The 45th anniversary of the publishing of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which kicked off the Environmentalist movement and the war on DDT and synthetic chemicals in general, has been variously marked by various authors with triumph, determination, resignation, skepticism, shock and horror.
As a follow-up to my previous (and lengthy) post on DDT and the principled ignorance of ideological Environmentalism, here is an article by New York Times science writer John Tierney, on Carson’s mix of science and pseudoscience (and outright falsehood) in her book. He also very properly discusses the flip-sides of the coin concerning synthetic chemicals and health risks to humans and animal life (and follows it up with a blogpost on natural pesticides):
1. A great many naturally occuring compounds in the environment are just as dangerous (carcinogenic or otherwise toxic), and in terms of numbers and abundance, they dwarf man-made compounds. In the average American diet, it’s 9,999:1 for natural to man-made pesticides ingested. If they’re going to ban chemicals on the grounds of concern for human health, they should start with things like botulism toxin. Hell, why stop there? Eradicate E.coli, Giardia or… gasp…. malaria while you’re at it. And how many of these crusaders smoke, eh?
2. Proper use of synthetic (or, for that matter, natural) chemicals effectively removes the vast majority of risk to humans. Don’t spray chemicals every day when you only need to do it once a week. Etc.
3. Linked with the last point: dosage matters. Eating twelve pounds of yellow mustard (or all the bark on the tree you’re hugging) in a week or even a month probably could give you cancer. But twelve pounds of mustard spread over the course of 80 years is not a cancer risk. Remember that when scientists test a compound for cancer risk, not only are they giving it to mice, they give it to mice that are genetically engineered to get cancer at the drop of a hat, and then they feed them quantities of the compound that would make your head spin (or stomach tremble). That something causes cancer in mice is less of an issue these days than how, and how easily, it causes what kind of cancer.
4. The trade-off of longer-term health risks like many cancers are, on a rational analysis, a good thing when swapped for mass death from preventable diseases, malnutrition or irrepairable injury at younger ages. E.g. DDT and malaria. Because in the vast majority of cases, far fewer people are harmed by (much less die from) a chemical that prevents injury, disease or death in very large numbers of people.
5. Don’t forget your biology, folks: you constantly ingest countless, unidentified toxins, germs and non-nutritional, non-life-promoting things. For that reason, you (and all other vertebrates) have both an immune system and a liver. Their jobs are to weed out the bad stuff and retain the good stuff. (Non-vertebrate organisms almost assuredly have physiologically or functionally similar systems; I’m just not remembering my invertebrate immunology very well right now).
The very existence (without exception) and long evolutionary history of such organs and systems across the animal world shows that the "natural" condition for humans and all life is to be constantly fending off "natural" things that would otherwise harm or kill you from the inside out - purposefully, in the case of parasites, germs and diseases, which are other organisms "making a living" off of you, or non-purposefully but factually, in the case of inert elements, compounds and molecules.
Nature ain’t a paradise, much less an Eden, folks. It’s like that documentary about a washed-up actor-turned-filmmaker who goes to live with grizzley bears out in the boondocks. He gets amazing footage, but somewhere along the line he snaps, starts to think the bears are intelligent and capable of human-like emotions like sympathy - and then he gets eaten by a bear.
6. Also remember, none of the above obviates an individual or a corporation from responsibility for their actions, intended or unintended, and culpability if other individuals are harmed. Exposing other people (without their permission) to chemicals known to be highly toxic is an infringement of people’s individual rights.
It’s like putting your trash on your neighbor’s property - whether intentionally or by accident, just a little or the contents of your entire garage - it’s in principle wrong. The question of consequences is then at your neighbor’s discretion. He might not care, or even mention, if some of your lawn clippings get blown in by the wind. He might gripe at you out for letting your dog crap on his lawn, get pissed and demand repair and apology if your kid sends a baseball through his livingroom window, or condemn you and prosecute you to the full extent of the law for pouring out every cleaner, solvent, paint, oil and liquid chemical in your possession into his backyard well and then denying you did it. (Such was the case of Pacific Gas & Electric off-loading tons of the hugely toxic hexavalent chromium into the local water supply, dramatized in the movie Erin Brockovich).
7. Finally, don’t forget the power of choice, and the fact that choices are, by nature, the province of individuals, just like thinking is a totally private act (metaphors and bastardizations of language utterly notwithstanding). If, for whatever your reason (rational or irrational), you’d rather risk not using Chemical C, and take your chances getting Bad Effect E (either flying solo against nature, or using other means of preventing E), that’s totally your choice. No one has the right to take that away from you. (Athough our government and others have long since dispensed with this principle, it’s still right). And, assuming a healthy, sane and long-term outlook on life, the rational choice will necessarily differ depending on your circumstances.
Personally, I’ve never touched DDT, nor do I have plans to, nor do I take any precautions against contracting malaria when I’m at home in the US. This is because my odds of contracting it are next to nil - it was effectively eradicated in the US in the early 20th c (in large part from DDT), and most of the couple-dozen annual cases in the US are in (or tracable to) travelers returning from abroad. So, there’s a miniscule chance. But weighed against the hassle of obtaining DDT (even if it was sold next to Raid in the grocery store), actually using it, and the cost and time involved for me personally, as well as potential health risks (though all are quite low), and inconveniences like unpleasant odors from such chemicals, it’s not currently worth it to me.
It’s only when the threat of short-term harm is lifted that one can reasonable consider long-term effects like cancer risk and toxicity. This is what anti-manmade-chemical crusaders forget: first, it’s each person’s choice what to do with their life, and how to conduct it, and on what principles, and for what purposes; second (and this is the harder point), a person’s actions quite reasonably vary by context - there are no super-commandments, no intrinsic, universal, a-contextual principles that must be obeyed no matter what your circumstances (particularly given the existence of choice). Blanketing a countryside in even moderately harmful synthetic chemicals may well be the best thing to do - if an infestation of insects or bacteria is destroying a person’s/region’s/country’s only supply of some critical food source (all else equal - and the point of contingency planning, long-term thinking, and surplus and savings is to ensure that all else is not equal, that you are increasingly able to avoid perilous circumstances like this). Better to grapple with a long-term, low-rate risk than stand by in contaminant-free self-righteousness as lots of people are harmed, incapacitated, or killed by an imminently preventable danger.
And what of those people that don’t stand by, but actively thwart others’ actions to protect and promote their own lives? Misanthropists? Sadists? Killers, I say. Doesn’t matter if you bomb a factory or enlist the government to cripple the factory (under threat of force) for you. The principle and purpose are the same.
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