars. Now, supported with international grant money, it's more than 40 million. Posters have been hung throughout the country, informing people of malaria's causes and symptoms and stressing the importance of medical intervention. (The vast majority of the nation's malaria cases are never treated by professionals.) There are even Boy Scout merit badges for knowledge about malaria. Zambia's plan is to educate the public, then beat the disease through a three-pronged assault: drugs, sprays, and mosquito nets.
The country has dedicated itself to dispensing the newest malaria cure, which also happens to be based on one of the oldest—an herbal medicine derived from a weed related to sagebrush, sweet wormwood, called artemisia. This treatment was first described in a Chinese medical text written in the fourth century A.D. but seems to have been overlooked by the rest of the world until now. The new version, artemisinin, is as powerful as quinine with few of the side effects. It's the last remaining surefire malaria cure. Other drugs can still play a role in treatment, but the parasites have developed resistance to all of them, including quinine itself. To help reduce the odds that a mutation will also disarm artemisinin, derivatives of the drug are mixed with other compounds in an antimalarial barrage known as artemisinin-based combination therapy, or ACT.
Zambia is also purchasing enough insecticide to spray every house in several of the most malarious areas every year, just before the rainy season. It has already returned to DDT—though just for indoor use, in controlled quantities. In the face of the growing malaria toll, access to DDT is gradually becoming easier, and even the Sierra Club does not oppose limited spraying for malaria control. Finally, the Zambian government is distributing insecticide-treated bed nets to ward off mosquitoes during the night, when the malaria-carrying Anopheles almost always bite.
The plan sounds straightforward, but progress against malaria never comes easily. Many Zambians living far from hospitals depend on roadside stalls for medicines. There, ACTs can cost more than a dollar a dose—virtually unaffordable in a country where more than 70 percent of the population survives on less than a dollar a day. So people buy other drugs, for as little as 15 cents. They provide temporary relief, reducing the malarial fever, but may do little to halt the parasites.
Then there are widespread traditional beliefs. One of the posters plastered across Zambia reads: "Malaria is not transmitted by witchcraft, drinking dirty water, getting soaked in rain, or chewing immature sugarcane." When children suffer from seizures—a symptom of advanced cerebral malaria—some parents interpret it as a hex and head straight to a traditional healer. By the time they make it to the hospital, it's too late.
Even the gift of a bed net can backfire. There's no question that the nets can save lives, especially the latest types, which are impregnated with insecticide. But first they need to reach the people most in need, and then they must be properly used. "Distributing nets to remote villages is a nightmare," says Malama Muleba, executive director of the nonprofit Zambia Malaria Foundation. "It's one thing for me to convince Bill and Melinda Gates to donate money, it's quite another to actually get the nets out."
The Zambian army has been employed to help, but even after delivery, people can be reluctant to sleep beneath nets, which make a hot and stuffy part of the world feel hotter and stuffier. If a leg pops out at night or the fabric is torn, mosquitoes can still reach the skin. And the nets are sometimes misused, as fishing gear. Theater troupes are spreading out into the Zambian countryside, emphasizing the proper use of bed nets through stage productions in settlements large and small.
Despite the difficulties, Zambia's campaign has started to produce results. In 2000, a study showed that fewer than 2 percent of children under the age of five slept under an insecticide-treated bed net. Six years later, the number had risen to 23 percent. The government of Zambia says an ACT known as Coartem is now available cost free to the entire population. In a country that was steadily losing 50,000 children a year to malaria, early indications are that the death rate has already been reduced by more than a third.
But what if donor money dries up? What if Zambia's economy collapses? What about political instability? Both Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which flank Zambia, have a history of war. In the 1970s, during a civil war in Angola, six bombs landed near Kalene Mission Hospital; in the Congo war years, some of the nearby roads were mined.
"This is a critical moment," says Kent Campbell, program director of the Malaria Control and Evaluation Partnership in Africa. "There are no national models of success with malaria control in Africa. None. All we've seen is pessimism and failure. If Zambia is a success, it will have a domino effect. If it's a failure, donors will be discouraged and move on, and the problem will continue to get worse."
No matter how much time, money, and energy are expended on the effort, there still remains the most implacable of foes—biology itself. ACTs are potent, but malaria experts fear that resistance may eventually develop, depriving doctors of their best tool. Before the ban on DDT, there were already scattered reports of Anopheles mosquitoes resistant to the insecticide; with its return, there are sure to be more. Meanwhile, global warming may be allowing the insects to colonize higher altitudes and farther latitudes.
Drugs, sprays, and nets, it appears, will never be more than part of the solution. What's required is an even more decisive weapon. "When I look at the whole malaria situation," says Louis Miller, co-chief of the malaria unit at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, "it all seems to come down to one basic idea: We sure need a vaccine."
It's easy to list every vaccine that can prevent a parasitic disease in humans. There is none. Vaccines exist for bacteria and viruses, but these are comparatively simple organisms. The polio virus, for example, consists of exactly 11 genes. Plasmodium falciparum has more than 5,000. It's this complexity, combined with the malaria parasite's constant motion—dodging like a fugitive from the mosquito to the human bloodstream to the liver to the red blood cells—that makes a vaccine fiendishly difficult to design.
Ideally, a malaria vaccine would provide lifelong protection. A lull in malaria transmission could cause many people to lose any immunity they have built up against the disease—even adults, immunologically speaking, could revert to infant status—rendering it more devastating if it returned. This is why a partial victory over malaria could be worse than total failure. Falciparum also has countless substrains (each river valley seems to have its own type), and a vaccine has to block them all. And of course the vaccine can leave no opening for the parasite to develop resistance. Creating a malaria vaccine is one of the most ambitious medical quests of all time.
Recent malaria history is fraught with grand pronouncements that turned out to be baseless. "MALARIA VACCINE IS NEAR," announced a New York Times headline in 1984. "This is the last major hurdle," said one U.S. scientist quoted in the article. "There is no question now that we will have a vaccine. The rest is fine-tuning." Seven years of fine-tuning later, another Times headline summarized the result: "EFFORT TO FIGHT MALARIA APPEARS TO HAVE FAILED." In the late 1990s, Colombian immunologist Manuel Patarroyo claimed, with much media fanfare, that he had found the answer to malaria with his vaccine, SPf-66. Early results were tantalizing, but follow-up studies in Thailand showed it worked no better than a placebo.
