 and peregrine falcon (right), let alone dozens of other bird species, would likely be gone now in the continental U.S.)
BIRDS OF SPRAY: Without the 1972 ban on DDT and ensuing protections, the bald eagle (left) and peregrine falcon (right), let alone dozens of other bird species, would likely be gone now in the continental U.S.
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Dear EarthTalk: I understand there is good news about the recovery of bird species like the peregrine falcon, bald eagle and others owed to the 1972 ban on DDT. Can you explain?— Mildred Eastover, Bath, Maine
Rachel Carson’s seminal 1962 book, Silent Spring, told the real-life story of how bird populations across the country were suffering as a result of the widespread application of the synthetic pesticide DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), which was being used widely to control mosquitoes and others insects. Carson reported that birds ingesting DDT tended to lay thin-shelled eggs which would in turn break prematurely in the nest, resulting in marked population declines. The problem drove bald eagles, our national symbol, not to mention peregrine falcons and other bird populations, to the brink of extinction, with populations plummeting more than 80 percent.
Luckily for the birds, Silent Spring caused a stir, and many credit it with launching the modern environmental movement. Indeed, one of the world’s leading environmental non-profits, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), initially formed in 1967 in reaction to the DDT problem. The group’s first order of business included filing lawsuits in New York, Michigan, Wisconsin and Washington DC to force a ban on DDT. EDF enlisted the help of dozens of scientific experts—ornithologists, ecologists, toxicologists, carcinogenesis experts, and insect control specialists—to testify at multi-month hearings to prove its point in regard to the dangers of DDT. In 1972 environmentalists' prayers were answered—and their hard work vindicated—with the federal government finally banning DDT.
But with lots of the pesticide already dispersed through ecosystems far and wide, not to mention myriad other threats to bird habitats and the environment in general, no one could be sure whether populations of eagles, falcons and other predatory and fish-eating birds would come back from the brink. While the federal Endangered Species Act went a long way to protect these at-risk species and some of their habitat, non-profits also played a key role in helping specific species recover. To wit, the Peregrine Fund was founded in 1970 by a leading Cornell ornithologist to help nurse peregrine falcon populations hit hard by DDT back to their once abundant numbers. Researchers with the group pioneered methods of breeding peregrines in captivity and releasing them into the wild; such techniques have since been adopted widely by biologists trying to bring other wildlife species back from the brink of extinction. Thanks to a combination of factors and the hard work of bird lovers and scientists, peregrine falcons are once again common across the U.S., graduating off the national endangered species list as of 1999.
The bald eagle’s recovery is perhaps the best known example of how our environmental laws worked to restore not just a resource but our very national symbol. In the mid-1960s fewer than 500 nesting pairs of bald eagles existed in the continental U.S.; today, thanks to the DDT ban and other conservation efforts, some 10,000 pairs of bald eagles inhabit the Lower 48—that’s a 20-fold population increase in just four decades! In 2007 the federal government removed the bald eagle from the Endangered Species List. Without the 1972 ban on DDT and ensuing protections, the bald eagle, let alone dozens of other bird species, would likely be gone now in the continental U.S. And without the song of the birds, the spring would be a very silent time indeed.
CONTACTS: EDF, www.edf.org; Peregrine Fund, www.peregrinefund.org.
EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E - The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe. Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.
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30 Comments
Add CommentYes but remember the 500 million who are estimated to have died in the few years before DDT was introduced.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIgnorance and unthinking reaction to Carson caused the ban.
Since the ban another 50 million are estimated to have died.
People are more important than bird no matter how iconic.
See
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1259
But Google for yourself to confirm the figures.
DDT killed as many people as it "saved", not to mention the disfigured and handicapped newborns. Your comment is like saying that without Agent Orange, even more US soldiers would have died.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd if I was you, I would really think twice before quoting a single site which is entirely devoted to attacking what it considers the political left.
The numbers BTW are completely wrong. If they were correct the African nations would have reintroduced DDT asap.
What next? Quoting some off-his-rocker action actor as a reliable judge of a president's work? Why not Limbaugh to judge Darwin?
I'm afraid jctyler has more emotion than facts. If he/she will check the scientific literature (try the UN data), it will be apparent that the total ban on DDT has resulted in MILLIONS of deaths, especially in Africa. (In fact, it HAS been reintroduced in several African nations.) The problem was the overwhelming extreme responses to her book and the irrational overuse throughout the environment. It has been said that (not intentionally) she was responsible for more deaths than Hitler.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy the way, how has DDT "killed as many people as it "saved"? Data???
