DOCTORS FOR DISASTER PREPAREDNESS NEWSLETTER


November 1999
Vol. XVI, No. 6

DDT BAN - FOR THE BIRDS

Global environmentalism has a long history. In the Aztec Empire, the priests convinced the people that severe weather changes and the deaths of plants and animals could be prevented by ritual human sacrifice (see Access to Energy 8/97).

These days, we are not shedding the blood of identifiable individuals on an altar stone to protect the environment. If you dare to ask a park ranger or environmentalist (as one of our members did) how many human babies should be allowed to die of malaria to save a predatory bird, the reaction will probably be a stunned silence. Yet, such a tradeoff is tacitly approved by today's environmental priesthood, and accepted by scientists who should know what they are doing.

The babies are dying in vain. An article from the DDP archives is highly pertinent as the world elite contemplates a total ban on DDT: ``Remembering Silent Spring and Its Consequences'' by J. Gordon Edwards, presented at the 1996 meeting. (Audio and image files available on CD-ROM, $5 postpaid.)

Dr. Edwards writes: ``In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, and because of my 25 years of nature study I expected to be delighted....It didn't take long to learn that she had filled the book with great numbers of untruthful things. Vice President Al Gore has stated that Rachel Carson turned his life around. She turned mine around, too, but in the opposite direction,...from an 'environmentalist' to a scientist with a desire to keep truth in science and environmentalism.''

``I discovered,'' Dr. Edwards states, ``that many 'scientists' were going along with the propaganda in order to get paid for tendentious 'experiments' that would support untruthful allegations.'' Audubon refused his offer to write ``the other side of the DDT story.'' Philip Abelson, editor of Science, informed Dr. Thomas Jukes that the journal would never publish any non-antagonistic article about DDT. The New York Times and the Audubon Society asserted that Edwards and Jukes, among others, were ``paid by the pesticide industry to lie about the Christmas Bird Counts showing increased numbers of birds during the DDT years.'' The scientists won a libel suit in federal court.

These are some of the lies that Dr. Edwards refutes:

Rachel Carson dedicated her book to Albert Schweitzer, who said ``Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.''

``Miss Carson knew,'' Edwards states, that ``he was referring to atomic warfare when she quoted that, but she implied that he meant there were deadly hazards from pesticides such as DDT. I got a copy of Schweitzer's autobiography to see if he really mentioned DDT. He did, writing (p. 262): 'How much labor and waste of time these wicked insects do cause us...but a ray of hope, in the use of DDT, is now held out to us'.''

DDP 2000 MEETING SCHEDULED

Mark your calendars: the 17th annual meeting of DDP will be held at the San Francisco Airport Marriott June 30-July 2, 2000.

DDP, 1601 N. Tucson Blvd. Suite 9, Tucson, AZ 85716, (520)325-2680, www.oism.org/ddp.