Here's a cute story, overly dramatic but scientifically accurate (at least with the science bits).

April 27, 2006


Death by ecology
Dan Sernoffsky

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot.

The great mass murderers of the 20th century had one thing in common beyond their predilection for amassing power and their utter disregard for human life: they, and the political 'philosophy' they espoused, was based on a premise of absolute control over the societies they governed.

But there is at least one more name that should be added to that list, and while she may not have shared the same meglomanical pursuit of power the others did, the result of her efforts created the unintended consequence of leading to the deaths of millions.

Her name was Rachel Carson, the patron saint of Earth Day.

Carson's book, "Silent Spring," became the manifesto of a movement that continues to result in countless deaths and untold economic damage throughout the world. Published in 1962, 'Silent Spring' posited that the use of the pesticide DDT threatened the extinction of birds (hence the book's title, no chirpping robins to welcome the arrival of the vernal equinox), and therefore representing a clear and present danger to humans and the environment. The outcry raised by the book ultimately led to a ban on DDT in the United States in 1972, similar bans throughout the world, and an overall demonization of the pesticide.

Ironically, even when the ban on DDT was being debated in the United States, there was an increasing body of evidence indicating that much of what Carson wrote was based on faulty analysis of data and manufactured conclusions. But the evidence that DDT was not the threat Carson portrayed it to be was ignored, and continues to be ignored. As a result, one of the most effective, and inexpensive, pesticides available is largely eschewed, and mosquito-borne diseases like malaria are exacting a frightening toll. Verifiable estimates put the number of preventable deaths due to malaria in the vicinity of 100 million since 1972, a large percentage of those deaths occuring in Africa.

The faulty hypothesis put forward by Carson and advanced by her accolytes has been expanded into a political movement that has incrementally been advancing its premise of absolute control over society. That political movement, framed as environmentalism, is essentially the latest incarnation of the totalatarianism of communism.

Despite the growing hue and cry over global climate change, the concerns about global warming, there is no hard scientific evidence that industrial society is at fault. Claims that "virtually all scientists agree" are spurious at best. What has happened is that those espousing such theories have become jealously possessive of their funding, which would disappear if their hypotheses were disproved. Therefore, they have been quick to denigrate and castigate any and all who disagree with them. They are winning the war of words and are waging a campaign of emotionalism rather than true scientific examination of the pertinent data. It has become a case of refusing to allow the facts to stand in the way of a good story.

The environmentalist movement, especially the radical environmentalist movement, is an elitist movement, made possible, ironically, by the technological advances of industrialized society. It is a basic truism that the more advanced a society becomes, the greater interest it has in its environment.

For all the ballyhooed rhetoric about the link between primative societies -- hunter-gatherers -- and their relationship with nature, the facts prove otherwise. The more primative the society, the more nomadic it becomes, prodigally using the resources at hand, then moving when they run out. And given the need for food and shelter, there is no real concern conservation, or the preservation of species. Prior to the introduction of the horse in the American West, a technological advance of sorts, Indians who relied on the buffalo would drive herds over cliffs, indiscriminately killing more than could ever be used.

It is only when societies become established in specific locations that a real concern for maintaining an ecologically-friendly environment begins to emerge, and only when societies become advanced enough to create new technologies to maintain a clean environment that pollution concerns are really addressed.

When the first Earth Day was established, the basic premise was that all would benefit by helping to clean up the environment, picking up litter, cleaning rivers and streams, finding ways to eliminate dumping of raw sewage and industrial waste into rivers. The original intent, however, has long given way to an agenda aimed at preventing further development and in establishing a new elitist ruling class.

Perhaps it is mere coincidence, perhaps it is by design, but Earth Day falls on April 22. That also happens to be the birthday of one V.I. Lenin, the man who established the Soviet Union and began a reign of terror that would spawn some of history's greatest mass murderers.


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Dan Sernoffsky is an award-winning sportswriter and political columnist for The Lebanon Daily News in Lebanon, Pa. A career journalist, he is a graduate of Ottawa University, Ottawa, Ks., and attended graduate school at Central Michigan University. The father of four grown children, he and his wife reside in Lebanon.

