Ddt Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Ddt. Here they are! All 71 of them:

Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler,
Michael Crichton (State of Fear)
...los PCB eran fluidos que nunca dejaban de lubricar; los PBDE, aislantes que nunca dejaban de evitar que el plástico se derritiera, y el DDT, un pesticida que nunca dejaba de matar. Como tales, ahora resultan difíciles de destruir; algunos, como los PCB, apenas muestran signo alguno de biodegradarse.
Alan Weisman (The World Without Us)
...that language may be a compound code, and that the discovery of an enormous complexity beneath a simple surface may well be more dismaying than delightful. E.g.: the maze of termite tunnels in your joist, the intricate cancer in her perfect breast, the psychopathology of everyday life, the Auschwitz in an anthill casually DDT'd by a child, the rage of atoms in a drop of ink - in short, anything examined curiously enough.
John Barth
based on UN statistics, is that before the DDT ban, malaria had become almost a minor illness. Fifty thousand deaths a year worldwide. A few years later, it was once again a global scourge. Fifty million people have died since the ban,
Michael Crichton (State of Fear)
DDT stood for Dangerous Darrell Thomas. Thomas had given himself the name when he was riding with a motorcycle club and was interviewed for a public radio magazine. The magazine writer got it wrong, though, and referred to him as TDT--Terrible Darrell Thompson--which lost something of its intent when expressed as initials; and since the writer got the last name wrong, too, Thomas never again trusted the media.
John Sandford (Chosen Prey (Lucas Davenport, #12))
Technological errors made by government, industry [DDT, ABM, SST, CIA, etc.] are those of children, who, even thought they don't know what the score is, go on playing pre-technological games of power and profit.
John Cage (M: Writings '67–'72)
El análisis de los tejidos en descomposición de los cadáveres de hipopótamo revela cuál es el secreto del perfecto ramo de flores: el DDT y la dieldrina —esta última cuarenta veces más peligrosa—, dos pesticidas prohibidos en los países cuyos mercados han hecho de Kenia el principal exportador de rosas del mundo. Mucho después de que los humanos, e incluso los animales y las rosas, hayan desaparecido, probablemente la dieldrina, una ingeniosamente estable molécula manufacturada, seguirá estando presente.
Alan Weisman (El mundo sin nosotros (Spanish Edition))
I'm cracking up in this fucking Fishbinder Problem Box. A terrible seizure is coming on, I can feel its sinister pulsation creeping up my spine as I gnaw my tail apprehensively, grinding my teeth with anxiety, wishing I had some DDT to drown these rats in misery, repetitive cycles of poetry, symptoms of psychotic activity, rhyming of lines endlessly, results in Mazes D and E, dervish spinning round me vis-a-vis, Poole, Broome, Helvicki, help me, please, somebody, take a look at my pedigree, Albino Number 243, Doctor of Psychology, rashes, warts, and a small goatee, expert in lobotomy, performed six times on a chimpanzee, sweet land of liberty, Jesus this is agony, poisonous snake subfamily, here he comes after me!
William Kotzwinkle (Dr. Rat)
The day may come when the obese people of the world must give up diets, since metabolizing their fat deposits will lead to DDT poisoning. But, on the bright side, it is clear that fewer and fewer people in the future will be obese!
Paul R. Ehrlich (The Population Bomb)
In the view of conservationists, there is something special about dams, something—as conservation problems go—that is disproportionately and metaphysically sinister. The outermost circle of the Devil’s world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people—and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam.
John McPhee (Encounters with the Archdruid)
There’s nothing cooler than putting the planet before people. The problem with this kind of coolness is that it’s wrong and often deadly. How many have died because it became cool to demonize DDT? Millions of lives were saved by that evil chemical, which killed malaria-carrying mosquitoes before the cool demonized it.
Greg Gutfeld (Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You)
Histories of the Kennedy Space Center acknowledge without exaggeration that the obstacle posed by the mosquitoes was so serious that NASA quite literally could not have put a man on the moon by Kennedy's "before the decade is out" deadline without the invention of DDT. In this way, the challenges of spaceflight reveal themselves to be distinctly terrestrial.