At least 90 teams around the world are now working on some aspect of a vaccine; the British government, by way of incentive, has pledged to help purchase hundreds of millions of doses of any successful vaccine, for donation to countries in need. The one closest to public release, developed by the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals in collaboration with the U.S. Army, is called RTS,S. In a recent trial in Mozambique, it protected about half the inoculated children from severe malaria for more than a year.
Fifty percent isn't bad—RTS,S might save hundreds of thousands of lives—but it's not the magic bullet that would neutralize the disease once and for all. Many researchers suspect an all-encompassing cure isn't possible. Malaria has always afflicted us, they say, and always will. There is one man, however, who not only believes malaria can be defeated, he thinks he knows the key.
Stephen Hoffman is the founder and CEO of the only company in the world dedicated solely to finding a malaria vaccine. The company's name is Sanaria—that is, "healthy air," the opposite of malaria. Hoffman is 58, lean and green-eyed, with a demeanor of single-minded intensity. "He's impassioned and impatient and intolerant of negativity," is how one colleague describes him.
Hoffman is intimately familiar with the pitfalls of the vaccine hunt. During his 14-year tenure as director of the malaria program at the Naval Medical Research Center, he was part of the team working on the vaccine promised in the 1984 New York Times article. He was so confident in the vaccine that he tested it on himself. He exposed himself to infected mosquitoes, then flew to a medical conference in California to deliver what he thought would be a triumphant presentation. The morning after he landed, he was already shaking and feverish—and, soon enough, suffering from full-blown malaria.
Now, more than two decades later, Hoffman is ready to return to prominence. He couldn't have found a more uninspiring launchpad: Sanaria is headquartered in a dismal mini-mall in suburban Maryland, near a picture-framing shop and a discount office-supply store. From outside, there's no mention of the company's mission. A window badly in need of washing bears the company name in tiny adhesive letters. Hoffman realizes it's probably best if the office-supply customers aren't fully aware of what's going on a few doors away.
Inside, generating a hubbub of activity, are some 30 scientists from across the globe. The lab's centerpiece is a room where Hoffman raises mosquitoes infected with the falciparum parasite—yes, in a quiet mini-mall. Hoffman claims it's the world's most secure insectary. To enter, a visitor must pass through multiple antechambers that are sealed between sets of doors, like a lock system in a canal. Everyone has to wear white cotton overlayers, masks, shoe covers, and gloves. White makes it easier to see a stray mosquito. The air is recirculated, and the insectary is checked daily for leaks. Signs abound: "WARNING! WARNING! INFECTIOUS AGENT IN USE." And hanging on a wall is a time-honored last line of defense: a flyswatter.
The mosquitoes are housed in a few dozen cylindrical containers, about the size of beach buckets, covered with mesh lids. They're fed falciparum-infected blood, then stored for two weeks while the parasites propagate in the insects' guts and migrate to the salivary glands, creating what are known as "loaded" mosquitoes. The loaded insects are transferred carefully to a kiln-like irradiator to be zapped with a quick dose of radiation. Then, in a special dissecting lab, the salivary glands of the mosquitoes are removed. Each mosquito's glands contain more than 100,000 parasites. Essentially, the vaccine consists of these irradiated parasites packed into a hypodermic needle.
The idea is based on research done in the late 1960s at New York University by Ruth Nussenzweig, who demonstrated that parasites weakened by radiation can prompt an immune response in mice without causing malaria. Hoffman's vaccine will deliver the wallop of a thousand mosquito bites and, he says, produce a complete protective response. Thereafter, any time the vaccinated person is bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito, the body, already in a state of alert, will not allow the disease to take hold.
Hoffman's lofty goal is to eventually immunize all 25 million infants born in sub-Saharan Africa every year. He believes that at least 90 percent of them will be protected completely from malaria. If so, they'll be the first generation of Africans, in all of human history, not to suffer from the disease.
But which generation will it be? Although Sanaria's vaccine may undergo initial field-testing next year, a federally approved version won't be available for at least five years—and maybe never. Given the track record of malaria vaccines, that's a distinct possibility. After so many million years on Earth and so many victories over humanity, the disease, it is certain, will not surrender easily.
When it comes to malaria, only one thing is guaranteed: Every evening in the rainy season across much of the world, Anopheles mosquitoes will take wing, alert to the odors and warmth of living bodies. A female Anopheles needs to drink blood every three days. In a single feeding, which lasts as long as ten minutes, she can ingest about two and a half times her pre-meal weight—in human terms, the equivalent of downing a bathtub-size milk shake.
If she happens to feed on a person infected with malaria, parasites will accompany the blood. Two weeks later, when the mosquito flies through the open window of a mud hut, seeking her next meal, she'll be loaded.
Inside the hut, a child is sleeping with her sister and parents on a blanket spread over the floor. The family is aware of the malaria threat; they know of the rainy season's dangers. They've hung a bed net from the ceiling. But it's a steamy night, and the child has tossed and turned a few times before dropping back to sleep. Her foot is sticking out of the net. The mosquito senses it, and dips down for a silent landing.
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francis kwarteng 8 years ago
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Intoduction by Vice President Al Gore (Al Gore wrote this introduction ... read full comment
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Intoduction by Vice President Al Gore (Al Gore wrote this introduction to one of the editions of Carson's well-known book, "Silent Spring")
Writing about Silent Spring is a humbling experience for an elected official, because Rachel Carson's landmark book offers undeniable proof that the power of an idea can be far greater than the power of politicians. In 1962, when Silent Spring was first published, "environment" was not even an entry in the vocabulary of public policy. In a few cities, especially Los Angeles, smog had become a cause of concern, albeit more because of its appearance than because of its threat to public health. Conservation -- the precursor of environmentalism -- had been mentioned during the 1960 Democratic and Republican conventions, but only in passing and almost entirely in the context of national parks and natural resources. And except for a few scattered entries in largely inaccessible scientific journals, there was virtually no public dialogue about the growing, invisible dangers of DDT and other pesticides and chemicals. Silent Spring came as a cry in the wilderness, a deeply felt, thoroughly researched, and brilliantly written argument that changed the course of history. Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all.
