DDT and Environmentalism |
Post Reply |
Author | ||||||||||
Andalus
Moderator Group Joined: 12 October 2005 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 1187 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
Posted: 31 December 2008 at 9:59pm |
|||||||||
Hi Love, I have to say that your reply, though you inteded well, your response highlites the problem that a rational discourse is rarely achievable with the environmentalist movement. I agree, as does hunter, that a sensible approach to the environment must be attempted, as long as sensibility is used by all parties.
Faith is a strong element in the environmentalist movement because the belief is more important than the actual facts. A prime example is the ban on DDT. It was not banned based upon science, but on belief. Belief out weighed any fact, as evident with Rachel Carson who used "what could be" to take precedence over "facts we know". She left out the facts that DDT had significantly reduced malaria out breaks which in some countries like Sri Lanks, brought the malarial death rate to under 10, down from millions the year before. Of course the discourse should contain how the pesticide is used, manufacture, and how to maintain its effectiveness in conjunction with other strategies. These additional points must be discoused also, but Carson was more intrested in pseudo science and emotionalism, and real rational discussion was trashed, with one side wanting to abuse DDT, and the other wanting to ban it from the earth.
So when antibiotics fail in a particular case against resistant microbe, do we throw out anti biotics? Absolutely not. We form a way to use and control the use of anti biotics as a viable method to fight disease, in conjunction with other methods.
The article goes on to criticize the factory who produces it.....so the method of maing it might be unsound, therefore stop making the product, which does save lives in other circumstances? That is irrational. The problem, if we take the article at its word, is the method of production, not DDT.
The article makes an interesting point,
The article claims that a factory has polluted the environment. The solution of environmetalists: Lets close the plant and ban DDT, of course leaving out any reasonable solution that is actually effective to replace DDT for some developing countries that have huge malaria problems. So the article does not support the claim that DDT should be banned. If the article is true, it owuld only suggest that the manfacturer is using a method that is not efficient.
No one has argued that DDT should be used because malaria cannot become resistant, and one could hardly make the argument that the ability to become resistant on the part of parasite means that DDT should be banned globally, because not in every area is the parasite resistant, and residual spraying is a use of DDT that acts as a repellent to masquitos. Once more, DDT use as part of a comprehensive strategie makes for a rational method to control malaria.
This begs the question: So what? How does this necessarily mean that DDT should be banned?
I covered this argument above. And no, India is not the only country in the world where malaria is rampant.
Ah..India again. MUch like Carsen, you are trying to "stack cards" by leaving out all other scenerios and all the facts. India, India, India. By the way. lou leave out the fact that DDT can be a repellent used as a residual spray.
Environmentlist hyperbole.....
Not allow insecticides like DDT to help stop the spread of some of the most deadliest diseases should not be an option.
1) Islam is not environmentalism (as defined by the modenr movement). Islam respects nature, but also calls for rational and sane approaches to life.
2) Needing a new paradigm shift is idealist pie in the sky sollutions that sound good and appeal the the sheeple who were enchanted with the latest US president, but idealism is rarely ever pragmatic. We must move beyond slogans, feel good catch phrases, and emotional rhtoric, and ambrace sane solutions that take the environment and mans place in it into account.
|
||||||||||
A feeling of discouragement when you slip up is a sure sign that you put your faith in deeds. -Ibn 'Ata'llah
http://www.sunnipath.com http://www.sunniforum.com/forum/ http://www.pt-go.com/ |
||||||||||
love
Groupie Joined: 23 July 2008 Status: Offline Points: 40 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
|||||||||
The issue shouldn't be about substituting environmentalism as faith, it's what is our purpose in life. The science is there, but I don't believe most people are prepared to deal with the consequences of what we're seeing all around us. DDT failed to check Malaria in India September 7, 2006 http://www.hinduonnet.com/2006/09/27/stories/2006092701891500.htm DDT in India June 2, 2008 http://www.countercurrents.org/shaji020608.htm May 17, 2000 http://www.brown.edu/Research/EnvStudies_Theses/full9900/creid/malaria_in_india.htm �70-80% of the malaria control money in India is spent on insecticides (Dhingra et al., 1998).� India began using DDT in 1946 and since then deaths from malaria has increased. Malaria has become resistant to DDT. �As of 1996, individuals of An. culicifacies, one of the six most important vectors of malaria in India, had been found resistant to DDT in 18 states and 286 districts, to HCH (hexachlorobenzene) in 16 states and 233 districts, and to malathion in 8 states and 71 districts.� Who can argue that this is not robbing a nation of its
resources and its future by damaging the reproductive health of its women and
creating a malady of health issues for the disfigured children? People can sit around and criticize all day, but what are we doing to help change the plight of a people who are physically getting sick? We need a new paradigm shift and living a life according to Islamic principles can do just that. Edited by love - 24 December 2008 at 2:48pm |
||||||||||
Andalus
Moderator Group Joined: 12 October 2005 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 1187 |
Post Options
Thanks(0)
|
|||||||||
Why The Insecticide DDT Should Never Have Been Banned
|
1. | When Sri Lanka banned DDT in the mid 1960s, malaria cases rose from 29 in 1964 to more than half a million five years later. |
---|---|
2. | Ecuador, which expanded its use of DDT in the 1980s and 1990s, experienced a 60 per cent drop in infection rates. |
Let us discount for bureaucrats with blithely Herodian intentions. How close to deliberate their grotesque implementation of zero population growth was will probably remain a mystery. What about the decent activists, let alone the self-respecting scientists with access to all the learned journals? How could slogans about saving the planet have engendered such a schizophrenic attitude towards the evidence? At what point did the realisation begin to dawn that the dominant paradigm was a big lie? Why is Greenpeace still active in India?
Lapkin sees these questions through the prism of a new form of First World vanity. "The anti-DDT crusade is made all the more outrageous by the distinct taint of neo-colonialism that is its indelible accompaniment. In a way, the push to ban this insecticide represents the ultimate in modern Eurocentric arrogance, the newest form of imperialism." He likens it to the "we know what's best" Kipling version of taking up the white man's burden imposing a green, insecticide-free colonial ideology of primal, untainted nature. Given the Herodian consequences, it seems to me that the more fitting analogy is with the Belgian than the British empire, and with Joseph Conrad's Mister Kurtz. Still there can be no doubting his conclusion that
"hubris, folly and ethnocentrism...spawned this unnecessary tragedy".
To that list must surely be added the Left's habitual response of taking for ever to recognise � and never admitting � when it gets things massively wrong. How massively? Crichton puts the price of environmentalist action at "somewhere between 10 and 30 million people since the 1970s". For those who dislike figures so rubbery, it should be noted that Third World population statistics pose all sorts of problems and that the interaction of malaria with other diseases and factors, such as poverty and malnutrition, complicates matters. Even the lowest estimate is a stupefying toll and one that reinforces the parallels with other monstrous, secular religions of the past century.
For Crichton, the most imperative of contemporary challenges is to retrieve responsible environmentalism from the clutches of those zealots for whom it has become a substitute faith and return to scientific discipline.
"I am thoroughly sick of politicised so-called facts that simply aren't true. It isn't that these 'facts' are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organisations are spinning their case... in the strongest way. Not at all � what more and more groups are doing is putting out lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false. This trend began with the DDT campaign and persists to this day."
Discovering the extent to which these strictures apply to the Australian Greens as a political party, and their allies, seems to me one of the most important challenges of contemporary journalism.
Post Reply | |
Tweet
|
Forum Jump | Forum Permissions You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot create polls in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum |