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Plan to honour Silent Spring author blocked in U.S. senate

Raw Story reports that two bills are in the works in the U.S. to honour Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring – one to mark the 100th anniversary of her birth and one to name a post office in Pennsylvania after her. The bills were introduced by a bipartisan group of senators from her home states of Pennsylvania and Maryland, but Republican senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma is blocking the bill.

Coburn said through a spokesman that Carson was undeserving of honor from Congress because she had promoted ‘junk science.’

“Dr. Coburn believes the tremendous harm Carson’s junk science claims about DDT did to the developing world overshadow her other contributions,” said spokesman John Hart in an e-mail to RAW STORY. “Millions of people in the developing world, particularly children under five, died because governments bought into Carson’s junk science claims about DDT. To put it in language the Left understands, her ‘intelligence’ was wrong and it had deadly consequences.”

“This book was the catalyst in the deadly worldwide stigmatization against insecticides, especially DDT,” said Senator Coburn at his website. “The U.S. and western European countries all used DDT in the mid-20th century to eliminate malaria from their territories, but then banned the substance for use by poor countries today to combat their number one health threat.”

While the story goes on to acknowledge that “the World Health Organization recently approved DDT for limited use in order to prevent the spread of malaria in developing countries,” the dangers Carson drew attention to are the reasons why the pesticide’s use needs to be limited. The legislative impasse will likely be broken and Carson should get her honours yet, but the gall that it takes for a Republican senator to throw around the terms wrong “intelligence” and “deadly consequences” has left this Quillblogger speechless.

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