Not surprisingly, both the book and its author, who had once worked as a marine biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service, met with considerable resistance from those who were profiting from pollution. Major chemical companies tried to suppress Silent Spring, and when excerpts appeared in The New Yorker, a chorus of voices immediately accused Carson of being hysterical and extremist -- charges still heard today whenever anyone questions those whose financial well-being depends on maintaining the environmental status quo. (Having been labeled "Ozone Man" during the 1992 campaign, a name that was probably not intended as a compliment but that I wore as a badge of honor, I am aware that raising these issues invariably inspires a fierce -- and sometimes foolish -- reaction.) By the time the book became widely available, the forces arrayed against its author were formidable.
The attack on Rachel Carson has been compared to the bitter assault on Charles Darwin when he published The Origin of Species. Moreover, because Carson was a woman, much of the criticism directed at her played on stereotypes of her sex. Calling her "hysterical" fit the bill exactly. Time magazine added the charge that she had used "emotion-fanning words." Her credibility as a scientist was attacked as well: opponents financed the production of propaganda that supposedly refuted her work. It was all part of an intense, well-financed negative campaign, not against a political candidate but against a book and its author.
Carson brought two decisive strengths to this battle: a scrupulous respect for the truth and a remarkable degree of personal course. She had checked and rechecked every paragraph in Silent Spring, and the passing years have revealed that her warnings were, if anything, understated. And her courage, which matched her vision, went far beyond her willingness to disturb an entrenched and profitable industry. While writing Silent Spring, she endured a radical mastectomy and then radiation treatment. Two years after the book's publication, she died, of breast cancer. Ironically, new research points strongly to a link between this disease and exposure to toxic chemicals. So in a sense, Carson was literally writing for her life.
She was also writing against the grain of an orthodoxy rooted in the earliest days of the scientific revolution: that man (and of course this meant the male of our species) was properly the center and the master of all things, and that scientific history was primarily the story of his domination -- ultimately, it was hoped, to a nearly absolute state. When a woman dared to challenge this orthodoxy, one of its prominent defenders, Robert White Stevens, replied in terms that now sound not only arrogant but as quaint as the flat-earth theory: "The crux, the fulcrum over which the argument chiefly rests, is that Miss Carson maintains that the balance of nature is a major force in the survival of man, whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist and scientist, believes that man is steadily controlling nature."
The very absurdity of that world view from today's perspective indicates how revolutionary Rachel Carson was. Assaults from corporate interests were to be expected, but even the American Medical Association weighed in on the chemical companies' side. The man who discovered the insecticidal properties of DDT had, after all, been awarded the Nobel Prize.
But Silent Spring could not be stifled. Solutions to the problems it raised weren't immediate, but the book itself achieved enormous popularity and broad public support. In addition to presenting a convincing case, Carson had won both financial independence and public credibility with two previous bestsellers, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. Also, Silent Spring was published in the early years of a decade that was anything but silent, a decade when Americans were perhaps far readier than they had been to hear and heed the book's message. In a sense, the woman the moment came together.
Eventually, both the government and the public became involved -- not just those who read the book, but those who read the news or watched television. As sales of Silent Spring passed the half-million mark, CBS Reports scheduled an hour-long program about it, and the network went ahead with the broadcast even when two major corporate sponsors withdrew their support. President Kennedy discussed the book at a press conference and appointed a special panel to examine its conclusions. When the panel reported its findings, its paper was an indictment of corporate and bureaucratic indifference and a validation of Carson's warnings about the potential hazards of pesticides. Soon thereafter, Congress began holding hearings and the first grassroots environmental organizations were formed.
Silent Spring planted the seeds of a new activism that has grown into one of the great popular forces of all time. When Rachel Carson died, in the spring of 1964, it was becoming clear that her voice would never be silenced. She had awakened not only our nation but the world. The publication of Silent Spring can properly be seen as the beginning of the modern environmental movement.
For me personally, Silent Spring had a profound impact. It was one of the books we read at home at my mother's insistence and then discussed around the dinner table. My sister and I didn't like every book that made it to that table, but our conversations about Silent Spring are a happy and vivid memory. Indeed, Rachel Carson was one of the reasons I became so conscious of the environment and so involved with environmental issues. Her example inspired me to write Earth in the Balance, which, not coincidentally, was published by Houghton Mifflin, the company that stood by Carson through all the controversy and that has since earned a reputation for publishing many fine books about the environmental dangers facing our world. Her picture hangs on my office wall among those of the political leaders, the presidents and the prime ministers. It has been there for years- and it belongs there. Carson has had as much or more effect on me than any of them, and perhaps than all of them together.
Both a scientist and an idealist, Carson was also a loner who listened, something that those in places of power so often fail to do. Silent Spring was conceived when she received a letter from a woman named Olga Owens Huckins in Duxbury, Massachusetts, telling her that DDT was killing birds. Today, because Carson's work led to the ban on DDT, some of the species that were her special concern- eagles and peregrine falcons, for example- are no longer at the edge of extinction. It may be that the human species, too, or at least countless human lives, will be saved because of the words she wrote.
No wonder the impact of Silent Spring has been compared to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Both rank among the rare books that have transformed our society. Yet there are important differences. Harriet Beecher Stowe dramatized an issue that was already on everyone's mind and at the center of a great public debate; she gave a human face to an already dominant national concern. The picture of slavery she drew moved the national conscience. As Abraham Lincoln said when he met her, at the height of the Civil War, "So you're the little lady who started this whole thing." In contrast, Rachel Carson warned of a danger that hardly anyone saw; she was trying to put an issue on the national agenda, not bear witness to one that was already there. In that sense, her achievement was harder won. Ironically, when she testified before congress in 1963, Senator Abraham Ribicoff's welcome eerily echoed Lincoln's words of exactly a century before: "Miss Carson," he said, "you are the lady who started all this."
Another difference between the books goes to the heart of Silent Spring 's continuing relevance. Slavery could be, and was, ended in a few years, although it has taken another century and more to even begin to deal with its aftermath. But if slavery could be abolished with the stroke of a pen, chemical pollution could not. Despite the power of Carson's argument, despite actions like the banning of DDT in the United States, the environmental crisis has grown worse, not better. Perhaps the rate at which the disaster is increasing has been slowed, but that itself is a disturbing thought. Since the publication of Silent Spring, pesticide use on farms alone has doubled to 1.1 billion tons a year, and production of these dangerous chemicals has increased by 400 percent. We have banned certain pesticides at home, but we still produce them and export them to other countries. This not only involves a readiness to profit by selling others a hazard we will not accept for ourselves; it also reflects an elemental failure to comprehend that the laws of science do not observe the boundaries of politics. Poisoning the food chain anywhere ultimately poisons the food chain everywhere.
In one of Carson's few speeches, and one of her last, tot he Garden Club of America, she acknowledged that things could get worse before they got better: "These are large problems, and there is no easy solution." Yet she also warned that the longer we waited, the more risks we ran: "We are subjecting whole populations to exposure to chemicals which animal experiments have proved to be extremely poisonous and in many cases cumulative in their effect. These exposures now begin at or before birth and - unless we change our methods - will continue through the lifetime of those now living. No one knows what the results will be, because we have no previous experience to guide us." Since she made these remarks, we have unfortunately gained an abundance of experience, as rates of cancer and other diseases that may be related to pesticide use have soared. The difficulty is not that we have done nothing. We have done some important things, but we have not done nearly enough.
The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, in large part because of the concerns and the consciousness that Rachel Carson had raised. Pesticide regulation and the Food Safety Inspection Service were moved to the new agency from the Agriculture Department, which naturally tended to see the advantages and not the dangers of using chemicals on crops. Since 1962, Congress has called for the establishment of review, registration, and information standards for pesticides - not once, but several times. But many of these standards have been ignored, postponed, and eroded. For example, when the Clinton-Gore administration took office, standards for protecting farm workers from pesticides were still not in place, even though the EPA had been "working on them" since the early 1970s. Broad-spectrum pesticides such as DDT have been replaced by narrow-spectrum pesticides of even higher toxicity, which have not been adequately tested and present equal or even greater risks.
For the most part, hardliners within the pesticide industry have succeeded in delaying the implementation of protective measures called for in Silent Spring. It is astonishing to see the cosseting this industry has been accorded in Congress over the years. The statute that regulates pesticides, fungicides, and rodenticides sets far looser standards than those that regulate food and drugs, and Congress intentionally made them more difficult to enforce. In setting safe levels of a pesticide, the government takes into account not only its toxicity but also the economic benefit it provides. This dubious process pits increased agricultural production (which might be obtained otherwise) against potential increases in cancer and neurological disease. Moreover, the process for removing a hazardous pesticide from the market generally takes five to ten years. New pesticides, even if they are very toxic, can win approval if they work just marginally better than existing ones.
In my view, this is nothing more than the regulatory equivalent of "Been down so long it looks like up to me." The present system is a Faustian bargain - we get short-term gain at the expense of long-term tragedy. And there is reason to believe that the short term can be very short indeed. Many pesticides do not cause the total number of pests to decline; they may do so at first, but the pests eventually adapt by mutation and the chemicals become useless. Furthermore, we have focused research on pesticide effects on adults and not on children, who are especially vulnerable to these chemicals. We have examined each pesticide in isolation, but scientists generally have not yet researched combinations, which are the potentially far more perilous reality encountered in our fields and pastures and streams. Essentially, what we have inherited is a system of laws and loopholes, deadlines and delays, facades that barely disguise a wholesale failure of policy.
Rachel carson showed that the excessive use of pesticides was inconsistent with basic values; that at their worst, they create what she called "rivers of death," and at their best, they cause mild harm for relatively little long-term gain. Yet the honest conclusion is that in the twenty-two years since the publication of Silent Spring, the legal, regulatory,a nd political system has failed to respond adequately. Because Carson understood not only the environment but the very different world of politics, she anticipated one of the reasons for this failure. At a time when almost no one discussed the twin contaminations of special-interest money and influence, she referred in her Garden Club speech to the "advantage...given to those who seek to block remedial legislation." Foreshadowing the present debate about political reform, she even condemned the tax deduction for lobbying expenses that this administration has sought to repeal, pointing out that the deduction "means, to cite a specific example, that the chemical industry may now work at bargain rates to thwart future attempts at regulation... The industry wishing to pursue its course without legal restraint is now actually subsidized in its efforts." In short, the problem of politics, which she uncannilu predicted. Cleaning up politics is essential to cleaning up pollution.
The years-long failure of one endeavor helps to explain the years-long failure of the other. The results are as undeniable as they are unacceptable. In 1992, 2.2 billion pounds of pesticides were used in this country - eight pounds for every man, woman, and child. Many of the pesticides in use are known to be quite carcinogenic; others work by poisoning the nervous and immune systems of insects, and perhaps of humans. Although we no longer have the doubtful benefits of one household product that Carson described - "We can polish our floors with a wax guaranteed to dill any insect that walks over it" - today pesticides are being used on more than 900,000 farms and in 69 million homes.
In 1988, the EPA reported that the ground water in thirty-two states was contaminated with seventy-four different agricultural chemicals, including one, the herbicide atrazine, that is classified as a potential human carcinogen. Seventy million tons a year are used on cornfields in the Mississippi basin, and 1.5 million pounds of runoffs now flow into the drinking water of 20 million people. Atrazine is not removed by municipal water treatment; in springtime, the amount of atrazine in the water often exceeds the standards set by the Safe Drinking Water Act. In 1993, that was true for 25 percent of all the surface water in the entire Mississippi basin.
DDT and PCBs are virtually banned in the United States for other reasons, but pesticides that mimic the female hormone estrogen, which are close chemical cousins, are plentiful and are raising intense new concerns. Research from Scotland, Michigan, Germany, and elsewhere indicates that they lead to reduced fertility, testicular and breast cancer, and malinformation of the genital organs. In the United States alone, as the tide of estrogen pesticides has crested in the past twenty years, the incidence of testicular cancer has risen by approximately 50 percent. The evidence also suggests that, for reasons not yet understood, there has recently been a worldwide drop in sperm counts of 50 percent. There is documented, irrefutable proof that these chemicals disrupt the reproductive capacity of wildlife. As three researchers concluded after reviewing the data for the Journal of the Institute of Environmental Health Services, "Today many wildlife populations are at risk." Many of these problems may be harbingers of vast and unpredictable changes in animal and human reproductive systems, but the pesticides' potentially harmful effects are not currently considered in regulatory risk assessment. A new administration proposal calls for this kind of review.
