83 pages • 2 hours read
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
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Chapter 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Denial Rides Again: The Revisionist Attack on Rachel Carson”
Chapter 7, in part, focuses on Rachel Carson:
In Silent Spring…Carson explained how pesticides were accumulating in the food chain, damaging the environment, and threatening even the symbol of American freedom: the bald eagle. Although the pesticide industry tried 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 scientific evidence was sufficient to warrant the banning of the pesticide DDT in America (216).
However, DDT was permitted to be sold to the World Health Organization to help stop malaria in Africa by killing mosquitos.
In 2007, conservative and libertarian think tanks labelled Carson a murderer because she generated hysteria over DDT which led to millions of people dying from malaria as well as other articles supporting the use of DDT:
In the demonizing of Rachel Carson, free marketeers realized that if you could convince people that an example of successful government regulation wasn’t, in fact, successful—that it was actually a mistake—you could strengthen the argument against regulation in general (217).
“Silent Spring and the President’s Science Advisory Committee”
DDT was created in 1873 but started being widely used in 1940, when it was discovered it killed many pests, including mosquitos and lice responsible for diseases such as malaria and typhus.
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