by Larry Bell
Just as everything humans have done in the name of industrial progress hasn't been kind to the environment, it shouldn't be assumed that everything is bad either. Yet the modern-day environmental activist movement tends not to see it that way.
[But the fact is] as civilizations have evolved, so have sanitary conditions. Life expectancies have more than doubled since times when raw sewage was heaped upon the streets of grand Greek and Roman empires and plagues and famines devastated rural populations.
There are big differences between the responsible environmental stewardship ideals that most of us subscribe to, and the moralistic, anti-development, obstructionist activism that exemplifies much of today's environmental zealotry. Often premised on pseudoscientific rationale, publicized through expensive ad campaigns and lawyered up for battle, private and public green activism is asserting ever-expanding, and sometimes hazardous, influences over broad aspects of our lives.
The beginning of the environmental movement is conventionally associated with a virtual flood of reaction to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring after it first appeared in 1963. The book called attention to the thinning of eggshells among certain bird species, which threatened their existence, along with alleged toxic problems throughout the food chain attributed to crop spraying of the pesticide DDT. These claims are clearly credited with a prohibition against DDT use in the U.S. since 1972, and a similar ban in Europe.
The U.S. DDT prohibition was issued in a decision by then EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus following a long hearing on risks and benefits of the material. But after calling 125 witnesses and reviewing 9,362 pages of testimony, Judge Edmund Sweeney, the appointed hearing examiner, had actually concluded that alarm was unwarranted: First, DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man; second, DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man; and third, the use of DDT under the registrations involved does not have a deleterious effect on fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.
The World Health Organization pleaded at the EPA hearings that DDT was very beneficial in fighting malaria in many parts of the world and should not be banned, stating that withdrawal of its use would be "... a major tragedy in the chapter of human health." Still, due to threatened European trade restrictions against countries that used the chemical, African nations terminated use of the effective mosquito pesticide for malaria control.
Since that time death rates from the disease have increased dramatically, and are now estimated to be between 155,000 and 310,000 annually, according to data collected at 41 African sites from 1997 to 2002. The vast majority of these victims are desperately poor, including large numbers of young children and elderly who are especially vulnerable.
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