Rachel Carson, the naturalist whose landmark book, "Silent Spring," is credited with launching the global environmental movement, halting the indiscriminate use of pesticides in the United States and saving the bald eagle, would have turned 100 on Sunday. To mark the occasion, her former employer, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is hosting birthday events around the country. The U.S. House of Representatives voted to name a post office after Carson in her hometown of Springdale, Pa. And Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.) drafted a resolution celebrating her "legacy of scientific rigor coupled with poetic sensibility."
But every party has a pooper, and this time it's Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who is blocking the House bill and Cardin's resolution from consideration in the Senate. He characterizes Carson as an alarmist crank and her book as "the catalyst in the deadly worldwide stigmatization against insecticides, especially DDT."
Coburn's language recalls the criticisms hurled at Carson after her book was published in 1962. Robert White Stevens, a scientist with the chemical company American Cyanamid, wrote that if it were up to Carson, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Others questioned her credentials, because her specialties were marine biology and zoology, not biochemistry. Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson said she was "probably a Communist."
Still, the book led to a review of federal pesticide policy. DDT was banned, the bald eagle rebounded and Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- all after her death from breast cancer in 1964.
Four decades later, with malaria claiming the lives of millions of African children, public health advocates began a campaign to rehabilitate DDT's reputation. Though international agreements prohibit agricultural spraying of DDT, it can be used to fight malaria. But even the poor nations ravaged by the pandemic are reluctant to use DDT. Some critics, including Coburn, blame that squarely on Rachel Carson.
Coburn, who is a doctor, has worked to reform federally funded malaria control programs. "The environmentalist lobby, still tainted by Rachel Carson's junk science, is aggressively opposing these efforts -- at the cost of many lives," his Web site says.
"DDT [sprayed in small, diluted amounts on the inside of houses] is the cheapest and most effective insecticide in the world for use in mosquito control," the Web site says. Last fall, the World Health Organization endorsed wider use of DDT to fight malaria.
It's not likely Coburn or WHO would have gotten an argument from Carson, who was more concerned with mass spraying of food crops and mosquito-abatement efforts that involved tanker trucks spewing dense clouds of DDT. Carson did not argue that pesticides should be banned, only that they should be applied with restraint.
"Practical advice should be, 'Spray as little as you possibly can,' " she wrote, "rather than, 'Spray to the limit of your capacity.' "
She would have applauded, for example, the recent ban on residential use of the pesticide diazinon, which is toxic to songbirds and other wildlife as well as to the mole crickets and chinch bugs it targeted. But if millions of children could be saved by spraying diluted amounts of DDT on the walls of their homes, we think Rachel Carson would be OK with that.