I'd like suggest that if an animal population is harmed by a chemical, human population is not far behind. But then again, just what the world needs is millions more people.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisjpate is absolutely correct, and jctyler way off base here. Do a basic Google search on malaria death rates and DDT and you'll find many scientific articles and studies sponsored by WHO and the UN.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCheck out the graph of annual cases of malaria dating from 1948 (prior to DDT use) into the 2000's and judge for yourself the dramatic decrease in cases while DDT was in use, and the marked increase after it's ban....
http://www.searo.who.int/en/Section10/Section21/Section334_4008.htm
Two things: 1) DDT isn't banned world-wide and 2) DDT is still used as a control method for malaria-bearing mosquitos. DDT is banned for agricultural use in many nations, but not completely banned. Its use has been limited over time. In all honesty, this is probably a good thing, too--insects often gain resistance to pesticides through widespread use, and so this may have actually helped to limit the ability of malarial mosquitos to develop resistance to DDT. In addition to DDT, they also use many other methods of controlling malarial transmission, and it's been found that spraying DDT indoors is much more effective than blanket spraying outside in terms of controlling mosquitos and limiting the spread of malaria.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow many times do we have to endure the same lies from the anti-science, anti-reason nutcases?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is no "total ban" on DDT. It's a lie, it's an urban legend that the Teapublicans like to trot out repeatedly no matter how many times they've been shown to be liars.
DDT is not banned. It never has been. It was manufactured in the USA into the mid 1980's and is still produced in South Africa (and probably other places). It's still 100% legal to buy, sell and use in the USA and it is still legal and in use in Africa and South America and other places where malaria is problem.
What the 1972 ban applied to is widespread agricultural application of DDT. You can't spray entire farm fields and wetlands with it. Plain and simple. http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/ddt/
The reason that DDT is no longer widely used is because of what everyone who has read about it or used it already knows: insects rapidly develop resistance to it, sometimes in a matter of months.
That's the reason the US government stopped using it during WWII, not because they gave a shit about eagle eggs while they were spraying it on the islands in the Pacific, but because it wasn't effective in killing off the mosquitoes that carried malaria.
And please, please, please would you teapublican lunatics just ONCE get it through your skulls that correlation is NOT causation!!!!! So much willful ignorance and so much malice, and there seems to be no limit to your appetite for those.
The radical right is fundamentally irrational. The only way they evaluate whether or not a statement is factual is based on its political implications. If the facts don't support their ideology, they deny them and invent new "facts" that are more convenient. What I find sadly predictable is the low moral character demonstrated by the supporters of the american christian party who have long claimed that their religion invented morality.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisread comments nr 4 and 7
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is bad for animals is bad for humans even if the latter take longer to be affected. And what the world-wide bee population for example does not need is a wide-spread return of DDT spraying.
There are a ton of reasons why DDT is not used anymore on a large scale and some countries, especially in the cooler North simply don't want it on their territory (= ban).
About numbers of people killed/saved: since it has by far not saved as many people as some claim but has done more damage to crops than necessary on a continent which already has a problem feeding its numbers, the math may be indirect, still very simple. And DDT is very badly affecting fetuses and very young children.
In short, DDT is simply not as efficient as Barrance claims in comment Nr 1, it has by far not saved as many lives as he quotes from a right-wing site but has killed many and handicapped even more, is very unhealthy and should only be used in an emergency and within limited areas for a limited time.
I stand by what I wrote.
It's a toughie. Talking about DDT is akin to talking about race...best to avoid the subject. Hard to separate out fact from political correctness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI applaud Rachel Carson but she's a bit like Jesus...better known after her demise than when she lived. 'Silent Spring' has gained popularity it never had when published. DDT wasn't banned because of 'Silent Spring'...the book was niche at the time and barely known outside of a few circles. It was banned brecause of the weight of scientific research at the time.
The role of DDt is still controversial. Not that it isn't 'bad' but 'how bad'. Was it blamed for other environmental sins?
instead of telling me to search the net, why don't you?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this- DDT and some of its breakdowns alter hormones; I would search using "ddt hormones";
- DDT is a serious health hazard from slowing child progress to breast cancer ; I'd therefore suggest keywords "ddt who";
- DDT is still banned in many western countries; search "DDT ban"
- an international agreement a few years ago re-allowed the production of DDT under certain circumstances for short-term use on areas suffering from infectious insects such as the female malaria spreading mosquito; a better way IMO and without any of the side-effects is malaria-nets for all, medication, better water management, avoidance of unnecessary water spilling as breeding spots, proper sanitation and especially education. You'd be stunned to learn how little most African people know about malaria and how it is spread.