Defenders of these chemicals will no doubt provide the traditional responses: that studies using human subjects don't demonstrate a direct link between the chemicals and disease; that coincidence doesn't equal casuality (although some coincidences strongly point to making a prudent instead of a reckless decision); and, the old standby, that tests animals don't always, absolutely, inescapably translate to the same results in the human species. Each of these answers recalls the kind of reflexive response that Rachel Carson's work elicited from the chemical industry and the university scientists it subsidized. She anticipated the response, and wrote in Silent Spring of a public "fed little tranquilizing pills of half-truths. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugarcoating of unpalatable facts."
In the 1980s, especially when James Watt was at the Interior Department and Ann Gorsuch was at the EPA, the environmental know-nothings reached the peak of their influence. Poisoning the environment was almost regarded as a sign of hard-nosed economic pragmatism. In the Gorsuch EPA, for example, integrated pest management (IPM), the alternative to chemical pesticides, was literally declared anathema. The EPA banned publications about it, and certification of IPM methods was outlawed.
The Clinton-Gore administration began with a different view, and with a firm determination to turn the tide of pesticide pollution. Our policy pursues three imperatives: tougher standards, reduced use, and broader use of alternative biological agents.
Obviously, a sensible approach to pesticide use has to balance dangers and benefits and take economic factors into account. But we also have to take the heavy weight of special interests off the scale and out of the equation. The standards have to be clear and demanding, and the testing has to be thorough and honest. For too long we have set tolerance levels for pesticide residues in children hundreds of times higher than they should be. What calculus of economic benefits can justify this? We have to test the effects of these chemicals on children, not just adults, and we have to test a range of varying combinations. We must test not just to limit fear, but to limit what we have to fear.
If a pesticide isn't needed or doesn't work in a given situation, then the presumption should be against use, not for it. The benefit should be real, not possible, transitory, or speculative.
Above all, we have to focus on the biological agents for which the industry and its political apologists have such intense hostility. In Silent Spring , Carson wrote of the "truly extraordinary array of alternatives to the chemical control of insects/" The array is wider today, despite the indifference of too many public officials and the resistance of manufacturers. Why don't we push hard for the use of nontoxic substances?
Finally, we must begin to bridge the cultural divide between the pesticide-production and agricultural community on the one side and the public health community on the other. People in the two communities come from different backgrounds, go to different colleges, and have very different viewpoints. As long as they face each other across a gulf of suspicion and enmity, we will find it hard to change a system in which production and profit are tied to pollution. One way in which we can signal the end of that system - and begin to narrow the cultural divide - is by having the Agricultural Extension Service promote alternatives to chemical solutions. Another is by instituting formal, ongoing dialogue between those who produce our food and those who protect our health.
The Clinton-Gore administration's new policy regarding pesticides has many architects. Maybe the most important is a woman whose last official government service came in 1952, when she resigned from her mid-level civil service position so she could write full-time, not just on weekends and at night. In spirit, Rachel Carson sits in on all the important environmental meetings of this administration. We may not do everything she would want, all at once, but we are moving in the direction she indicated.
In 1992, a panel of distinguished Americans selected Silent Spring as the most influential book of the last fifty years. Across those years and through all the policy debates, this book continues to be the voice of reason breaking in on complacency. It brought environmental issues to the attention not just of industry and government; it brought them to the public, and put our democracy itself on the side of saving the Earth. More and more, consumer power will work against pesticide pollution, eve when government does not. Reducing pesticides in food is now becoming a marketing tool as well as a moral imperative. The government must act, but the people can also decide - and I am convinced that the people will no longer let the government do nothing, or do the wrong thing.
Rachel Carson's influence reaches beyond the boundaries of her specific concerns in Silent Spring. She brought us back to a fundamental idea lost to an amazing degree in modern civilization: the interconnection of human beings and the natural environment. This book was a shaft of light that for the first time illuminated what is arguably the most important issue of our era. In Silent Spring's final pages, Carson described the choice before us in terms of Robert Frost's famous poem about the road "less traveled." Others have taken that road; few have taken the world along with them, as Carson did. Her work, the truth she brought to light, the science and research she inspired, stand not only as powerful arguments for limiting the use of pesticides but as powerful proof of the difference that one individual can make
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MARCUS AMPADU 8 years ago
Thank you Francis Kwarteng and Prof. Lungu for exposing the shallowness of Baidoo Jnr.'s attack on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.
Baidoo has definitely joined the "I am not a scientist," crowd battle hymn of the Conserativ ... read full comment
Thank you Francis Kwarteng and Prof. Lungu for exposing the shallowness of Baidoo Jnr.'s attack on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.
Baidoo has definitely joined the "I am not a scientist," crowd battle hymn of the Conseratives in US. He surely don't understand the import of how we humans are interconnected and interdependent on nature.
You are making the capitalists look dumb sir.
Does Baidoo know that DDT is an insecticide that has a high propensity to bioaccumulate and bio magnify in birds? Is he aware that the use of DDT led to the decrease in the population of bald eagles in the US?
Ghana, in the fight against the ubiquitous mosquitoes, must made greater use of non toxic alternatives.
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
Hello Mr Ampadu, Yes, of course, that is what you all think i.e. anybody who does not share your world view is ignorant and dumb. What Mr Kwarteng and Prof Lungu have done is called the salvation of a leaking vessel. Thank yo ... read full comment
Hello Mr Ampadu, Yes, of course, that is what you all think i.e. anybody who does not share your world view is ignorant and dumb. What Mr Kwarteng and Prof Lungu have done is called the salvation of a leaking vessel. Thank you.
Bobby Broot-Blay 8 years ago
i find it a bit scandalous when in the interest of ideological differences and personal gratification the knowledge we acquire to be able to assist the under-privileged, the poor and the masses are traded. its very refreshing ... read full comment
i find it a bit scandalous when in the interest of ideological differences and personal gratification the knowledge we acquire to be able to assist the under-privileged, the poor and the masses are traded. its very refreshing at times to admit that what we knew as a gospel has been challenged with better information.i expect mr. baidoo to read mr kwarteng's comments and come out to say he got it wrong because after reading the baidoo's essay and the comments of kwarteng one cannot help but to conclude that kwarteng's comments on the essay are more informative and educative.
