John Tierney of NYT on Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring"

Here's a brief trek off the usual path here at Jollyblogger.  In my early days as a Christian I had a very low view of creation and environmental issues.  It's not that I thought about them very much, but when I did, I took a common ultra-conservative line that only liberals were worried things like that.  The planet is fine, God gave it to us to use as we see fit and we need to be about doing God's business, not worrying about such earthly things.

In recent years I have seen that this was a wrong attitude and have shifted around to seeing environmental issues as legitimate matters of Christian stewardship.  Having said that, though, I have still had my qualms about much that passes as conventional wisdom among environmentalists.

Several years ago I read a few chapters in Dixie Lee Ray's book Trashing the Planet and, among other things, she took on the logic behind Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.  Carson's book was the catalyst that led to the banning of some pesticides and insecticides like DDT.  Dixie Lee Ray argued that her concerns were overblown and in error.

Well, today I came across an article by John Tierney in the New York Times that deals quite critically with the fallout from Carson's work (Hat tip - Harrison Scott Key at Worldmag Blog).

Tierney quotes Dr. I. L. Baldwin of the University of Wisconsin's reply to the contention that man is upsetting the balance of nature:

"Mankind has been engaged in the process of upsetting the balance of nature since the dawn of civilization."

In her book, Carson acknowledged that nature manufactures its own carcinogens, but she contended that they were inconsequential and that the new carcinogens from the pesticides were "elixirs of death" against which we had no protection.   Tierney offers the following in regard to that:

She cited scary figures showing a recent rise in deaths from cancer, but she didn’t consider one of the chief causes: fewer people were dying at young ages from other diseases (including the malaria that persisted in the American South until DDT). When that longevity factor as well as  the impact of smoking are removed, the cancer death rate was falling in the decade before “Silent Spring,” and it kept falling in the rest of the century.

Why weren’t all of the new poisons killing people? An important clue emerged in the 1980s when the biochemist Bruce Ames tested thousands of chemicals and found that natural compounds were as likely to be carcinogenic as synthetic ones. Dr. Ames found that 99.99 percent of the carcinogens in our diet were natural, which doesn’t mean that we are being poisoned by the natural pesticides in spinach and lettuce. We ingest most carcinogens, natural or synthetic, in such small quantities that they don’t hurt us. Dosage matters, not whether a chemical is natural, just as Dr. Baldwin realized.

Further, the adoption of Carson's views has had a devastating human cost.

The human costs have been horrific in the poor countries where malaria returned after DDT spraying was abandoned. Malariologists have made a little headway recently in restoring this weapon against the disease, but they've had to fight against Ms. Carson's disciples who still divide the world into good and bad chemicals, with DDT in their fearsome "dirty dozen."

Ms. Carson didn't urge an outright ban on DDT, but she tried to downplay its effectiveness against malaria and refused to acknowledge what it had accomplished. As Dr. Baldwin wrote, "No estimates are made of the countless lives that have been saved because of the destruction of insect vectors of disease." He predicted correctly that people in poor countries would suffer from hunger and disease if they were denied the pesticides that had enabled wealthy nations to increase food production and eliminate scourges.

Tierney contends that Carson's work is bad science.  I would add that it is bad theology. 

A fundamental part of the Christian worldview is that we live in a fallen world.  This applies to the environment.  Just as man is morally corrupt as a result of the fall, the environment is also corrupted.  Just as man has the responsibility, before God to address moral corruption, he has the responsibility to address environmental corruption.

Granted, this is what environmentalists do, but the mistake some make is to begin with the assumption that nature is naturally pure and pristine and man corrupts it.  A better way of addressing things would be to see that nature is naturally fallen and corrupt, and sometimes man furthers and worsens that corruption, but he also is capable of reversing that corruption.  Thus the solution is not to have man quit tampering with nature, but to have him tamper correctly. 

If Carson's predictions were proven true then indeed we should have banned and should keep banning pesticides.  Yet, according to Tierney and Dr. Baldwin, this is a kind of environmentalism that has led to the loss of countless lives.

I'll give another example of how human tampering with nature can help. In his book Heaven is not My Home, Paul Marshall tells the story of a trip to the vet.  The dog was getting older and the vet told him he needed to brush the dog's teeth.  Marshall thought he was kidding and this was a crazy idea.  He said something to the effect that wild dogs have lived for thousands of years without brushing their teeth, why did he need to worry about that now.

The vet explained that yes indeed, wild dogs have lived for thousands of years without brushing their teeth, but you have to understand the life of wild dogs.  He said wild dogs didn't need to worry about their teeth because they all died at a very young age, they would never live long enough to be afflicted with tooth decay.  The vet mentioned that the life of wild dogs is terrible.  They die young, and their deaths are often very slow, very painful and very gruesome.  Wild dogs typically die young as a result of hunger, disease or through being killed by wild animals. 

In contrast, by domesticating dogs, humans have provided them with long lives and protection from hunger, disease and predation.  Thus, dogs live longer and need to take care of their teeth.

My point in that story is, again, to illustrate that nature is fallen.  Indeed man can tamper with nature and destroy it as we see in some of our big cities, and as I found out firsthand on a trip to China a few years ago.  But man can also improve on nature and often technology and chemistry are the tools he uses to improve on nature.

Christians should be the world's best environmentalists, but we need to begin with the right assumptions which are based on a right theology.