Margaret Lazarus Dean (Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight)
Since the progressive doctrine of The Silent Spring was implemented, three million people have died of malaria every year for more than thirty years, adding up to a total now of nearly 100 million. Ninety-five percent of the victims have been black African children under the age of five. As a footnote to this tragedy, Carson’s claim that DDT was harmful to birds has since been discredited.
David Horowitz (The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings)
After the political success of the anti-DDT crusade by environmentalists, the banning of this insecticide was followed by a resurgence of malaria, taking millions of lives, even in countries where the disease had been all but eradicated. Rachel Carson may have been responsible for more deaths of human beings than anyone without an army. Yet she remains a revered figure among environmental crusaders.
Thomas Sowell (Intellectuals and Society)
Aminotriazole (herbicide used on cranberry crops, causing the “cranberry scare’” of 1959) DDT (widely known after Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring) Nitrites (a meat preservative and color and flavor enhancer used in hot dogs and bacon) Red Dye Number 2 Artificial sweeteners (including cyclamates and saccharin) Dioxin (a contaminant of industrial processes and of Agent Orange, a defoliant used during the Vietnam War) Aflatoxin (a fungal toxin found on moldy peanuts and corn)
T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
He looked like the wrathful Old Testament God getting ready to throw down some well-deserved punishment on the earth. “This might be hard to understand, lady. But in war, you do the right thing, whatever it takes, and if you come out alive, you know how easy you could have screwed up, so bragging on it is dead-solid wrong. Only assholes do that. I don’t Facebook. Don’t tweet. Don’t Instagram. I don’t talk about the past, and it pisses me off that you remembered that old DDT thing and were able to find that newspaper photo.
Dean Koontz (The Silent Corner (Jane Hawk, #1))
Big Yellow Taxi They paved paradise Put up a parking lot With a pink hotel, a boutique And a swinging hot spot Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paved paradise Put up a parking lot They took all the trees Put 'em in a tree museum And they charged the people A dollar and a half just to see 'em Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paved paradise Put up a parking lot Hey farmer, farmer Put away the DDT now Give me spots on my apples But leave me the birds and the bees, please Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paved paradise Put up a parking lot Late last night I heard the screen door slam And a big yellow taxi Took away my old man Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paved paradise Put up a parking lot I said, "Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paved paradise Put up a parking lot" They paved paradise Put up a parking lot They paved paradise Put up a parking lot
Joni Mitchell
By 2011, enough data had been accumulated to show that some risk existed due to long-term, heavy use of mobile phones, compelling the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, to classify mobile cell phone radiation in the Group 2B category, indicating a possible carcinogen (a substance or source of exposure that can cause cancer).14 This is the same category as DDT, lead, engine exhaust, chloroform, and glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup®). Later, in 2016, a $25 million study conducted by the National Toxicology Program (NTP), part of the National Institutes of Health, confirmed what many have believed for years—that exposure to EMF radiation emitted from cell phones can lead to serious health issues including brain and heart tumors.
Daniel T. DeBaun (Radiation Nation: Complete Guide to EMF Protection & Safety - The Proven Health Risks of EMF Radiation & What You Can Do to Protect Yourself & Family)
Meanwhile we find ourselves confronted by a most disturbing moral problem. We know that the pursuit of good ends does not justify the employment of bad means. But what about those situations, now of such frequent occurrence, in which good means have end results which turn out to be bad? For example, we go to a tropical island and with the aid of DDT we stamp out malaria and, in two or three years, save hundreds of thousands of lives. This is obviously good. But the hundreds of thousands of hu­man beings thus saved, and the millions whom they beget and bring to birth, cannot be adequately clothed, housed, educated or even fed out of the island's availa­ble resources. Quick death by malaria has been abol­ished; but life made miserable by undernourishment and over-crowding is now the rule, and slow death by outright starvation threatens ever greater numbers.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)
This is the crux of the issue, the crux of our story. For the shift in the American environmental movement from aesthetic environmentalism to regulatory environmentalism wasn’t just a change in political strategy. It was the manifestation of a crucial realization: that unrestricted commercial activity was doing damage—real, lasting, pervasive damage. It was the realization that pollution was global, not just local, and the solution to pollution was not dilution. This shift began with the understanding that DDT remained in the environment long after its purpose was served. And it grew as acid rain and the ozone hole demonstrated that pollution traveled hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from its source, doing damage to people who did not benefit from the economic activity that produced it. It reached a crescendo when global warming showed that even the most seemingly innocuous by-product of industrial civilization—CO2, the stuff on which plants depend—could produce a very different planet.
Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
Here is another example that demonstrates the tightly linked interests that both cause and treat cancer. In 1978, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), one of the largest companies in the world, specializing in agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals, developed the cancer drug tamoxifen. In 1985, along with the American Cancer Society, ICI founded the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month with the aim of promoting mammography as the most effective tool against breast cancer. In 1990 Imperial Chemical Industries was accused of dumping DDT and PCBs, known carcinogens, into the Long Beach and Los Angeles harbors. Zeneca, producer of tamoxifen, demerged from ICI in 1993, and later merged with Astra AB in 1999 to form AstraZeneca. Astra AB had developed the herbicide acetochlor, classified by the EPA as a probable carcinogen. In 1997 Zeneca purchased Salick Health Care, a chain of for-profit outpatient cancer clinics. Subsequently AstraZeneca launched a major publicity campaign encouraging women to assess their risk factors for breast cancer, downplaying the dangers of tamoxifen in order to create a market for its prophylactic, or chemopreventative, use and, more recently, for the breast cancer drug Arimidex (anastrozole), approved in 2002 and used as an alternative to tamoxifen (Arimidex went off patent in 2010).
S. Lochlann Jain (Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us)
Or, in your case, as wide. Wait. Did you just say Gandalf?” “He is the founder of our order, and the first of the Five Warlocks. He comes from afar across the Western Ocean, from Easter Island, or perhaps from Japan.” “No, I think he comes from the mind of a story writer. An old-fashioned Roman Catholic from the days just before First Space Age. Unless I am confusing him with the guy who wrote about Talking Animal Land? With the Cowardly Lion who gets killed by a Wicked White Witch? I never read the text, I watched the comic.” “Oh, you err so! The Witches, we have preserved this lore since the time of the Fall of the Giants, whom we overthrew and destroyed. The tale is this: C. S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke were led by the Indian Maiden Sacagawea to the Pacific Ocean and back, stealing the land from the Red Man and selling them blankets impregnated with smallpox. It was called the Lewis and Clarke Expedition. When they reached the Pacific, they set out in the Dawn Treader to find the sea route to India, where the sacred river Alph runs through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. They came to the Last Island, called Ramandu or Selidor, where the World Serpent guards the gateway to the Land of the Dead, and there they found Gandalf, returned alive from the underworld, and stripped of all his powers. He came again to mortal lands in North America to teach the Simon Families. The Chronicle is a symbolic retelling of their journey. It is one of our Holy Books.” “Your Holy Books were written for children by Englishmen.” “The gods wear many masks! If the Continuum chooses the lips of a White Man to be the lips through which the Continuum speaks, who are we to question? Tolkien was not Roman. He was of a race called the hobbits, Homo floresiensis, discovered on an isle in Indonesia, and he would have lived in happiness, had not the White Man killed him with DDT. So there were no Roman Catholics involved. May the Earth curse their memory forever! May they be forgotten forever!” “Hm. Earth is big. Maybe it can do both. You know about Rome? It perished in the Ecpyrosis, somewhat before your time.” “How could we not? The Pope in Rome created the Giants, whom the Witches rose up against and overthrew. Theirs was the masculine religion, aggressive, intolerant, and forbidding abortion. Ours is the feminine religion, peaceful and life-affirming and all-loving, and we offer the firstborn child to perish on our sacred fires. The First Coven was organized to destroy them like rats! When Rome was burned, we danced, and their one god was cast down and fled weeping on his pierced feet, and our many gods rose up. My ancestors hunted the Christians like stoats, and when we caught them, we burned them slowly, as they once did of us in Salem. What ill you do is returned to you tenfold!” “Hm. Are you willing to work with a Giant? I saw one in the pit, and saw the jumbo-sized coffin they pried him out from. What if he is a baptized Christian? Most of them were, since they were created by my pet pope and raised by nuns.” “All Christians must perish! Such is our code.” “Your code is miscoded.” “What of the Unforgettable Hate?” “Forget about it.
