Put this under the category of “things I’ve meant to do for a long time”: I finally published (under my Endless Sky Books imprint) a new edition of The Haunted Horn, a modern-day middle-grade ghost …
The Shards of Excalibur audiobooks, narrated by the wonderful Elizabeth Klett, are now available again after being off the market for a short while. Best of all, while they’re once more on Audible.com and Audible.ca, you …
The official press release from the publisher says it all: Award-winning Canadian author, and host of The Worldshapers podcast, Edward Willett, is joining the Tuscany Bay Books family in 2026 with his The Helix War series. Tuscany Bay Books …
It’s been quite the year for reprints of some of my older novels, thanks to modern technology, and now there’s another: Magebane, the stand-alone steampunk-tinged fantasy I originally wrote for DAW Books, under the pseudonym …
Fairly hard on the heels of the new edition of my second novel, The Dark Unicorn, I’ve now released a new edition of the first of my novels published by DAW Books in New York. …
I’ve been meaning to create a new edition of my second novel, The Dark Unicorn, for a long time, and I finally did it, bringing it out in paperback and ebook (and AI-narrated audiobook) through …
Previous
Next
Taking on an environmentalist icon
John Tierney of the New York Times dares to point out the feet of clay of environmentalist legend Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. A sample:
The obsession with eliminating minute risks from synthetic chemicals has wasted vast sums of money: environmental experts complain that the billions spent cleaning up Superfund sites would be better spent on more serious dangers.
The human costs have been horrific in the poor countries where malaria returned after DDT spraying was abandoned. Malariologists have made a little headway recently in restoring this weapon against the disease, but they’ve had to fight against Ms. Carson’s disciples who still divide the world into good and bad chemicals, with DDT in their fearsome “dirty dozen.”
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Tierney has additional posts on the subject at his blog, TierneyLab.
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2007/06/taking-on-an-environmentalist-icon/
2 comments
I confess I haven’t researched the topic enough to have an informed opinion. But I’m generally a fan of Tierney’s science writing, and quite startled to see this counter-the-usual-wisdom article on Carson in the New York Times, which is why I linked to it.
He doesn’t note that in many countries, DDT wasn’t banned for years or even decades after Silent Spring. And there’s no mention of mosquitoes developing a resistance as another reason why malaria may be making a comeback.
And don’t get me started on the whole “natural carcinogens” thing. Of course almost everything is naturally occurring, and of course it depends on how much we ingest. But the fact is, we create versions of these chemicals that are much more concentrated and then put ourselves into situations where they can’t be avoided.
Carson was a scientist, but spent most of her working career as a writer. It’s fine to call out her mistakes, but not with a load of other errors and omissions.
D