Therefore, before advising me to google anything, why don't you give it a try first?
Nice on how you use insult and blustering to spread some bad information. The fact is Malaria was nearly extinct right up until when DDT was banned. Regardless of the nuances of the actual law, the US and other western governments tied financial assistance and other threats to force everyone in the world they could to stop using DDT and after this happened, malaria came back hard. You cant deny this, it actually happened.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut you are right correlation is not causation, just as the eagles that were part of that 1962 book were of areas with so many factories, chemical plants, petroleum refineries all up and down those rivers that with those eagles and it is totally insane to conclude it was DDT or DDT by itself and not some concoction created by the mixing of all of these chemicals in some way.
What is clearly demonstrated is just how insane the whacked leftists are and how they will latch onto anything to increase their power and prestige. Maybe DDT is bad for the environment but denying its use without any sort of effective replacement resulted in the deaths of millions. Why it is important to see this is the liberal environmental nut cases are doing it again. They have latched on to at best a theory called global warming, have decided it is CO2 and they are doing every insane thing they can imagine from burying atmospheric O2 we need underground to desires to replace nature's biosphere with one engineered by the liberals. While we do need to study, review and test everything, we also dont need total overreactions and wild theories leading the charge either. We keep letting these nut cases dictate everything to us, we will all be either living in stone age caves or packed like sardines in approved 500 floor apartment buildings drinking our own urine because the environmentalists will have banned everything.
I am always struck by the similarity between those who claim that DDT was never banned and the stuff I read from Holocaust deniers. I guess some people just have a hard time facing the consequences of their beliefs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyway, here is Michael Crichton on the subject:
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/video-studentsandleaders-question3.html
One other point that is probably worth mentioning is that a whole lot of the scare studies from the 1960s that claimed to find DDT in the fat of penguins from Antarctica and mothers' breast milk were later found to be in error. It seems that the testing methods they used at the time could not distinguish DDT from PCB contamination in their labs caused by fluorescent light ballasts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"lies from the anti-science, anti-reason nutcases"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo wonder you felt personally concerned by this job description. <g>
Seen from Europe, there are no left-wing politics in the US, it's only seriously right-wing and very right-wing. I can live with that because I see the US as a young country with growth pains as long as you don't fall into that US teenage ranting habit of "USA knows-it-all exceptionalist world-leader crap".
And why do you always have to bring every factual discussion down to wing politics? Because you know that the day you would discuss numbers and findings instead of politics you'd lose.
Prizzie, you're the intellectual equivalent of a drunk teenager with a gun. Seriously, seen the stupidities you often post, you should be grateful that we keep trying to dialogue with you.
In research, sometimes it turns out that SOME research erred, because of new data, because of incomplete reasoning, because of test of time, whatever. Part of the trial and error routine. Heard of learning from mistakes? You wouldn't have but that does not discredit DDT research in its entirety.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDo you think DDT was banned/reduced because scientists are stupid? What the hell are you then doing here reading a scientific journal? Who do you think you are, an undiscovered Nobel Prize candidate?
Search for "DDT breast cancer" or "DDT newborn" for a start and take it from there. Then get a mirror, take a good, hard look at yourself and ask: "What is it in our educational and massmedia and fake free-market system that makes me so stupid?"
If it wasn't for scientists and all the errors they sometimes made, take penicillin...
DDT used to spray mosquitoe nets inside dwellings.If more effective control measures please advise.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot sure about genetic interference in humans and would appreciate well-collaborated evidence. Not interested in emotional rhetoric.
Extremely simple. Use the nouns in each one of your sentences to search the net:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this<DDT mosquito nets>
<DDT effective control measures>
<DDT genetic interference>
although you will not like the results because they will conflict with your last try
<Snijders emotional rhetoric>
because my guess is that this one will only return results such as "fake impartial" or "helpless at reasoning" or "doesn't understand previous comments because thinks he's a bleedin genius".
