DDT and NGOs

This TCS piece is a devastating indictment of many NGO's, environmental groups, and other left wing organizations.

Unfortunately, however, good intentions sometimes go awry. Clever appeals often mask a hidden agenda that actually makes life infinitely worse for people on the ultimate "receiving end" of our kind-hearted donations.

And what fascist or communist state didn't rise to power on the claim that they would help "the little people" and alleviate suffering?

Environmental groups like Friends of the Earth importune us for funds to help them battle proposed hydroelectric, coal, gas and nuclear power plants in India and Africa. Put solar panels on huts instead, preserve indigenous lifestyles, they plead. And the money rolls in -- from people, companies and foundations -- to the tune of over $4 billion a year to U.S. eco-groups alone.

The donors get warm fuzzies. The activist groups ramp up another campaign. And 2 billion people in Africa, Asia and Latin America continue to live without electricity -- and without lights, refrigeration, hospitals, water purification or better jobs.

Not that the left really cares. Extra poverty and death just means they can feel more self-righteous about the evils of capitalism. As we used to tell these people in Appalachia, "Go help someone else. We done been helped to death."

Opposition to these electrical energy projects is "a crime against humanity," a man in Gujarat, India says angrily. "People cut down our trees, because they don't have electricity," Uganda's Gordon Mwesigye points out, "and our country loses its wildlife habitats and the health and economic benefits that abundant electricity brings."

A crime against humanity is a very apt description.

We used DDT to eliminate malaria in the United States. Now environmental activists can afford to rail against pesticide use in Africa, while they enjoy all the comforts that our high-tech, malaria-free society bestows upon them. Meanwhile, 2 million Africans die every year from this dreaded disease. Over 200 million get so sick each year they can't work, go to school, care for their families or tend their fields for weeks or months on end.

But their predatory birds are healthy! After all, just what are 2 million dead Africans worth to an environmentalist? It just reduces the pressures on much more deserving and potentially threatened species.

Fifi Kobusingye ran into one of these activists in the Kampala, Uganda airport this past November. "You don't have malaria," she told the woman, "because you used DDT." The woman replied, "But we lost our birds" -- referring to erroneous claims by Rachel Carson and others that DDT had killed birds and thinned eggshells.

"Well, I lost my son and nephew, and my friend lost her daughter," Ms. Kobusingye responded. "Don't talk to me about birds."

Let's see, 2 million dead a year in Africa, times about 40 years since DDT was nixed, is 80 million people. Malaria seems a far bigger killer in the latter half of the 20th century than Hitler ever was. This Scientist article (registration required) makes it plain that DDT is not the "Hitler" of chemicals.

Since starring as the lead villain in Rachel Carson's seminal environmentalist text, Silent Spring, the insecticide DDT is to environmental destruction what Hitler is to murderous dictators.

DDT=Hitler! Such a simple message. It's the same thing they keep saying about Bush despite the fact that it was Saddam filling all the mass graves. But as in so many areas, the left gets this one exactly backwards too.

However, while Hitler undoubtedly oversaw the murder of up to six million Jews, it is unclear what DDT actually did to earn its fearsome reputation. Indeed, DDT played a crucial part in the war against Hitler. In the Pacific arena, malaria was decimating Allied forces until DDT bombs were dropped to clear mosquitoes ahead of advancing troops.

In the eyes of anti-capitalist anti-human environmentalists this may be the most evil thing that DDT did. After all, if it helps advance freedom, capitalism, or US military power then it's got to be evil.

Postwar, DDT hastened malaria's elimination from Europe and North America and proved highly effective against agricultural pests. These successes prompted the World Health Organization to launch the wildly ambitious Global Malaria Eradication Program in 1955. Despite saving tens of millions of lives and clearing malaria from large swaths of the world, the pesticide did not eradicate the disease: Mosquito populations quickly became resistant to DDT, proving too much for the DDT-dependent program. WHO abandoned the plan in the 1960s.

This abandonment is considered by many to be one of the most devastatingly bad decisions ever made. Malaria rebounded in the areas where people had already lost their necessary ongoing accommodation with it, leaving them as susceptible as a Norwegian vacationing in Africa.

But this was a "mistake" only in that the eradication program was less successful than it might have been. "If one retrospectively supplants the unrealistic goal of eradication with one of control," wrote malariologist J. Kevin Baird, "the campaign appears brilliantly successful."

The UN wouldn't know a success if they were slapped in the face with it. Obviously the DDT manufacturers and users should've prefigured Saddam's machinations and just bought off half the UN. Although it would be unusual to bribe the UN into acquiescence to save millions of lives, rather than get kickbacks for genocide.

Although the US Environmental Protection Agency classified DDT as a probable carcinogen, based on high-dose animal tests, extrapolations to humans reveal that the carcinogenic risk posed by the average daily intake of DDT during the agricultural era was a 50th of that posed by the natural toxins in the coffee we drink, and half that from the celery we eat.

