Rachel Carson was a courageous woman who in the early 1960s called attention to the harms of indiscriminate pesticide use. In Silent Spring, a beautiful book about a dreadful topic, she explained how pesticides were accumulating in the food chain, damaging the natural environment, and threatening even the symbol of American freedom, the bald eagle. In spite of industry attempts to paint her as a hysterical female, her work was affirmed by the President’s Science Advisory Committee and in 1972 the EPA concluded that the scientific evidence was sufficient to warrant the banning of the pesticide DDT in America.
In 2007, the Internet was flooded with the assertion that Carson was a mass murderer, worse than Hitler because Silent Spring led to the banning of DDT, without which millions of Africans died of malaria. The Competitive Enterprise Institute who had previously defended tobacco and doubted the reality of global warming said that she was wrong and had sounded a false alarm. Why did the conservative and Libertarian think tanks reopen an old debate? In demonizing
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Accepting that their ends justified their means, they adopted the tactics of their enemy, the very things they had hated Soviet Communism for: its lies, deceit and denial of the very realities it had created. In defending what they saw as liberty, free from government intervention, they allowed business practices to ignore the real cost of doing business, those “externalities” leading to “social costs” which have now come back to haunt us. Liberty also requires responsibility but in their greed and ideology, they ignored the massive damage that their unfettered free-market economies were