Defending Rachel Carson

I love the New York Times and rarely complain about it, but I admit to finding John Tierney's contrarianism tiresome, to say the least. I'm not a Rachel Carson student by any means and I knew when I read Tierney's column the other day in which he attacked her and Silent Spring, that I wasn't going to bother figuring out what was wrong with his argument. Thankfully other, better bloggers did that for me.

One of them is Keith Schneider, a former Times enviro reporter. Schneider begins and ends his post, here, by criticizing the big environmental groups for not challenging the Big Industry PR that has attacked Carson, presumably because her work led to the banning of DDT. Then he writes about his own experience as a reporter:

Pesticide use has resulted in mass killings of songbirds and wildlife, and the poisoning of farm and industrial workers. I personally reported on the consequences to production workers in Lathrop, California in the 1980s who were left sterile because of their exposure to the pesticide DBCP during its manufacture. I reported on the incidence of young children who’d been born deaf in a California community where the drinking water supply had been contamined by DBCP and other toxic farm chemicals.

I tracked through the forests of western North Carolina in the early 1980s, identifying uncommon rates of death and illness in communities exposed to the defoliants 2,4-D and picloram, which were used to kill broad-leafed trees. The mix of 2,4-D and picloram, by the way, was sprayed in Vietnam, was known as Agent White, and was used to clear forests where Agent Orange didn’t work. A military study of the effects of Agent White, which I found in the library of Auburn University in Alabama, said that Hmong tribes exposed to the defoliant displayed levels of cancer and birth defects far in excess of neighboring communities that weren’t exposed.

So you can’t tell me that Rachel Carson’s reporting inspired “chemophobia” as Tierney charges, or is exaggerated or untrue. What he does is focus the knife edge of an eloquent rhetorical attack on the outer membrane of Carson’s reporting, such as the predictions she made that haven’t come to pass — a big loss of robins, for instance. He doesn’t note that such a prediction might well have come to pass, and fortunately hasn’t, because several of the most toxic compounds she critiqued, especially DDT, have been banned for agricultural use.

Strong words, in my opinion, considering that Schneider and Tierney were colleagues.

Tim Lambert, who blogs for Science Blogs, asks here how Tierney got things so wrong:

Well, look at his references. Katherine Mangu-Ward, who wrote that Carson was indirectly responsible fro millions of malaria deaths. John Berlau, who lied about what Carson wrote and who claims that not only did environmentalist kill all those people, but that it was a deliberate plan. Tina Rosenberg, who reckons that Silent Spring is killing African children. Steve Milloy and Gordon Edwards at junkscience.com, who write how DDT is harmless to birds. Ronald Bailey, who blames Carson for millions of deaths from malaria. And Gregg Easterbrook's A Moment of Earth.

Mark Lytle, a professor up at Bard (about which more here) and author of a study of Carson and her life, points out at Oxford University Press's blog, here, that Carson was shining a light on risk that very few people were aware of:

The public had a right to know that these chemicals posed potential risks. She had no need to extol their virtues because the Department of Agriculture and agricultural chemical industry had spent tens of millions touting them as safe and beneficial. Tierney makes no mention of the hundreds of scientists who contributed to Silent Spring and vetted Carson’s chapters.

Peregrines, Long Island Sound and Rachel Carson's Centenary

Peregrine falcons have been nesting on the Throgs Neck Bridge for more than 25 years but for some reason the Times chose today to write a brief story about it.

To me, it's noteworthy for two things.

First, the story says the Throgs Neck Bridge is at the intersection of the East River and Long Island Sound. This is tiresome but ... a "sound" is a relatively narrow strip of water between an island and the mainland. Therefore Long Island Sound is the strip of water between Long Island and the Bronx, Westchester and Connecticut. Since Queens is on Long Island, the strip of water between Queens and the Bronx is Long Island Sound. It is not the East River. The East River separates Queens and Brooklyn from Manhattan, and it ends at Hell Gate (not Hell's Gate). As I've said before, I think this partially explains why people in Queens and the Bronx don't care that much about Long Island Sound -- because they're continually told that they live not near the Sound but near the East River. Oy.

Second, the story (which is so inconsequential it's apparently not even on the Times website, hence no link) refers to the connection between DDT and the decline of peregines, which reminds me that Sunday is the 100th anniversary of Rachel Carson's birth and also reminds me to link to this commentary about Carson and the Bush administration that Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in the current New Yorker:

As much as any book can, “Silent Spring” changed the world by describing it. An immediate best-seller, the book launched the modern environmental movement, which, in turn, led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the passage of the Clean Air, the Clean Water, and the Endangered Species Acts, and the banning of a long list of pesticides, including dieldrin. Depending on how you look at it, Carson’s centenary couldn’t come at a better time—or a worse one.

Six years into the Bush Administration, it’s basically the ant wars all over again. At key agencies, a disregard for inconvenient evidence seems today to be a prerequisite. A memo prepared by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in mid-March, for example, revealed that officials of the White House Council on Environmental Quality had made more than a hundred and eighty changes to a status report on global warming, virtually all of which had the effect of exaggerating scientific uncertainties and minimizing certainties. (The official responsible for most of the changes, Philip Cooney, had come to the White House from the American Petroleum Institute and now works for Exxon Mobil.) A second report issued in March—this one by the Inspector General for the Department of the Interior—chronicled numerous instances in which a high-ranking department official, Julie MacDonald, had pressured government scientists to alter findings on threatened species. MacDonald, the report pointedly noted, had “no formal educational background in natural sciences, such as biology.” (MacDonald has since resigned.) As it happened, the report on MacDonald was released the same day that the former second-in-command at the Interior Department, J. Steven Griles, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress.

Meanwhile, the Administration has done its best to gut the safeguards put in place after “Silent Spring.” When, for instance, the E.P.A. proposed new rules on mercury emissions from power plants, the proposal turned out to contain several paragraphs lifted, virtually verbatim, from an industry lobbyist’s memos. (With minor changes, those regulations are now in effect.) Just last month, the Administration proposed new rules on the retrofitting of old power plants. The more or less explicit purpose of the rules is to accommodate a power company, Duke Energy, that the E.P.A. had itself sued for violating the Clean Air Act. Also last month, the E.P.A. announced that it would once again delay taking action on two drinking-water contaminants, perchlorate, an ingredient of rocket fuel, and M.T.B.E., a fuel additive.