"Do you think DDT was banned/reduced because scientists are stupid?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo. I think that banning DDT had very little to do with science and a lot to do with the emotions of people in First World countries who imposed their whims on powerless people in Third World countries. There was also an element of Green NGOs flexing their muscles.
I really don't give much credit to any of the overly emotional responses to this or many articles.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRachel Carson was akin to a modern day prophetess, however she did have considerable scientific knowledge and experience. Please don't discount her or other meritorious lives based on human imperfection.
There is merit to much of both sides' positions here, but the interspersed diatribe significantly reduces the abiliy to listen clearly and see with open minds. Too bad, fkor we can alll agree, possibly, that the world faces many significant problems, some human induced and others not, which will require our collective wills to solve.
"I think..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou think?
"There is merit to much of both sides' positions here"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo. There is no merit to inane comments on DDT, ignoring its side-effects despite all the proof, disregarding its many unpleasant and even deadly consequences. Especially when those people ask for proof and then ignore them so they can bring their political opinions into play.
Ignorance in the face of facts, especially ignorance putting other people's lives at risk, is not excused by anything, it is plain and simple stupidity.
And I do mind people trying to play referee, especially when they admit that they can't see clearly through comments that couldn't be clearer. Blindness disqualifies from any refereeing.
"You think?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah, got a university science degree and everything.
"Ignorance in the face of facts, especially ignorance putting other people's lives at risk, is not excused by anything, it is plain and simple stupidity."
Sometimes the lack of self awareness is so strong it burns. We know people's lives are at risk because so many of them die from malaria. As long as those people who's lives are at risk are mainly children in Africa I guess it doesn't matter to you and the green mafia.
The question posed that began this discussion referred to Rachael Carson, DDT and raptors. This is a prime example of the tunnel vision we can tend toward when “poster child” species are involved. Silent Spring laid blame on the indiscriminant use of chemical pesticides, the list being topped by organo-phosphates, DDT being a rather innocuous member of that list. While the immediate impact of Ms Carson’s writings might be argued, the fact that millions of dead song birds littered cities, towns and fields is probably the birth of widespread environmentalism.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat seem forgotten are the millions of pounds (tons?) of pesticides still being applied worldwide and the probable results. The lack of obviously visible detrimental side effects tends to keep them out of the public view. Testing of these chemicals by “overdose” tends to give a false sense of safety. What is missed by less informed portions of the populace is that vertebrate endocrine functions are controlled by molecular concentrations in the range parts per billion. We have aquatic species exhibiting a wide array of endocrine disruption eg: failure to sexually differentiate. Closer to home is the alarming trend of premature human puberty. While it can be stated that hard connections have not been demonstrated, I for one can reason that when thunder is heard there must have been lightening.
Global warming, terror, dwindling resources’… What do these threats matter if we succeed in chemical suicide?
<We know people's lives are at risk because so many of them die from malaria.>
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat's mainly to do with bad sanitation, no education, poor hygiene and a lack of mosquito nets mainly. DDT wouldn't solve that.
<As long as those people who's lives are at risk are mainly children in Africa I guess it doesn't matter to you and the green mafia.>
I don't believe you got a "scientific degree and everything" cos linking scientists' DDT risk assessment to "green mafia" is simply too stupid for any degree except in brown tea creationism. And you've not been to Africa either or you wouldn't talk that nonsense.
cjoyce: "While the immediate impact of Ms Carson’s writings might be argued, the fact that millions of dead song birds littered cities, towns and fields is probably the birth of widespread environmentalism."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps to some Americans. hint...it's a big world.
@ RSchmidt, You truly are remarkable for labeling people you don't know. dphaynes' comment is good, you don't refute any of his claims, but attack the person instead, and you do that very often, how low will you go? Maybe you are just a troll.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately, bald eagles are still being hunted and killed legally for insane religious/cultural reasons.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.npr.org/2012/03/19/148919990/wyoming-tribe-wins-right-to-hunt-two-bald-eagles
Simply the book that saved the earth. Having read it several times, I am impressed by the scientific detail
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe author presented. You didn't need much of a science
background to see we were killing ourselves and all the creatures around us.
As a kid I witnessed some rivers that ran every color of the rainbow with blobs of foam 3ft high and a smell that you never forget. It was so easy to build a factory next to a waterway to use as an all purpose drain.
I watched agent orange being spayed next to our unit in Viet Nam. Swaths of jungle disappear in less than two weeks.
"Ye shall know he truth and the truth will set you free" John8:32
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this