John C. Wright (The Judge of Ages (Count to the Eschaton Sequence, #3))
Since 1972, when the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT from the United States, about 50 million people have died from malaria: Most have been children less than five years old. Examples of the impact of Silent Spring abound: In India, between 1952 and 1962, DDT spraying caused a decrease in annual malaria cases from 100 million to 60,000. By the late 1970s, no longer able to use the pesticide, the number of cases increased to 6 million. In Sri Lanka, before the use of DDT, 2.8 million people suffered from malaria. When the spraying stopped in 1964, only 17 people suffered from the disease. Then, between 1968 and 1970, no longer able to use DDT, Sri Lanka suffered a massive malaria epidemic—1.5 million people were infected by the parasite.
Paul A. Offit (Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong)
Despite Carson’s warnings in Silent Spring, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States showed that DDT didn’t cause liver disease, premature births, congenital defects, leukemia, or any of the other diseases she had claimed. Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably the safest insect repellent ever invented—far safer than many of the other pesticides that have since taken its place.
Paul A. Offit (Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong)
To be consistent, those who argue that abortion is “unnatural” would have to say: no penicillin, no lightning rods, no eyeglasses, no DDT, no radar and so on.
Max Frisch (Homo Faber)
Dividend received from a mutual fund is exempt from tax for the investor. However, other than equity oriented MF schemes, Dividend Distribution Tax (DDT) is required to be paid by the MF schemes issuing the dividend. Please refer to DDT for more details.
Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
The dividend received is exempt from income tax in India provided the Dividend Distribution Tax (DDT) has been paid by the company distributing dividend. If the DDT has not been paid, the dividend income would be taxable.
Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
Thinking back, I can almost feel the air in the commons that day, the things eddying around us. We were breathing in violence and desperation and other people’s hallucinations, but it was all invisible to us then. Like the fluoride in the water or the radiation from Brookhaven, the DDT and the valium and the Strontium 90. All the heavy atoms and alkaloid molecules that shape us and then break us apart.
Meredith Miller (How We Learned to Lie: A Novel)
Thinking back, I can almost feel the air in the commons that day, the things eddying around us. We were breathing in violence and desperation and other people’s hallucinations, but it was all invisible to us then. Like the fluoride in the water or the radiation from Brookhaven, the DDT and the valium and the Strontium 90. All the heavy atoms and alkaloid molecules that shape us and then break us apart.
Meredith Miller (How We Learned to Lie: A Novel)
Mosquitoes had developed resistance to DDT, and the parasites to chloroquine.
Elif Shafak (The Island of Missing Trees)
The results showed a fivefold increase in breast cancer risk among women with high levels of serum DDT or its metabolites.59 DDT does cause cancer, it does affect human health, and it does cost human lives. Rachel Carson was not wrong.
Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
But the construction of a revisionist history of DDT gives the game away, because it came so long after the science was settled, far too long to argue that scientists had not come to agreement, that there was still a real scientific debate. The game here, as before, was to defend an extreme free market ideology. But in this case, they didn’t just deny the facts of science. They denied the facts of history.
Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
From Pastor Malthus to the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth; from hysteria over DDT, PCBs, and natural gas “fracking”; to continuing bouts of chemo-phobia and population panic; the achievements of capitalism have suffered a long series of detractions. The factitious and febrile campaign against global warming is only the latest binge of self-abuse among the children of prosperity.