Note for the uninformed. Plants contain carcinogens. They depend on chemical defenses to avoid being eaten. Brocolli is a great source of natural dioxin. And orange juice is even worse than coffee. But they aren't called "pesticides" so these compounds are ok with the environmentalists, who don't think natural things kill you, for some reason.

In 1999, the US National Research Council reported no association between environmental DDT levels and human cancers. The only health problem associated with the comparatively tiny quantities of DDT used in antimalarial operations is a reduced duration of lactation in nursing mothers, but to a degree that has no measurable consequences on infant health. Any such downsides must be weighed against the undoubted benefits of DDT in controlling malaria, which still kills three million people annually, mostly children.

Over a forty year span that would come to about 80 million in Africa, 120 million worldwide. If you add that to the death by deicide figure of about 170 million dead through totalitarian goverments, you're up to 290 million in just this century, all killed by misguided utopianism and unfounded fears.

If scientists made a "mistake" with DDT, it is that they let it be snatched from their grasp by the force of erroneous popular opinion. Negative perceptions of DDT endured beyond the agricultural ban and soon impinged on public health applications. Many malaria- ridden countries scaled down or stopped DDT spraying, following pressure from Western aid organizations. DDT's continued effectiveness is further undermined by the lack of even an inventory of the mosquito populations that remain susceptible to it.

And so the deaths from malaria shot back up, and have remained high ever since. Here's another source

Six years after the United States banned DDT, there were 800 million cases of malaria and 8.2 million deaths per year.

Dixy Lee Ray,Trashing The Planet, p.69.

With all the lies and deception that went on during the effort to get DDT banned the methodology blueprint for pushing the environmental agenda was born.

A leading spokesman for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) said in 1969, "If the environmentalists win on DDT they will achieve, and probably retain in other environmental ,issues, a level of authority they have never had before. In a sense, then, much more is at stake than DDT." (CR, Page 24975)

The environmentalist's haven't slowed down a bit.

Almost all the 8.2 million people, that die each year, quoted from Dr. Ray's book are black people or brown people.

Yet the environmentalists who caused the abandonment of DDT and thus this rate of death (which dropped to 3 million, due to substituting less effective pesticides and the simple fact that you can only kill a person once) were out protesting the Iraq war, saying it was Bush who was killing the black and brown people, despite the fact that it was Saddam who was filling mass graves full of them.

Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring," the pseudo-scientific book that gave the Greens the ammunition they needed, the media, who are willing accomplices to the Green deception and the Socialists of the world are all responsible for the deaths of millions of humans. Let's forget that in 1970 the National Academy of Sciences had written, "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. In little more than two decades DDT has prevented 500 million deaths, due to malaria, that would otherwise have been inevitable."

Well, if the environmentalists could've acted soon, maybe they could've nailed those 500 million too. Drats!

So let's let the Green's celebrate Earth Day's and let the German Green Party help destroy the UN and NATO. And let's light a candle for all the humans that have died and will die so the elite white city slickers can go on a picnic and throw around a frisbee.§

That about sums it up, but a few more tidbits are here.

Somewhere on the Earth, on average every 12 seconds, a child dies of DDT-preventable malaria. The United States National Academy of Sciences estimated that DDT saved 500 million lives before it was banned. The discoverer of DDT was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Well, the left doesn't have time for such trivial issues, since they're completely consumed with 1 US soldier dying per day. That's 7,200 deaths from malaria for every US soldier. Although I can't speak highly enough about our troops, it is a bit mystifying why so many on the left who loathe and despise our soldiers would evince more concern over the welfare of any one of them as opposed to the 7,200 black and brown children who these anti-Americans claim to defend. Must be the inumeracy and blind hatred of America so common on the left.

Then came Silent Spring — a book filled with deliberate falsehoods and blatantly marketed unreasoning and unjustified fear. The burgeoning enviro movement chose these lies for one of their first big campaigns. This campaign coincided with the rise of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA was in search of a big win with which to promote itself. The EPA studied the subject and its own scientific review board reported that - DDT is harmless to the environment and is a very beneficial substance that should not be banned.

Since when has a deliberate falsohood every bothered a leftist when the subsequent conclusions looked to give them power and authority, or at least something to whine about all day?

Politics prevailed, however, over reason. DDT was banned, and the U.S. government spread that ban throughout the world by tying it to all sorts of international programs.

The result: Malaria, which was well on the way to control and eradication, now afflicts 250 million adults and kills about 3 million children per year. The deaths of children alone make this the most heinous act of technological genocide the world has ever known. It is the second-most extensive overall act of genocide — surpassed only by the reigns of terror under Communism in Red China.

Yet the left fully supports the ban, almost as strongly as they supported Saddam. I think they're fast running out of even a pretense of morality. Given their track record of "help", I would think any country that cares about it's future would slam the door in the face of all these "activists" that the NGOs are sending abroad.