MARCUS AMPADU 8 years ago
I wished you had addressed my concern about how DDT is able to bioaccumulate and in the process bio magnify to prevent birds from laying eggs.
Don't try to dodge my concern Mr. Baidoo.
I wished you had addressed my concern about how DDT is able to bioaccumulate and in the process bio magnify to prevent birds from laying eggs.
Don't try to dodge my concern Mr. Baidoo.
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
That is not what you wanted. How can someone who is ignorant give you answers?
That is not what you wanted. How can someone who is ignorant give you answers?
YAW 8 years ago
It is evidently clear Baidoo,never saw the effect of DDT in any of the cocoa producing areas in Ghana. Compiling the works of critics is not the basis of any sound debate.When it comes to socialism or capitalism,he seems to o ... read full comment
It is evidently clear Baidoo,never saw the effect of DDT in any of the cocoa producing areas in Ghana. Compiling the works of critics is not the basis of any sound debate.When it comes to socialism or capitalism,he seems to oscillate between ignorance and adulation.He ought to bore a "big" hole in himself and let the sap run out.By the way Mr Baidoo,Nkrumah and your favourite " dictator" Lee Kuan Yew are both listed among the 100 greatest leaders of all time.
Philip Kobina Baidoo 8 years ago
Hello Yaw, it is obvious that you never really analysed what I wrote. I did argue that too much of everything is bad. Whatever happened on those cocoa farms is what is called overdrive. Controlled usage wouldn't have caused a ... read full comment
Hello Yaw, it is obvious that you never really analysed what I wrote. I did argue that too much of everything is bad. Whatever happened on those cocoa farms is what is called overdrive. Controlled usage wouldn't have caused any harm. Any substance is subject to abuse, and DDT like any substance was abused. That does not mean that it is harmful when used appropriately. For example, normal painkillers are manufactured from opium, yet is widely abused and causes a lot of devastation to people. My question is would you ban opium? Thank you.
Samuel. Otchere 8 years ago
Very insightful and interesting piece.But don't share his views on Socialism
Very insightful and interesting piece.But don't share his views on Socialism
Danny Amakye 8 years ago
Very interesting piece.
Very interesting piece.
Danny Amakye 8 years ago
Very interesting piece.
Very interesting piece.
Danny Amakye 8 years ago
Very interesting piece.
Very interesting piece.
G. K. Berko 8 years ago
At our age of Independence and expansive collective intelligence, all we need to do is diligently assemble the cogent principles of both ideologies and intelligently design a more informed mix of them to apply to our special ... read full comment
At our age of Independence and expansive collective intelligence, all we need to do is diligently assemble the cogent principles of both ideologies and intelligently design a more informed mix of them to apply to our special circumstance in Ghana as our contemporary social and economic situation would require.
It is most disappointing to see folks with enviable Academic laurels assign themselves to fighting ideological Wars that should not be our to fight, but eventually influence our gullible Politicians to conveniently glue themselves to one polarity or the other for their narrow personal interests and the detriment of the Nation at large.
I would mince no words in pointing out that it is absurd for any of us to arrogate to ourselves subtle titles of champion advocates of any one of those Economic and Political systems which all fall short in addressing our special situation.
It is totally wrong for Baidoo to thrash the contribution of Rachel Carson in bringing the Public attention to Environmental issues out of which we now have the EPA. The strong advocacy of Ralph Nader and others like Al Gore, could all be accommodated in our challenge to maintain a reasonable balance in our Global Environment.
Anyone who fights against Environmental awareness on the basis of pure political sentiments is only helping to hang the nook around our necks. The space is large enough for honest, integrity-driven, scientifically supported debates by those with expert knowledge.
It is a fact that the brunt of the Business model dominantly followed in the Western Capitalist systems around the World today intrinsically feel threatened by the Environmental Movement in general. The initial opposition to Rachel Carson, who did work at the USA Department of Agriculture, was not necessarily on the authenticity of her claims but on the effect of what her claims could do to the pockets of Business owners. Little did the entities controlling the huge Capital behind the Western Economies believe any changes to the status quo would open up new ways of making them even bigger profits with different products or methods of manufacturing that were environmentally friendly.
Baidoo must realize that many of the major Oil Companies in the USA, in particular, are quickly realigning themselves to jump to the fore front of 'Green productivity'. Whatever scientific errors Carson might have made in some of her submissions to support her movement did not kill Capitalism but rather served as catalysts for more vigorous Scientific investigations into the areas they touched.
I have read Silent Springs from cover to cover for serious Academic work. I have closely followed most of the arguments Baidoo raised with the skeptics of Carson, and Nader and Al Gore. In all fairness, these folks are not without flaws. But their vivacious interrogation and advocacy methods have helped the whole World keep a needed vigilance on what the profiteers would rather have us accept without questioning. It is through such environmental protests and alerts that Companies have set reasonable standards for manufacturing and Workplace safety. Before Carson and others like her, the American worker was nothing more than a mere dispensable cog in the Economic machinery of the existing system. We would not have ever had OSHA or MSHA that enforce reasonable safety and Health conditions under which all workers, including Miners, ought work.
When we are dealing with such a topic we must not choose and pick only a few points here and there to criticize or applaud on but consider the overall outcomes. I lived in Silver Spring in Maryland, USA, where Rachel Carson lived for most of the later part of her life until her death. She was highly esteemed by all in spite of any hiccups her work suffered in-between the early days of her crusade and her death. And it was not only the Socialists or Leftists that accepted her contributions as positive. She was acknowledged by various Presidents and US Congress. Baidoo would not claim, I hope, that he alone would be right in trashing Rachel Carson's work.
By the way, I wonder why Baidoo would not mention the fact that DDT is still a banned chemical in the USA. If it were only the Leftists that cling unto the 'lies' of Rachel Carson, why has such a harmless chemical (DDT) in Baidoo's opinion not been lifted off the banned chemicals by the various majority Republican Congress and Presidents?
Moreover, the struggle with the Environmental Health and pollution and their associated Global Warming that Baidoo would guillotine Al Gore for does not hinge solely on Rachel Carson's work. Not even the recent charges that some Environmental Scholars had deliberately cooked data to boost their claims totally undermine the credibility of the phenomenon. This is because a whole larger segment of the Scientific Academia owns data that still support much of the claim.
Therefore, I would suggest strongly that both Kwarteng and Baidoo ought to open up their minds more to accommodate frequently updated scientific outcomes based on rigorous research efforts.
On the argument of the superiority of Capitalism or Socialism, I would point both sides to Professor Emeritus Ralp Wolff and the likes of him who are seriously advocating for a new Economic paradigm. Time and Space may not allow me to delve deeper into that aspect of the argument now. But I would encourage both sides to drop the intransigence of obsession to any one side and begin considering the new wave of stringent and honest assessment of what needs be done to keep the World moving on economically and politically healthy, and socially equitable.
A general perspective on the new trend offers us an insight into variable mixes of Socialist programs in Capitalist encasements, as every Nation would need to adopt for the best outcomes, given a set of factors that prevail in the country over a reasonable stretch of its life. That presupposes, that the level of each Nation's resources, Natural and creative, and its accessibility to external resources, at any particular benchmark point might have to be the predominant criteria in deciding the dosage of Capitalist-cum-Socialist mix its Economic system should adopt.
Many more eyes have been recently turned unto the Scandinavian (especially, Sweden's) and Middle-East Models of Economic Systems, especially, Israel's), for the most versatile design for a new Economic paradigm. Capitalism as we knew it by 2008 is dead! President Sarcozy of France conceded that before he bowed out. It is not only because France had long been leaning towards Socialism of any form. It was more because of the nature of the revealed vulnerabilities in the System that had been overlooked and do not show any inclination to repair themselves.
Dr. Ron Paul of the Republican Conservative core of the USA currently is strongly advertising on the National Media of an imminent crash of the USA Economy to which he has supplied some mitigating advice to the ordinary Americans to help them survive.
Nothing stays the same, Folks. And we would be fools to just simply follow the old trends and ignore obvious pitfalls on the way.
Lastly, I would encourage all to review the staled comparisons our parochial ideologically consumed Economists have long been making between us and Singapore to show the contrasts between their economic success and our failure. It would shock many as to what vital factors these Economists either missed or conveniently left out.
I would humbly call on both Baidoo and Kwarteng to settle for accommodating each other for brainstorming to advance our Nation.
Long Live Ghana!!!
True African 8 years ago
Unlike Kwarteng,I see Baidoo as a man who is not ready to engage in any meaningful intellectual discourse.In fact,like AHOOFE,DR SAS,SARPONG etc,Baidoo is totally consumed by BIAS,FANATICISM and lack of objectivity.
Unlike Kwarteng,I see Baidoo as a man who is not ready to engage in any meaningful intellectual discourse.In fact,like AHOOFE,DR SAS,SARPONG etc,Baidoo is totally consumed by BIAS,FANATICISM and lack of objectivity.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Dear Berko,
How are you?
It appears from your comments that you have not been following my article.
I have never defended the merits and demerits of capitalism exclusively. Neither have I defended the merits and deme ... read full comment
Dear Berko,
How are you?
It appears from your comments that you have not been following my article.
I have never defended the merits and demerits of capitalism exclusively. Neither have I defended the merits and demerits of socialism exclusively.
I have always taken the position that brings the best out of all economic paradigms in one place.
This is why I have discussed Keynesian economics, free-market economics, mixed economics, the Nordic Model, Washington Consensus, and the Beijing Consensus.
I have also discussed the works of Dambisa Moyo, Kofi Kissi Dompere, among several others. I gues you are not reading my articles. I am also familiar with the worls of Ralp Wolff and Richard Wolff.
So I don't understand what you are driving? Could you go back and read some of my articles to upgrade your position on what my stance is on these matters?
As for science, that is my background. I guess you did take the time to raed my comments here. If you did, you would have realized I provided some of the latest research (cutting-edge) that is being carried out in Africa (Mali), across other parts of Africa, Europe, and America on malaria (plus vaccine), etc.
I even mentioned the potential of artemisia to malaria. So, Mr. Berko, I don't know what you are saying. In fact, did you read where I said I had to review the best and authoritative scientific papers and texts on malaria for some of my science proffessors whose papers ended up being published in peer-reviwed articles!
Please I will entreat you to go back and read mt articles and the comments I have provided here if you want to have any clue as to how far my position on science goes with regard to malaria research, etc.
You also mention the Scandinavia economic model but you seem not have have no idea that I had already discussed that in some of my Ghanaweb articles.
You also mention Sakorzy but you may not have known that I have discussed Sarkozy and the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty ("Capital in the Twenty-First Century").
You mentioned Ralph Nadar and I have already discussed him and his activism. On the Dr. Ron Paul and his advertism, I have discussed what he intends to do on the "imminent crash of the USA economy" without mentioning his name.
I am therefore at a loss as to who your comments is directed! In one sense I do not think it is for me. In the other sense I don't know if its is exclusively for Baidoo. There is nothing in your comments that I have not already discussed in my articles on Ghanaweb!
Piketty has been influential in advising the leadership. In other words, you will not have written most of what you have written here if you follow my articles.
For your information. I still continue to read widely on issues of science, environment, etc. One of my former White American biology professors still updates me on plant biology (West and Africa), etc. He sends me scientific publications on plant/animal biology almost everything.
The same with my former Nigerian-Jamaican-American professor pf biochemistry. I have others whose fields intersect physics, economics, biology, etc., who also update me on current developments in the world of science, all these beside my private readings and researches.
To wit, I am familiar with the current research in the areas of science (space science, entomology, artificial science, plant biology (botany), pharmacology, robotics, physics, chemistry, etc) and of the social sciences.
Finally, let me assure you that, unlike Baidoo, I have not subscribed to any single economic/political model. You should have read either of the following before commenting:
1) RE: Using Cuba To Defend Nkrumahism Is Laughable (Ghanaweb, Jan. 24, 2015)
Or
2) Why Philip Kobina Baidoo, Jr.’s Approach To Nkrumahism Is Questionable! (Ghanaweb, Jan. 30, 2015).