[email protected]

__________________
-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Webster may or may not have been the first to say it, he was certainly not the last.

Here is my favorite version of the statement:

AUTHOR: Carl Schurz (1829–1906)

QUOTATION: The Senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, “My country, right or wrong.” In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.

ATTRIBUTION: Senator CARL SCHURZ, remarks in the Senate, February 29, 1872, The Congressional Globe, vol. 45, p. 1287.

You place way too much faith in some sort of divine guidance that automatically descends on all men in uniform in the service of this nation. What sort of " lawful" order would you consider to be actually unlawful? You think an American soldier will never be confronted with a situation where the entire campaign amounts to an unlawful order? I maintain (surprise, surprise) that it has happened.

MedMech's statement is often heard -- I put no words in his mouth, I merely point out that the two statements are strongly linked -- the soldier serving in any and all wars, no exceptions, has essentially signed on to the "my country, right or wrong” clause.

__________________
1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Lawful order is defined in the UCMJ. Read it.

Bot

I'll look for it. Seriously doubt I'm going to be persuaded that dropping ordinance/plant poison on peasants who never attacked us and WHO COULD NOT HAVE ATTACKED US IN 300 YEARS was based on anything resembling a "lawful order." A bit prejudiced on my part, I guess.

__________________
1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

You asked for law, not morality.

Bot

Trying to lump Rachel Carson in with that crowd is just about beyond belief. One weird aspect of pesticides is the fact that soil would probably not even be fertile if not for millions of years worth of insects leaving their little poopies and bods behind.

Yeah, a modern techno society has more concern for environmentalism cause techno introduces more poison into our surroundings than before and if we don't get a handle on it, we're pretty stupid.

You don't have a good answer, not sure if anyone has a good answer for why cancers have increased so much in recent decades. I'm betting on the 'better living through chemistry' connection.

Hunter gatherers did some damage, no doubt -- put Mastedons out of existance I believe, but there were a lot fewer of them and they had a tiny fraction of our ability to rearrange the earth's crust. One thing is pretty certain: loggers, farmers, and miners would love to have this continent the way it was in 1492, cause it was some kind of seriously wealthy place.

__________________
1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

I found the UCMJ on the web and oh man, it hurt my head just to scan it. Lawyer speak met military speak and had a baby.

Nowhere did I get a clue about what an unlawful order would be, but I didn't read every last word.

This is a good country in a lot of ways, but I reserve the right to think for myself on large matters like killing people you don't have an argument with and barely know anything about. I don't mind being a peon but being a pawn in an assinine conflict is where I draw the line.

__________________
1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

What Rachel Carson wrote is one of those fact things. Her book was inaccurate and fabricated in many instances. For example she sighted studies of eagle eggs supposedly thinned by DDT that were performed prior to the invention and use of DDT. She was trying to prove a point and misrepresented information to do so. Not unlike today's environmental movement.

As far as hunter-gatherers and the environment...
They would do the same as we do today if they had the ability then. How do I know? Because we are they - just further along the timeline. If you want to hold onto the romantic notion that they were somehow better, feel free. It is but a notion. Do you honestly think that rather than run buffalo off a cliff that they would not have used a rifle had they had that technology.

Simple fact of the matter. History teaches us that as we become more advanced we become more clean and environmentally concious. Reference the first world countries compared to the second and third world. Are we less polluting than China? As we become more highly advanced then we will in turn become cleaner. That is, unless the modern day luddites that are the political envirnomental movement have their way.

__________________
-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Article 92.

Additionally, a subordinate can choose to disobey an order that he believes unlawful. He can (and probably will) be court martialed for violating Article 92 but if the court finds the order unlawful then he wont be punished and the issuing officer is then in danger of court martial. However, if he fails to obey an order claiming it was unlawful but later found to be in fact lawful, he is in serious doo-doo, especially if in the face of the enemy when he is in mortal danger.