George Gilder (Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World)
The five major sources of income which are exempt for NRIs are: Proceeds from Life Insurance Policy - provided the policy complies with the exemption criteria/conditions Dividend from a domestic company or mutual fund scheme - provided the company or mutual fund scheme has paid the Dividend Distribution Tax (DDT), if applicable Interest on an NRE account – provided the NRE account is maintained as per the FEMA rules Interest on FCNR or RFC accounts – provided the account owner is a non-resident or RBNOR under the Income Tax Act Long Term Capital Gain on equity and equity based mutual fund – provided the Security Transaction Tax (STT) has been paid
Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
When scientists discovered the limits of planetary sinks, they also discovered market failure. The toxic effects of DDT, acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer, and climate change were serious problems for which markets did not provide a spontaneous remedy.
Naomi Oreskes (The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future)
Tens of millions of acres have been added to the federal wilderness system, environmental impact assessments are now required for all major developments, some lakes that were declared dead are living again. . . . Lead particulates have been impressively reduced in the atmosphere; DDT is no longer found in American body fat, which also contains considerably fewer polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) than it once did. Mercury has virtually disappeared from Great Lakes sediment; and Strontium 90 is no longer found in either cows’ milk or mothers’ milk.” And Dowie stressed: “What all these facts have in common is that they are the result of outright bans against the use or production of the substances in question.”III, 27
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
What would life be like if there were no environmental protection agency? If DDT and asbestos had not been banned? If unleaded gasoline had not been mandated and smog still blanketed most American cities? If standards for clean water were not in place? Might we have a cholera epidemic or other water borne diseases? These critical concerns are ignored by libertarians who think the market will determine our safety. We have seen how that worked before regulations were in place. The market almost always puts profit first, not safety.
Georgia Kelly (Uncivil Liberties: Deconstructing Libertarianism)
The right-wing defenders of American liberty have now done the same. The painstaking work of scientists, the reasoned deliberations of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, and the bipartisan American agreement to ban DDT have been flushed down the memory hole, along with the well-documented and easily found (but extremely inconvenient) fact that the most important reason that DDT failed to eliminate malaria was because insects evolved. That is the truth—a truth that those with blind faith in free markets and blind trust in technology simply refuse to see.
Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
Would you ever buy chocolate with DDT? How about Cheerios with arsenic? Not very likely!
Gudjon Bergmann (Quit Smoking and Be Free: 7 Steps to a Smoke Free Life)
we’ve learned that some of our favorite things like DDT and the propellants in aerosol cans were rapidly unraveling the structure and substance of our biosphere. We gave them up, and reversed the threats. Now the reforms required of us are more systematic, and nobody seems to want to go first. (To be more precise, the U.S.A. wants to go last.)
Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle)
In India, dividend income is exempt from income tax for investors, provided the dividend distribution tax (DDT) is paid by the company or the mutual fund schemes declaring the dividend. While
Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
DDT is borne by the investors as it reduces the NAV but is not given to the investors. Please
Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
And few of those calling for DDT to be revived seemed to realize that it would be a waste of time. Latin American governments had used it so intensely from 1947 to 1962 that they almost wiped out Aedes aegypti on the continent. In doing so, they almost eradicated yellow fever. But almost counts only in horseshoes and hand grenades. The genetic mutation that confers DDT resistance had emerged in Venezuela and had became fixed in the species before it spread outward from there. More
Donald G. McNeil (Zika: The Emerging Epidemic)
Carson admitted that she wasn’t interested in treating the subject with any sort of journalistic fairness. When she shared this thinking with Shawn, he encouraged it. “After all,” he said, “there are some things one doesn’t have to be objective and unbiased about.” Chapter
Elena Conis (How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT)
Dr. Offit vocally supports GMO foods93 and chemical pesticides and is an obstreperous foe of vitamins, nutrition, and integrative medicine.94 He warns against the fallacy of going “GMO free,” and takes the radical position that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) is harmless. He bitterly demonizes Rachel Carson for killing millions of people by hatching the plot against Monsanto’s DDT.95
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Synthetics diminished the great powers' need for strategic raw materials by offering substitutes. Aviation, cryptography, radio, and satellites, meanwhile, enabled those powers to run secure transportation and communication networks without worrying about contiguous territorial access. Innovations in medicine and engineering - such as DDT, antimalarials, plastic-based packaging, and "world-proofed" electronic equipment - further reduced the need for territorial control. They allowed objects and humans to safely travel to hostile terrains, meaning that colonizers didn't have to soften the ground beforehand. Standardization, similarly, made foreign places more accessible. (Page 314, 315)
Daniel Immerwahr (How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States)
In 1972, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of DDT as an insecticide because of its threats to human health.
Everett M. Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations)
The outermost circle of the Devil’s world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people—and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam.
John McPhee (Encounters with the Archdruid: Narratives About a Conservationist and Three of His Natural Enemies)
Spring, about the horrific damage caused by the use of DDT.” “That book really did help start a movement,” I agreed. “The right book or the right film at the right time really can change the culture. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is another example. Books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy have
Jane Goodall (The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times)
Environmentalists were right to be inspired by marine biologist Rachel Carson’s book on pesticides, Silent Spring, but wrong to place DDT in the category of Absolute Evil (which she did not). Most of her scientific assessments proved right, some didn’t—such as her view that DDT causes cancer. In an excess of zeal that Carson did not live to moderate, DDT was banned worldwide, and malaria took off in Africa.
Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary)
Quoted in a 2007 National Geographic article, Robert Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health said, “The ban on DDT may have killed 20 million children.
Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary)
D.D.T., which is sprayed on food while it is growing up from the earth, is also a poison that should not be put into the human body, regardless of the desire to kill insects, that loves to dine on the same food on which we dine.
Elijah Muhammad (How To Eat To Live - Book 1)
CFCs and DDT carry different, much more sobering but also expected lessons: human interventions in Earth’s environment often carry delayed, complex risks, so far removed from the initial concern and so far beyond the readily conceivable complications that only time and the accumulation of events will make us aware of those unexpected but highly consequential impacts.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
The results were convincing. During two summer months of 1943 in Sicily, the US Army had 21,482 hospital admissions for malaria compared to 17,375 battle casualties (wounded and dead). A public health poster had it right: “The malaria mosquito knocks out more men than the enemy.” Field testing of DDT began in Italy in August 1943; by 1945 new cases of malaria had declined by more than 80 percent, and DDT was also in use, in an indiscriminate but highly effective fashion, to stop the typhus epidemic in Naples.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
In 1948 Paul Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods,” with the citation concluding that “without any doubt, the material has already preserved the life and health of hundreds of thousands” (fig. 2.4). And that total number of saved lives kept on growing: in 1970 the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Research in the Life Sciences concluded that “to only a few chemicals does man owe such a great debt as to DDT” because in less than two decades of use, it had prevented 500 million deaths from malaria, and the compound became one of the new tools (besides the new short-stalked, high-yielding wheat and rice cultivars receiving increasing amounts of synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers) in the global quest to eradicate hunger, malnutrition, and diseases.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
The first reports of adverse effects came during the late 1950s as both agricultural applications and large-scale DDT spraying to control mosquitoes, tent caterpillars, and gypsy moths became common.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
In the same year when Ratcliffe and Barker published their findings, Rachel Carson—a marine biologist formerly employed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service who left her job in 1952 after her previous publication, The Sea Around US, became a bestseller that gave her financial independence—began to investigate the anti-DDT activities among some communities, mostly in the US Northeast, affected by DDT spraying
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
This trifecta turned the book into the best-known nonfiction work of the 1960s. Silent Spring presented the use of DDT as one of the most consequential human interferences in the natural order of things, and the book was intended to make the widest possible public impact.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
she made DDT the centerpiece of the book’s lengthy indictment: throughout the book Carson refers to it nearly two hundred times.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
This history of DDT use makes it clear that the trajectory of its rise and fall has some obvious similarity to the ascent and eventual demise of leaded gasoline but that the overall cumulative impact of the insecticide’s large-scale and decades-long use is much harder to assess. Leaded gasoline did enable higher combustion efficiencies but there is little doubt that the health benefits resulting from reduced automotive emissions were far outweighed by the introduction of a known and persistent neurotoxin into the environment. In contrast, DDT’s indisputably positive role in eliminating malaria from many countries and reducing its burdens in others could have been even more positive had we not resorted to massive spraying of crops, which burdened the environment with a persistent pollutant and led to the widespread rise of DDT/DDE tolerance among targeted insects.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
DDT now belongs to the category of inventions that were not just welcome but seen as truly transformative, only to be relegated to the class of undesirable advances.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
In 2002 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced a 497-page document named Toxicological Profile for DDT, DDE and DDD. In 2006 the World Health Organization finally finished reviewing all the scientific investigations and, just like the CDC, classified DDT as “mildly harmful” to humans, stating that it had more health benefits than drawbacks in many situations.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
Quinine, in a sense, had prepared Sardinians to understand the necessity for DDT.
Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
There is consensus that DDT was a potent factor in eradicating malaria from Sardinia, but the conclusion that it acted as a stand-alone instrument is misleading. The postwar spraying took place in the midst of overlapping interventions unrelated to DDT that are not mentioned in Logan’s official account or subsequent histories.
Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
In his new activism, Mike’s long background in oil became a great asset. He knew the geology. He knew the economics. He knew the local lay of the land. He’d gained firsthand knowledge of dangerous chemicals. As a child he had crouched in the sugarcane field to watch the Piper Cub crop dusters fly low, their wheels nearly leafing through the tops of the cane stalks. After the pilot had sprayed DDT clouds and started to rise at the end of the row, Mike would pop up from the cane into the pesticide cloud to watch the plane turn for another pass. He knew about unawareness. But what was new for Mike was a close-up view of the politics—especially the attitude toward the environment expressed by Republican governor Bobby Jindal.
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right)
Unlike the campaigns against DDT, nuclear power, and genetically modified crops – but very much like the eugenics movement – the global warming cause is universal enough to serve as the basis of a pseudo-religion. This potential is the subject of remarks by the movement’s leaders themselves.
Robert Zubrin (Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New Atlantis Books))
Science has and continues to make huge mistakes, and yet continues to arrogantly declare itself as the end all and be all of rational explanation of the universe. What are some of sciences big gaffs? The list is almost endless: the efficacy of frontal lobotomies, The Blank Slate theory (or Tabula rasa), Phlogiston Theory, the definition of the “GENE” (which has changed over and over since it was coined by Johansson in 1909), that we cannot send information faster than the speed of light, classifying humans into the different races, the invention of nuclear weapons, fossil fuels, CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), leaded petrol and DDT.
Laurence Galian (Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!)
generation of children grew up drinking DDT-laced milk and water and eating DDT-contaminated food. Unknown thousands of that generation are still suffering the effects.
Randy Wayne White (Dead of Night (Doc Ford #12))
in 1955, Russell published Man’s Mastery of Malaria, in which he envisaged a global spraying campaign that would free humankind from the disease—cheaply, rapidly, and without great difficulty. Rallying to Russell’s optimism, WHO adopted a global campaign of malaria eradication with DDT as its weapon of choice.
Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man,” she wrote.15 Herbicides and pesticides represented the very worst kind of “cave man” thinking—a club “hurled against the fabric of life.” The indiscriminate application of chemicals was, Carson warned, harming people, killing birds, and turning the country’s waterways into “rivers of death.” Instead of promoting pesticides and herbicides, government agencies ought to be eliminating them; “a truly extraordinary variety of alternatives” were available. An alternative Carson particularly recommended was setting one biological agent against another. For instance, a parasite could be imported to feed on an unwanted insect. “In that book the problem—the villain—was the broad, almost unrestricted use of chemicals, particularly the chlorinated hydrocarbons, like DDT,” Andrew Mitchell, a
Elizabeth Kolbert (Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future)
In Alabama, the Olin Corporation became embroiled over its production of DDT. Rachel Carson, in her book Silent Spring, had identified the pesticide as a deadly contaminant to the biological food chain.
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)