Skip to main content

The Silent Spring dilemma

I was listening to a programme on the radio the other day about Rachel Carson, arguably one of the founders of the environmental movement, whose 1960s book Silent Spring had such a huge influence, particularly on the banning of DDT. The programme was little short of a hagiography. You would not think, listening to it, that there was any controversy about Carson's influence - yet some would say that she was responsible for millions of deaths.

There is no doubt at all that the way DDT was being used in some countries when Carson wrote her book - in America in particular - was wrong. This potent compound was being sprayed in a blanket fashion as an agricultural pesticide and was causing much damage to the environment and quite possibly to people. This was, without doubt, dire - and Carson did the world a favour by pointing out the terrible consequences, like the eponymous idea of killing the birds and producing a 'silent spring.'

However, it is also true that used in a controlled fashion, targeted on areas where mosquitoes breed, DDT was a very effective way of reducing the spread of malaria. Had it not been banned, a ban instituted in large part as a reaction to Silent Spring, and had it been used in an appropriately controlled way, there would have been millions of lived saved.

This Silent Spring dilemma illustrates the biggest problem the traditional green movement has. It is often based on knee-jerk reactions to words and concepts. Natural good; artificial bad. Chemical bad (forgetting that every substance we eat, drink and breathe is made of chemicals). Organic good, intensive bad. Burning wood good, using nuclear power bad. And, in this case, pesticide very bad. If we really want to be green and be rational we need to think through the implications of words in context, not just react to the words themselves. Most things are good in some circumstances and bad in others. Often it's a case that doing something to excess is bad, while doing it in a controlled way is good.

The devil is in the detail. Unless we can get down to that detail and really understand the science that often lurks behind it, we will be like people who respond to advertising and marketing, rather than understanding what's really good for us. And surely an ignorant, marketing-led response not the right way to be green?

This has been a green heretic production.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope