Under the headline, "Happy Birthday, Earth Day," the April 18 edition provided no information on the negative impact of Carson's efforts. Instead, editor Betty Debnam enthused, "In 1962, a scientist, Rachel Carson, published a book called 'Silent Spring.' She caught everyone’s attention with her accounts of birds dying from pesticides. She warned that people were in danger too."
Debnam made no mention of the fact that Carson's "warning" was wrong. The National Academy of Sciences has called DDT the "greatest chemical ever discovered, a lifesaver of 500 million whose deaths were otherwise inevitable." Carson's claims that the pesticides could be linked to cancer have been thoroughly debunked. Yet, the Mini Page spun this activist as a hero to children across the country.
A May 23, 2007 op-ed by Ayn Rand fellow Keith Lockitch explained:
On May 27, environmentalists will celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of Rachel Carson, the founding mother of their movement.
But Carson's centenary is no cause for celebration. Her legacy includes more than a million deaths a year from the mosquito-borne disease malaria. Though nearly eradicated decades ago, malaria has resurged with a vengeance because DDT, the most effective agent of mosquito control, has been essentially discarded--discarded based not on scientific concerns about its safety, but on environmental dogma advanced by Carson.
The crusade against DDT began with Carson's antipesticide diatribe "Silent Spring," published in 1962 at the height of the worldwide antimalaria campaign. The widespread spraying of DDT had caused a spectacular drop in malaria incidence--Sri Lanka, for example, reported 2.8 million malaria victims in 1948, but by 1963 it had only 17. Yet Carson's book made no mention of this. It said nothing of DDT's crucial role in eradicating malaria in industrialized countries, or of the tens of millions of lives saved by its use.
...
But the scientific case against DDT was, and still is, nonexistent. Almost 60 years have passed since the malaria-spraying campaigns began--with hundreds of millions of people exposed to large concentrations of DDT--yet, according to international health scholar Amir Attaran, the scientific literature "has not even one peer reviewed, independently replicated study linking exposure to DDT with any adverse health outcome." Indeed, in a 1956 study, human volunteers ate DDT every day for over two years with no ill effects then or since.
Debnam, however, portrayed Carson and her agenda as part of "how the world's people started to care for Planet Earth." The headline above her photo read "People wake up." It seems as though even a newspaper for kids is not free from liberal bias.
The December 14, 2008 Mini Page also pushed the green agenda on children and guilt-tripped young minds about the effects of Christmas waste: "If you already have a plastic tree, it is fine to keep using it. But don't buy a new one."
