Mass Murderers & Radical Environmentalists

by Paul R. Hollrah: LHI Contributor


If we were to compile a list of history's greatest mass murderers, who would we put on our list? Attila the Hun ravaged the Roman Empire during the 5th Century, killing and maiming all who stood in his way. In the 13th Century, Ghengis Khan and his Mongol hordes roamed far and wide, creating a bloody empire that stretched from China and the Korean peninsula all the way to Iraq and eastern Europe.

>From 1921 to 1959, Josef Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with a cruelty unprecedented in human history, killing some 60 million of his own countrymen. In the 1930's and 40's, Adolph Hitler murdered some 6 million people – mostly Jews, Gypsies, and others who were deemed ineligible for membership in the "master race." And from 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, murdered nearly 4 million in a wanton political "cleansing" of the Cambodian countryside.

But who would we select as the greatest mass murderer of all time? The leading candidate for that title would be American marine biologist Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring and the principal force behind the banning of the pesticide DDT.

DDT is an odorless chemical pesticide used to control disease-carrying and crop-eating insects. Developed in Germany in 1874, it did not come into common usage until World War II when it was effectively used for pre-invasion spraying of jungles and marshes. Following the war, it was widely used throughout the world as a means of combating yellow fever, typhoid fever, malaria, and other diseases carried by insects.

Not only was DDT a major boon to the life expectancy of people throughout the world, it could be purchased for just pennies a pound. In India alone, the number of cases of malaria was reduced from 75 million to less than 5 million in just ten years.

But then, in 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and environmental activism quickly became a leading fad among American liberals. Carson charged that, as DDT entered the food chain, certain reproductive dysfunctions, such as thin eggs shells in some species of birds, might occur.

In late 1971, the Environmental Protection Agency initiated a series of hearings on the potential dangers of DDT. After seven months of exhaustive hearings, the EPA's Administrative Law Judge, Edmund Sweeney, ruled that, "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man… The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife… The evidence in this proceeding supports the conclusion that there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT."

Nevertheless, in spite of all of the scientific testimony to the contrary, pressure by radical environmentalists caused EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus, a wealthy member of the Environmental Defense Fund, to reverse Judge Sweeney's ruling, declaring that DDT was a "potential human carcinogen" and banning its use for virtually all applications. Ruckelshaus had not attended the hearings and had not even read the final report.

In the thirty-two years since the banning of DDT, more than 13 billion cases of malaria have been reported, most of them in developing countries. Of these, more than 87.8 million people have died, 90% of them pregnant women and children under age 5.

In the aftermath of the Great Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26, more than 125,000 people have lost their lives and it is likely that tens of thousands more will be among that number when all the missing are accounted for. But the loss of life due to drowning and the collapse of buildings may be exceeded by those who will die as a result of starvation and the spread of disease, such as typhoid fever, dysentery, cholera, and malaria.

Typhoid fever, dysentery, and cholera can be treated with a combination of drugs and/or oral rehydration, but malaria is another matter. Malaria is best controlled through the use of DDT in mosquito-infested areas. But DDT is not an alternative. Its use has been banned as a result of pressure by radical environmentalists.

So who wins the title of the greatest mass murderer of all time? If we count all of the lives that would have been saved in the past thirty-two years through the application of DDT, that number would exceed the total number of people murdered by Attila, Ghengis Khan, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot, combined.

To allow all of those lives to be lost in the name of "environmental protection" and "animal rights," using junk science as a basis, is not just inhumane, it is genocide on a grand scale.