Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Worst Americans Hall of Fame: Rachel Carson

While I'm still mulling over the Worst Americans in History challenge, I have no particular order to my selections, any more. But I thought this one ought to be included.

According to the Ecology Hall of Fame, Rachel Carson guaranteed that millions of Africans would die of Malaria because they can't use the much less harmful and eminently affordable DDT to kill mosquitoes, :

"Before Silent Spring, nearly all Americans believed that science was a force for good. Carson's work exposed the dark side of science... Thanks to her, progress can no longer be measured solely in tons of wheat produced and millions of insects killed."


Thanks to her, real progress has been slowed, and in many places reversed, as her superstitious followers burn medical laboratories. She helped to birth the Luddite brigades who wish to block the development of GM foods, as well as encouraging fanatic groups such as the Earth Liberation Front and their less blatantly yet still strongly anti-human counterparts like Greenpeace. Thanks to her, millions more will die as food production has become, as it was in the Dark Ages, mostly political. Thanks to her -- and her faulty research, poetic nonsense, and general alarmist tactics, those who would truly give a damn about the ecosystem are stuck unable to trust the people we should be able to ask about how to best and most humanely conserve. Nobody will give an answer without socio-political filters, instead of straightforward science... because science and scientists can't be trusted, she said.

Thanks to Rachel Carson's alarmism, the phobia against scientific developments has led to our continued dependence upon fossil fuels... heating and lighting our houses with the same coal-burning power plants built about the time she was born.

(whew! long sentences for a bad scientist and mediocre poet!)

Ahem. Let me say to Ms. Carson... thanks. fer nuttin.

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