This is how I ended my the second piece:
"Finally, we may want to stress that we have adopted a centrist position on the question of political economy because neither capitalism nor socialism (and communism) is the best for every society, or has all the answers. The Nordic Model or Nkrumah’s “mixed economy” may hold the key to unraveling Africa’s economic success if we are willing to study the Beijing Consensus and the Nordic Model."
Thanks.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Dear Berko,
I have sent you an email explaining to you certain things you should have know before writing your response. I will not go in detail here.
Please, do take a look at me and respond to me via my email, if you ... read full comment
Dear Berko,
I have sent you an email explaining to you certain things you should have know before writing your response. I will not go in detail here.
Please, do take a look at me and respond to me via my email, if you so inclined.
I look forward to reading your response.
Thanks.
G. K. Berko 8 years ago
Thanks, Francis! My earlier comment was not meant to chastise you. It was a courting piece to have both of you keep abrasive attacks out of the conversation and focus on the relevant facts.
I will check the email. Stay co ... read full comment
Thanks, Francis! My earlier comment was not meant to chastise you. It was a courting piece to have both of you keep abrasive attacks out of the conversation and focus on the relevant facts.
I will check the email. Stay connected! Keep up the good work!
Where is Kwarteng?
Who knows why this irrational and biased Baidoo guy who is living in England,and enjoying Britain's free socialist HEALTH CARE benefits with his family,is always making senseless criticisms about Socialism
It has been confirmed that controversial Baidoo has now been elected the President of the newly created Association of Subjective and Irrational Commentators(ASIC).He beat AHOOFE,DR SAS,SARPONG etc.in a keenly contested elect ...
read full comment
Hi Kobina Baidoo,
Consider the statements in the tribute below:
"Yet, Carson called not for an outright ban on agricultural chemicals but for caution, further study, and the development of biological alternatives…The ...
read full comment
Oh my God. What in the name of the Good Lord is the matter with this chap? The man is as rabid as a bat out of hell.
Just listen to him in his frenzied submission. "Rachel Carson achieved the establishment of the EPA many ...
read full comment
Hello Shabi, at least, you are fun and more original. Thank you for your effort.
Hello Tim, I think you can be a bit innovative, because you posted this very comment the last time. It is alright to say Philip is silly, idiot and all those word you can think of, but be more novel.
Dear Readers,
Author: William Souder
Source: Pitssburgh Post-Gazette (Sept. 9, 2012).
Title: "Rachel Carson, Killer of Africans?"
I should point out that readers may want to read "On A Farther Shore: The Life And ...
read full comment
Mr Ababio, for your information I am a normal person like you. It is just that I have got an independent mind. This is what I will say to your comment. There is no such thing as free lunch. The NHS is not free; somebody pays ...
read full comment
Baidoo,stop beating about the bush.Do you specifically pay HEALTHCARE TAX in Britain,and what do you call free Healthcare for scroungers in Britain? Is it CAPITALISM or SOCIALISM.
Biased and subjective Baidoo could not answer Tim Owusu's question.
Hello Baidoo,
Author: Eliza Griswold (is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship).
Title: "How 'Silent Spring' Ignited The Environmental Movement"
Source: The New Yo ...
read full comment
PROF LUNGU SAYS: Because (We) believe Mr. Philip Kobina Baidoo's essay was written to "further misinform the public, the media, and our legislators...", Prof Lungu is hereby making this submission on behalf of all objective, ...
read full comment
Dear Baidoo,
Anyway, these comments should have been the first but I had to suspend that in order to respond to areas I could easily remember (I mean my sources. Also, I did not respond to your article before this one afte ...
read full comment
........................................................................................................................................................
Intoduction by Vice President Al Gore (Al Gore wrote this introduction ...
read full comment
Thank you Francis Kwarteng and Prof. Lungu for exposing the shallowness of Baidoo Jnr.'s attack on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.
Baidoo has definitely joined the "I am not a scientist," crowd battle hymn of the Conserativ ...
read full comment
Hello Mr Ampadu, Yes, of course, that is what you all think i.e. anybody who does not share your world view is ignorant and dumb. What Mr Kwarteng and Prof Lungu have done is called the salvation of a leaking vessel. Thank yo ...
read full comment
i find it a bit scandalous when in the interest of ideological differences and personal gratification the knowledge we acquire to be able to assist the under-privileged, the poor and the masses are traded. its very refreshing ...
read full comment
I wished you had addressed my concern about how DDT is able to bioaccumulate and in the process bio magnify to prevent birds from laying eggs.
Don't try to dodge my concern Mr. Baidoo.
That is not what you wanted. How can someone who is ignorant give you answers?
It is evidently clear Baidoo,never saw the effect of DDT in any of the cocoa producing areas in Ghana. Compiling the works of critics is not the basis of any sound debate.When it comes to socialism or capitalism,he seems to o ...
read full comment
Hello Yaw, it is obvious that you never really analysed what I wrote. I did argue that too much of everything is bad. Whatever happened on those cocoa farms is what is called overdrive. Controlled usage wouldn't have caused a ...
read full comment
Very insightful and interesting piece.But don't share his views on Socialism
Very interesting piece.
Very interesting piece.
Very interesting piece.
At our age of Independence and expansive collective intelligence, all we need to do is diligently assemble the cogent principles of both ideologies and intelligently design a more informed mix of them to apply to our special ...
read full comment
Unlike Kwarteng,I see Baidoo as a man who is not ready to engage in any meaningful intellectual discourse.In fact,like AHOOFE,DR SAS,SARPONG etc,Baidoo is totally consumed by BIAS,FANATICISM and lack of objectivity.
Dear Berko,
How are you?
It appears from your comments that you have not been following my article.
I have never defended the merits and demerits of capitalism exclusively. Neither have I defended the merits and deme ...
read full comment
Dear Berko,
I have sent you an email explaining to you certain things you should have know before writing your response. I will not go in detail here.
Please, do take a look at me and respond to me via my email, if you ...
read full comment
Thanks, Francis! My earlier comment was not meant to chastise you. It was a courting piece to have both of you keep abrasive attacks out of the conversation and focus on the relevant facts.
I will check the email. Stay co ...
read full comment
Very interesting piece.