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Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)
DDT is a powerful insecticide that was widely used around the world for agricultural and pest control purposes from World War II through the 1980s. It made food production more efficient and helped eliminate malaria in many parts of the world, but mosquitos developed resistance to it within a few years. It also proved extremely toxic to wildlife, as Rachel Carson detailed in her classic 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson’s work contributed to the EPA’s decision to ban DDT in 1972.
DDT Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by DDT or refer to DDT. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 7
Quotes
Sometimes reopening an old debate can serve present purposes. […] 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.
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The Kennedy PSAC report, Use of Pesticides: A Report of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, is notable in hindsight as much for what it did not do as for what it did. The scientists did not claim that the hazards of persistent pesticides were “proven,” “demonstrated,” “certain,” or even well understood; they simply concluded that the weight of evidence was sufficient to warrant policy action to control DDT.
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Both science and democracy worked as they were supposed to.
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So Sri Lanka didn’t stop using DDT because of what the United States did, or for any other reason. DDT stopped working, but they kept using it anyway. We can surmise why: since DDT had appeared to work at first, officials were reluctant to give it up, even as malaria became resurgent. It took a long time for people to admit defeat—to accept that tiny mosquitoes were in their own way stronger than us. As a WHO committee concluded in 1976, “It is finally becoming acknowledged that resistance is probably the biggest single obstacle in the struggle against vector-borne disease and is mainly responsible for preventing successful malaria eradication in many countries.”
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Accepting that by-products of industrial civilization were irreparably damaging the global environment was to accept the reality of market failure. It was to acknowledge the limits of free market capitalism.
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DDT Term Timeline in Merchants of Doubt
The timeline below shows where the term DDT appears in Merchants of Doubt. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 7
...in her book Silent Spring. Her work convinced the government to ban the dangerous pesticide DDT in the 1970s. But 30 years later, conservatives on the internet started accusing Carson of...
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Silent Spring and the President’s Science Advisory Committee. DDT use became widespread during World War II, when other pesticides were scarce. Experiments showed that...
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In 1962, Carson published Silent Spring in The New Yorker. She showed how DDT killed fish, people’s pets, and key pollinating insects. Since DDT didn’t naturally break down, it...
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...even some fellow scientists—started attacking her. Then, the official President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) studied DDT and concluded that the government should regulate pesticides immediately, because they pose such great risks...
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...early 2000s, conservatives started calling Rachel Carson a mass murderer. They asserted (without evidence) that DDT is safe and would have completely eradicated malaria if it weren’t banned. Mainstream newspapers like...
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In fact, world health authorities gave up on fighting malaria through DDT four years before DDT was banned. They had successfully eradicated malaria in most countries, but...
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I. L. Baldwin, the bacteriologist cited by Rachel Carson’s 21st-century detractors, never even researched DDT. Instead, he just wrote a mildly critical book review about Silent Spring. He called the...
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Denial as Political Strategy. Oreskes and Conway note that the campaign to defend DDT was also unique because, when it started, the science was long settled and Rachel Carson...
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Conclusion
...Nixon disbanded the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), which had made the regulation process for DDT so efficient. Meanwhile, corporations and conservative donors realized that they could undermine science by channeling...
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