While searching for articles related to Environmentalism, I came across The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights' website; though I do not necessarily agree with much of what has been posted on it, I did find many of the articles interesting to read, as they offered counterarguments to what we have recently discussed in class. One particular article of note is "Rachel Carson's Genocide", written two years ago by Keith Lockitch on the 100th birthday of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, who states that her 100th anniversary is no means for celebration. Lockitch claims that malaria has seen an unprecedented resurgence since DDT was all but outlawed as an effective agent of mosquito control, and that Carson's book is full of unsubstantiated claims and pure ignorance with scientific evidence. Lockitch boldly states that, "The answer is that environmental ideology values an untouched environment above human life. The root of the opposition to DDT is not science but the environmentalist moral premise that it is wrong for man to "tamper" with nature."
The Center's website can be found here, as well as the article itself.
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Three problems here:
ReplyDelete1."Genocide" was a term coined to describe the deliberate mass murder of a specific ethnic group, as in the Holocaust. There is no logical connection between that word and the work of Rachel Carson. This is an ad hominem attack that is beyond absurd.
2.Carson had a very specific argument to make about the safety and effectiveness of a very specific family of pesticides, i.e. chlorinated hydrocarbons. She was in no way opposed to pest control through more effective methods, such as the Sterile Male Technique.
3. The author here invents a term "the environmental ideology" which implies that the thinking of conservationists and environmentalists is monolithic. It is not.