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.
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."
Just more human sacrifices to Mother Gaia (TM).
I bet Baal-Moloch and/or Huitzlipochtli wish they'd thought of it first.
Posted by: Ken | June 07, 2007 at 11:57 AM
On the day late last month that Rachel Carson would have turned 100 years old I posted a piece on Mode Shift (www.modeshift.org) that focused on the surprising failure of the nation’s major environmental organizations to defend the mother of modern environmentalism. The free market right has set out on a deliberate path to diminish Carson, and by extension the American environmental community, as credible in responding to the consequences of industrial technology. The attack on Carson is an important facet of the free market right’s campaign to diminish the reach of local, state, and federal safeguards. And it’s been remarkably effective and destructive. The federal government, for instance, has no strategy for responding to global climate change because of its sympathy to free market assertions that the science of climate change is deeply flawed.
In any case on Tuesday this week John Tierney, an influential free market science writer and columnist at the New York Times, leveled a broadside at Carson in the pages of Science Times. Calling Silent Spring a “hodgepodge of science and junk science,” Tierney accused Carson of using “dubious statistics and anecdotes (like the improbable story of a woman who instantly developed cancer after spraying her basement with DDT) to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to pass. She rightly noted threats to some birds, like eagles and other raptors, but she wildly imagined a mass ‘biocide.’”
I know Tierney and worked with him at the Times in the early 1990s, when he joined the paper. He’s smart, thorough, and delights in being a contrarian on environmental issues. He wrote a famous piece questioning the value of recycling, essentially saying that recycling wastes more energy and materials than it saves. In another piece for the Times Magazine, Tierney singlehandedly changed the public’s view of Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich when he reported on a bet that Ehrlich made with Julian Simon, an economist at the University of Maryland. In 1968 Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which predicted a runaway global population boom (he was right on that) and mass starvation globally and food riots in the United States in the 1980s (he was wrong about that). Ehrlich bet that the prices of five key metals would rise as a result of population increases and scarcity of natural resources. Simon bet that innovation would drive prices down. In 1990, Ehrlich conceded defeat and sent Simon a check for $576.07, the amount that represented the decline in the metals’ prices after accounting for inflation, he reported.
See more here: http://modeshift.org/
Posted by: Keith Schneider | June 07, 2007 at 03:08 PM
It is absolutely true that DDT or another synthetic pesticides should be used to stop malaria transmission.
HOWEVER, this idea that these chemicals are safe is totally wrong. We forget how damaging DDT use was. We nearly killed off the national symbol of our country, the Bald Eagle, through the use of DDT and other chemicals. Many birds at the top of the food chain ingested increasingly concentrated amounts of these poisons and suffered reproductive damage that nearly wiped them out. How short our memories are! Like the veritable "canary in the coal mine," these top-level predators told us something was wrong. Their losses would have caused enormous increases in all sorts of vermin they keep in check. We must realize that even after the fall, God's wisdom made creation what it is and the food chain exists because He thought it best.
Agricultural pesticide and herbicide run-off is also a major issue, particularly with broadly toxic chemicals that kill or damage far more than their intended target. The massive die-off of amphibians in the United States can be linked to agricultural run-off containing the herbicide Roundup, which is massively toxic, especially to amphibians. Even a little of this chemical in a pond will kill off frogs and salamanders. We can't be ignorant of these realities.
It is also true that Mankind has an "Oops" issue with saying something is safe, only to realize better later on. I'm sure all of us can think of dozens of cases like this. Even now, food companies are scrambling to eliminate trans fats, nitrites, and nitrates from our food supply because of the harm they do to our bodies. "Safe" isn't always safe.
The Wall Street Journal ran an article a couple months ago about chelation therapy used to help children suffering from autism. This type of chemical-flushing therapy is actually reversing autism in some patients, showing that it might be exposures to concentrations of chemicals that is triggering some forms of autism. The reporter on this piece had a fat analysis done on his own body and was startled by the sheer number of damaging man-made chemicals that had built up in his system over the years. National Geographic did a similar piece covering the garbage building up in our bodies, most of it highly unnatural. To think this stuff harmless over extended periods of time is foolishness. Again, just look at what happened when we curbed some pesticide use and the predatory bird population came roaring back.
Christianity is about truth. We cannot be afraid of truth, no matter which way it cuts.