I found the article. I saw that one the first time, I was thinking it might give a little more understanding of what an unlawful order might look like. For example, what could the guys w/ Lt. Calley or some of the other squadrons who did similar stuff draw on to refuse orders?

The stuff I'm talking about, not participating in a war, is a decision that should be made and acted on long before you get to the front line. In the heat of battle though, things are a bit different. I can understand that that is not the time to start questioning orders, with the possible exception of being ordered to massacre unarmed civilians, a la My Lai.

__________________
1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

The Wikipedia entry on Silent Spring gives the pro and con arguments of Carson and DDT. The con are pretty much in line with what you're saying. Here's the pro:

Carson had made it clear she was not advocating the banning or complete withdrawal of helpful pesticides, but was instead encouraging responsible and carefully managed use, with an awareness of the chemicals' impact on the entire ecosystem. However, some critics asserted that she was calling for the elimination of all pesticides, despite the fact that Silent Spring was positively reviewed by many outside of the academic field such as agricultural science and chemical science, and it became a runaway best seller both in the USA and overseas.

Anectodal evidence may support Carson's claim. For example, chemicals that are persistent in the environment accumulate in body fat and are carried by women in their breast tissue, and studies by U.S. and Canadian scientists have found that women with higher levels of organochlorines in their blood have four to ten times the risk of breast cancer than those with lower levels.[3] Organochlorines are hydrocarbon-based chemicals containing chlorines like DDT. Moreover, "diminishing rates of breast cancer in Israel have paralleled a precipitous decline in environmental contamination with DDT and benzene hexachloride."[4] Thus far, human data about the link between these chemicals and breast cancer are inconclusive. One study showed that women with breast cancer have the same or lower levels of pesticide residue in their system than women without the disease.[5]

Perhaps some of her research was faulty, knowingly or not, I can't say. I sympathize with her concern about wholesale spreading of any kind of poison. I was under the impression that most any poison that will kill insects will also kill or at least sicken humans. The Wkp article included some examples of large doses taken by humans with no apparent ill effects. New one on me.

But to link her with mass murderers is still way off the mark. Your view of modernity and progress is a partial one, heavy on the cheerleading. For example, years ago I heard that we pave 5 sq. miles a day in the US. A few years back, I heard that this figure is up to 13 sq.mi. a day. Pave may include 'convert to urban use,' I'm not certain as I'm unable to find confirmation of that. Whether it's exactly accurate or not, I believe it's pointing in the direction of truth. I saw a satellite photo of Puget Sound once. The whole corridor from Seattle down through Tacoma was gray -- we're talking many square miles. You could see the checkerboard of clear-cutting over on the Olympic peninsula. We regularly fill in and pave over wetlands, one of the primary ways acquifers get replenished.

Of course I know we are not going to go back and live the way Nat.Ams. lived. Doesn't mean we can't learn a bit about humanity from them. IMO, that's one of the greater, often unrecognized gifts of Euros coming here: witnessing the species at a starkly different phase of social/scien. evolution -- about as close to a time machine as we're going to see on this earth.

Yes they drove Buffalo over cliffs. Even so, the herds were vast and healthy before the great white hunter eliminated them. Indian legend has it that the first buffalo appeared to an Indian and said, "I and my people will come to you in great numbers. Use us well, for the time will come when we will go back into the ground." Could be all of this is part of some divine plan, who knows.

The soils in America were rich beyond rich. Thomas Jefferson once noted while in France, that the Americans present were almost a full head taller than the Europeans. This was almost certainly the result of much richer soils in America. It is beyond dispute that natural processes husband soil MUCH better than the big brain of man. The Yankees had the benefit of soil that had never seen a plow. We're getting better at it but not quick enough to stave off widespread famine, IMO.

I almost feel like I'm wasting my breath/fingertips here. You're no dummy but I get the impression that you don't seriously examine the con side of your argument. Did you ever watch the Bill Moyers NOW link I posted? Some problems with Moyers, I'll admit -- doesn't mean there's no value there either.

We are cleaner than China but we are not cleaner than peoples before the industrial age. Some modern changes are way solid of course. We have much better sewage treatment and disposal than back then -- a lot of good changes. Still, in primitive times, there were no acqifers badly contaminated with various man-made toxins -- acquifers that don't clean up with any sort of rapidity. Fish back then were not dangerously tainted by mercury. Speaking of China -- shrinking grain harvest.

Where we have really screwed up, IMO, is orienting our cities and our lives so that they can only operate with the help of massive amounts of energy. We've gotten up to a level of consumption that only makes sense when you have an unlimited supply of petro, forever and ever. Nuclear, ethanol, everything else is going to be a lot more expensive, and often will have greater unwanted side affects than oil.

As rough as it was in some ways back in more primitive times, at least human numbers were kept in check by such things as wild animals, malaria, famine, etc. This sounds like untold horror to many, no doubt. The alternative might be worse. We have gained, in the last few centuries, an enormous competitive advantage over all other life forms, disease possibley excepted, and we are doing a grand impersonation of rabbits on an island w/ no predators.

Here's one vahrnmental view that I would guess you might find strident, if you read it that is. Sorry to be cynical, but, I've said it before, I don't believe I've seen any sign that you examine the information I present.

__________________
1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

UCMJ applies to people who are sworn into the armed forces or who by legal directive, fall under martial law. A draft resistor is not subject to the UCMJ since he has not been sworn in.

Calley gave the direct (illegal) order to violate the rules of war and so he was directly responsible. Any subordinate has the choice to follow any order, legal or not. Consequences may vary. Subordinates of Calley varied in their response to his order. I do not know what punishment enlisted personnel received.

You enjoy wallowing in misdventure, as is your right.

You might be interested in the story of a neighbor of mine, Hugh Thompson. Probably not.

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/Myl_hero.html

...wallowing in misdventure...

Jeez, Louise....

Yes, I've heard Hugh Thompson's story and was very impressed. I've met many admirable people in our nation's armed forces. My two favorite high school teachers were both vets, one a retired colonel.

What you call "wallowing in misdventure" I see more as a pragmatic look at what military can and cannot do. Somewhere along the way, we became way too enamored with the supposed effectiveness of mass slaughter in accomplishing worthwhile aims.

Vietnam is still important because of the widely divergent opinions as to what happened and what should have happened. The same contingent who wanted to utterly subdue the Vittnamese were convinced that we could implant a govt. of our fashioning onto a bizarre collection of tribal loyalties and rivalries in Iraq, if we started off with shock and awe.

My question, is when are the diehard militarists in our land going to begin to learn from their mistakes?

__________________
1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

I'm sorry, what militarists? Look around and show me an American militarist. You might want to look-up a the of the word.

returning to the intent of this thread, here's an interesting book review from americanscientist.org.

A Visionary and a Scoundrel

Rosalind Reid
The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary. William Playfair. Edited and introduced by Howard Wainer and Ian Spence. Cambridge University Press, 2005. $39.99.

Anyone who has clicked the popular button that commands a spreadsheet computer program to make a chart has experienced the satisfaction of seeing a confusing grid of numbers resolve into crisp bars. It is hard now to imagine how we ever got by without visual tools for understanding masses of data. But of course such devices as the bar graph, the time-series line graph and the pie chart had to be invented. The peculiar man who came up with all three was William Playfair (1759-1823), a Scot who was convinced he could influence Britain's course with visual explanations of macroeconomic trends. Endowed with drafting experience and confident in the power of graphical language, he presented his polemics in a new form: annotated graphs that vividly highlighted trade gaps and the growing national debt.

Although Edward Tufte (author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information [1983]) and others have noted Playfair's role as the leading originator of modern statistical graphics, access to his work has heretofore been limited. Finally Playfair can speak for himself: Facsimiles of two of his most important works—the 1801 edition of The Commercial and Political Atlas, and The Statistical Breviary of the same year—have now been published in one small, affordable volume.

The vision that emerges from Playfair's pages is one of startling clarity and foresight. Even those who have seen samples of his charts—perhaps in Tufte's 1983 book or in statistician Howard Wainer's 2005 volume, Graphic Discovery: A Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adventures—will find new treasures here, all in color and some on foldout pages. The facsimiles are prefaced by a lively introduction in which the editors—Wainer and psychologist Ian Spence—give us a glimpse of the work's creator and his times.

Born in a village near Dundee, William was the younger brother of John Playfair, who became a distinguished mathematician, physicist and geologist. After learning drafting in the employ of the engineer-inventors Andrew Meikle and James Watt, William sought his fortune in London. Failing at the first of several doomed business ventures, he turned to writing about economics. The Commercial and Political Atlas—a series of 44 graphs charting selected trends in England's trade and national finances, each followed by remarks and observations—appeared in a preliminary edition circulated privately in 1785.

Playfair's Atlas was a historical singularity. Graphs and charts did not, as one might have assumed, coevolve with science, business and government. Rather, the new medium emerged full-blown in Playfair's works (although other graphic forms did crop up in isolated experiments around the same time). And then, just as quickly, it vanished.

Graphic explanation simply did not catch on. Excellently constructed by today's standards, Playfair's charts were in his own day neither praised nor imitated. He eagerly sent copies to well-placed acquaintances, yet most took no interest. One of the few exceptions was the French king Louis XVI, who understood immediately that the charts "spoke all languages."

Another century or so would pass before the emerging field of statistics grasped the power and utility of graphical presentation. Wainer and Spence attribute the slow adoption of statistical charts to the intellectual climate of Playfair's Britain, where empiricism was ascendant. The empiricists, who argued that knowledge arises from sensory experience, recorded observations and plotted them on line graphs in their notebooks. But they valued rigor and precision, and pictures created to represent observations were necessarily less accurate and more interpretive than were numbers themselves. A "general mistrust of pictorial representation" in British science continued into the early 19th century (and a cautious skepticism about graphic presentation of data remains part of scientific culture today). Watt tactfully urged Playfair to provide tables to support his arguments, pointing out that "the charts now seem to rest on your own authority, and it will naturally be enquired from whence you have derived your intelligence."

It didn't help matters that Playfair was a recklessly outspoken iconoclast—and even a bit of a scoundrel. Afflicted by a proclivity for questionable schemes when in financial straits, Playfair waded in and out of legal hot water while working on the Atlas and the Breviary. Convicted of libel in England and swindling in France, he later bungled an extortion attempt. His standing impaired by his checkered reputation, he was in his final years still publishing fine charts and advocating that others do so, but his arguments fell on deaf ears.

Wainer and Spence point out that innovation is frequently the product of an unconventional individual. Playfair fits this description, yet in the opening pages of the Atlas, he builds a case for his graphical approach on precedent, noting the practices of drawing family trees and creating historical time lines. "The studies of history, genealogy, and chronology," he says, "have been much improved by copper-plate charts." A data table, he insists, can leave the reader with only a "very faint and partial idea of what he has read."

Pointing to cartography as an established graphical form, Playfair urges the reader to see how a financial chart can map a different physical reality, money. Financial graphs, he says, can be understood as "piles of guineas represented on paper, and on a small scale, in which an inch (suppose) represents the thickness of five millions of guineas, as in geography it does the breadth of a river."

Playfair's most intriguing arguments are those in which he anticipates the findings of experiments on cognition and perception that were not carried out until two centuries later. Graphical representation, he argues in the Breviary, can "facilitate the attainment of information, and aid the memory in retaining it."

He had already proved the point in the 1786 edition of the Atlas, with the first published bar chart, which illuminated Scotland's 1781 trade surplus with America and its simultaneous trade deficit with Russia. It conveys its message to the eye in an instant. Like Playfair's other graphs, it has grid lines, axis labels and hatching, designed with a thoughtfulness that makers of graphing software would do well to emulate.

More at americanscientist.org