MICHAEL CRICHTON, the popular author, recently called environmentalism a religion that has killed millions. Lives — mostly African mothers and infants — were sacrificed at the altar of green political correctness. Strong stuff, just like the pesticide that at the heart of his claim, DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane). The story of how DDT — which may have saved more lives than penicillin — became so demonised is worth telling in the week of Tony Blair ’s Africa summit.
It is a story both ancient and modern, where a clean, safe First World buys into a Disneyfied fan-tasy of Mother Nature as kind, gentle, caring. Meanwhile, the tools that make that fantasy possible — such as DDT — are denied to poor countries. They live with an older, brutal version: Ma Nature and her Gang of Diseases, stalking humanity, exacting a terrible toll.
More than 80 per cent of human infections are insect, mite and tick-borne. Bubonic plague, dengue, sleeping sickness, typhus and yellow fever have taken hundreds of millions of lives. By far the worst though is “the queen of diseases” — malaria. It probably killed Oliver Cromwell, Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire. “About half of all humans who have ever lived have died from malaria,” says Natalie Angier, the Pulitzer-winning science writer. By the time you finish reading this, 3,500 or so more children will be infected.
In 1939, Swiss chemist Paul Muller found his perfect pesticide — DDT was fast and deadly to many insects but had little or no impact on other organisms. Highly stable, it needed few repeat sprayings, and was cheap. Three years later, the Swiss secretly shipped a small amount to America.
Synthesising it for the Allies, Joseph Jacobs got drenched in the stuff. Six decades later, he shrugs it off. “In science and life, everything is a balance between pluses and minuses. We shipped 500lb to Italy, where Allied troops were suffering from typhus. 5,000 lives were saved. If you consider the good DDT’s done, compared with the relatively innocuous side-effects, there’s no contest.” Winston Churchill praised “the excellent DDT powder”.
National programmes in Greece and Sri Lanka showed astonishing results. Yet even before a 1967 World Health Organisation report that DDT had freed ten previously malarial countries from “the angel of death”, dissent had grown, inspired by a minor zoologist, Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring.
Carson’s classic of 1962 created a successful blend of “research” (much criticised since) and rhetoric, conjuring an American town, chemically silenced. Children “would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within hours”. Chemicals were evil, and DDT the worst.
The charge of the anti-DDT activists was, and remains, that it is a pollutant that accumulates in the environment and might pose a risk to humans or wildlife. These activists seem to take up the cudgels against all man-made chemicals that do not rapidly biodegrade, regardless of whether or not there is evidence that they are damaging.
The debate culminated in 1971 with an Environmental Protection Agency inquiry. Judge Edmund Sweeney concluded that “DDT is not a carcinogenic, mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man (and) does not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.”
Yet the EPA boss William Ruckelshaus overruled him, choosing to be cautious. Ruckelshaus is unrepentant, admitting it was “close”, adding “the truth is, if I lived in Sri Lanka, I would have decided it differently, but I decided it for the United States”. Where the US led, the world followed. Aid donors ceased funding DDT.
For 81-year-old entomologist Gordon Edwards, famous for swallowing spoonfuls of DDT in front of students, the decision was “an abject capitulation to environmental extremists and a tremendous defeat for science and mankind”. Crichton calls it “one of the most disgraceful episodes in the 20th-century history of America”.
Nor did green activists let up. Shiva Murugasampillay, head of the WHO Southern Africa malaria programme, says “countries have problems getting DDT supplies, because globally, the environmental lobby has tried to close down most production”. The activists’ demand is “total eradication” of DDT and its by-products. The World Wide Fund for Nature called for “a global phase-out and ban on DDT production and use by 2007”. WWF argues: “
Persistent and bioaccumulative chemicals (like DDT) should be phased out . . . regardless of toxicity.” Yet when toxicologist Andy Smith reviewed “everything published on DDT” he found “very poor evidence of an environmental effect at very low levels”. He added: “DDT is extremely useful — and I’m wary of imposing on some parts of the world ‘chemical doctrines’ that are First World luxuries.”
Fortunately there are now some signs that the tables are turning. American Greenpeace members were “stunned” recently when the Congress of Racial Equality demonstrated, accusing Greenpeace of “ecomanslaughter”, waving placards saying “DDT saves African lives”, and “Well-fed Greens — Starving Africans”.
Juvenal’s question “Who will guard the guards?” should be applied to the self-appointed guardians of our planet. It is time to rexamine the activist orthodoxy on DDT, or Gordon Edwards will have reason for his fear: “I keep thinking the insects are going to win.”
The author was a senior policy researcher at the Department for the Environment and is a consultant on development issues
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