In small, controlled amounts, DDT would greatly help stem the malaria problem. For this reason, we cannot blanket condemn its use. But we must also accept that this is not a win-win situation. We may cause long-term damage to ecosystems by using it, even in small amounts. We must be soberly-minded concerning how that affects human populations in the long term. It would do us no good to save thousands of people only to have them die if the ecosystem around them collapses or changes so drastically that another pathogen or vermin issue arises to take the place of all the dead mosquitoes.
This issue also presses the need to find targeted, biologically-friendly herbicides and pesticides that do not persist in ecosystems for decades. This will take research and money. Sadly, companies that produce pesticides that are broadly toxic have little compelling interest to do that research unless someone holds their feet to the fire. Because of this profit-related hesitance to do better, we all lose in the end.
Posted by: DLE | June 08, 2007 at 11:19 AM
David,
I have been a christian for 30 years and initially pursued wildlife mgmt and forestry with ambitions to work as a special agent for US Fish and Wildlife but gasp I am a woman and the 'shepherding movement' got a hold of me. I dropped the whole thing like the obedient sheep that I am.
A couple of things I appreciate about you...you freely talk about how your positions and views have changed theologically over the years and admitting you were wrong. Why does that seem to be rare for a pastor.? Thank God for you.
Believe me when we stand before Jesus we are going to have to give an account for our stewardship of this planet and how we treat the rescources just as much as to why I neglect my husband or kids or not sharing God's word when I should. Repenting from sin covers a multitude of areas including why I profess to be a christian but still poach deer out of season or bait them ,to... do I really need an SUV to guzzle more gas... Despite all the clamor at Focus On the Family somebody of credibility BETTER make a stand and get the attention of the christian community especially in the west that we proably need to check or greed -o- meter and make some major changes in our use of recources before it is mandated on us by the gov't.
Posted by: Sonya | June 08, 2007 at 07:02 PM
I know this comment doesn't have anything to do with you post here - but what is going on with the pcablogs and reformed aggregators?? They don't seem to be picking anything up.
Posted by: LJ | June 09, 2007 at 12:32 PM
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."
Ironically, it may be "Ms. Carson's disciples" that we can thank for the fact that DDT is still effective against malaria. Prior to Silent Spring, DDT was used indiscriminately for a wide variety of agricultural and non-agricultural uses. AFAIK, the primary result of _Silent Spring_ was dramatic reduction in the use of DDT as an agricultural pesticide in western industrial nations. It continued in use as an anti-malarial spray in developing nations, and the World Health Organization supported that use as recently as May, 2007.
We know that resistance to DDT can evolve fairly rapidly in insects that are sprayed with DDT, unless the spraying is carefully controlled. So, if the indiscriminate blanket spraying of DDT had continued, most mosquito populations would probably be resistant now. For example, DDT is no longer effective against malarial mosquitos in Sri Lanka and many parts of India, because the mosquitos are resistant. Unlike the case with most pesticide-resistance mutaions, mutations conferring DDT resistance can have a selective advantage even in the absence of DDT, so resistance spreads through an insect population even if DDT spraying is temporarily stopped (See McCart et al., 2005, Current Biology 15:R587). Since the use of DDT is now restricted to spraying for malaria control, usually indoors, there is reason to hope that the evolution of resistant mosquito populations will be slower.
Posted by: Nick | June 13, 2007 at 12:09 PM
"Christians should be the world's best environmentalists, but we need to begin with the right assumptions which are based on a right theology."
I believe the opposite is true, based on the right theology. Unbelievers should care more about this earth than we do because it is virtually all they really have as a god. Basically, all they have in their faith system it the earth, or that which is replete with false gods who originate in the host of heaven (astrological) and the deification of earth (Gaia). This explains their zealotry in transforming this world system into a heaven on earth, and their crusade to protect and sanctify it in the process.
While all of creation does groan and travail until now, only human beings are to be resurrected either unto eternal life, or eternal damnation. The physical world is emblematic of the Fall, and is a symbol of what our sympathies are evoked for: the redeemable humans under the Fall. The earth, however, is under a different plan of redemption. God makes it clear that He will renovate it. We have not been charged with a gospel to preach to the earth, but to preach to men that some might be saved.
David
TheNewsBeats.com
Posted by: David Dansker | June 16, 2007 at 02:24 PM