Never Ending Crises and the Ban on DDT

By Rich Kozlovich

I’m a newsie. I love history, I love the news, I love the way history plays into the events taking place daily. I love the fact that I can understand the why’s and where for’s of what is happening because of my lifelong interest in history.  I find the patterns of life play out over and over again as everything is cyclical.   I find that I love talking about it to those who are also interested, and I love explaining those why’s and where for’s and the historical foundation for all that exists today. 

Over these many years I've noticed a pattern of activity that I find sort of fascinating. Scares will ebb and flow, but never really go away.  Not only do these activists not want a crisis to go to waste, they don't want crises to ever end.

Even after an issue has been raised and dealt with it is clear activists keep these issues on the back burner for future reference, as if everyone will forget what the facts actually were. And to some extent they're right, because there will always be a new crop of young misinformed and uninformed potential acolytes they can gull into the green movement especially via these propaganda factories we call universities. Young people in search of some sense of worth who's minds are still easily molded, easily coerced by the need to belong, and searching for something in which they can believe, a clear failure of religion in America, are lured into these radical secular cults.

As a result, environmentalism, which is in reality a scion of socialism, has become today’s secular religion, thus, these young believes are susceptible to the Kyrie Eleison of environmentalism.  They soon become intellectually and philosophically drunk drinking the Kool Aid and breathing the fumes from the fever swamps of environmentalism, filling them with arrogance and a sense of self-righteous indignation at the rest of the world that no amount of valid scientific information or rational observation can cure.  We now call it the Church of Wokeness.  The left is like rust, it never sleeps and it keeps turning itself into an angel of light. 

I keep hearing all sorts of claims by activists and government grant chasing “scientists” that chemicals (especially pesticides) cause cancer, autism, low sperm count and a host of other unproven scares. This has been particularly true of DDT. More outrageous claims have been made against DDT than almost any product that has ever been developed, with the possible exception of bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates. Do chemicals really cause a drop in sperm count? We can answer with a resounding NO!  

In 2011 the American Council on Science and Health cited a study that clearly demonstrated that fact:

“the 1992 study by a group of Danish researchers that claimed sperm counts declined by 50 percent worldwide from 1938 to 1991”, was wrong! They point out that the study was “heavily criticized for its many flaws, methodological problems, and biases” at the time. “We know that the so-called decline in sperm count is just another myth promulgated by the ‘our stolen future’ crowd who say that environmental chemicals lead to infertility in men,” says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross. “But now we have proof that’s simply not true.”

This leads us back to DDT, which was banned by the first administrator of the EPA, Bill Ruckelshaus, in 1972. And yes, it was a ban. It is true that there were exceptions written into the ban, and yes, it is true that this ban in the U.S. was not incumbent on other nations, and yes it is true that it was not a worldwide ban, "at least on paper". However, so much economic pressure was placed on countries that didn’t ban it outright that it became a de facto ban in all but a few nations.

Lower sperm count was one of the claims, and yet the generation of parents who were most heavily exposed to DDT were the parents of the baby boomers, the largest generation of kids to ever come into existence.  At the end of WWII the world's population was approximately two billion people, and it took thousands of years to accomplish that.  In a little over 75 years the world's population soared to just under eight billion people.  So much for chemicals and low sperm counts, and DDT isn't the only chemical to which they make that claim. 

But time is the great leveler of truth.

I've followed this issue from the beginning and I knew the problem the EPA was having, and tried to ignore.  In 1996 when the Food Quality Protection Act was passed the bill contained a provision requiring the EPA to identify chemicals that were hormonally active agents (HAAs), commonly known as Endocrine Disruptors (ED) .  The problem with that was the ability to separate the ED potential of synthetic chemicals versus those which are naturally occurring.   That was the rub in 1996 and still is.   In his book "The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About- Because They Helped Cause Them", Iain Murray states:

"The entire theory that industrialization is causing severe endocrine disruption falls completely apart when exposures to naturally occurring endocrine modulators are taken into account. Plants naturally produce endocrine modulators called "phytoestrogens" to which human being are expose at levels that are thousands and sometimes millions of time higher than those of synthetic chemicals. Humans consume these chemicals every day without adverse effects some even contend these chemicals promote good health."

He goes on to say:

"Laboratory experiments have shown that there are so-called "endocrine disruptors" present in forty-three different foods common in the human diet, including corn, garlic, pineapple, potatoes, and wheat. Most amusingly, soybean, that product so beloved by liberal environmentalists, is a particularly potent source of phytoestrogens"....."it appears that on average human beings consume just over 100 micrograms of estrogen equivalents a day from natural sources. Compare that to the amount of industrial chemical amount of 2.5 micrograms."

He also notes:

"As it turns out phytoestrogens are actually much more potent than the chemicals that act like estrogens. Our friend DDT, for instance, has a relative potency to natural estrogen of 0.000001, meaning it takes one million molecules to have the same impact of one molecule of real estrogen."

Most studies are filled with weasel word and phrases. Then there are the “conclusions in search of data” studies, much like the Hungarian studies of Trajan and Kemeny published in 1969. Using only 3 ppm in the food per day this dose was fed to five generations of inbred Balb/c mice. They claimed a higher incidence of leukemia in the test subjects over the control animals. They also claimed they started with a leukemia free strain, yet there were incidents of leukemia in the controls.

So what was disturbing about this study? Other researchers working with comparable dosages with animals of any species or strain showed no incidences of cancer of any type. The skepticism warranted an investigation into this puzzle.

Although everyone agreed something went wrong in their study they couldn’t definitely point out what went wrong.  However it was shown that there were design problems in the study and there was a possibility of aflatoxin (an absolutely known carcinogen) contaminated food.

Modern studies seem to have much the same problem. Conclusions in search of data! The question I keep asking is this. If DDT was banned for scientific reasons that were obvious, factual and could be replicated, then why have they been studying it since 1972 to prove that it does all the things they claimed it did? Answer?  Because they didn't have one iota of honest research to prove their claims.

Millions have been spent on studies that have been conclusions in search of data. The mere fact so much has been spent after the ban to prove the ban on DDT was proper is a good indicator that everyone, and I mean everyone, on both sides of this issue, know the science was lacking, what was presented was weak or as in the case with Rachel Carson, invalid, and the decision to ban DDT was a political one.

The real problem with the ban on DDT isn't the fact that we lost DDT. Why? Technically it didn’t matter (at least in the developed world) because we had a large arsenal of products to defend society’s health, food and property.

Philosophically it was devastating because it became the basis for all that has come into being since then. All those tools have come under attack, and as a result we have lost important chemistry. First it was the chlorinated hydrocarbons, then it was the organophosphates and carbamates and now the pyrethroids and rodenticides are under attack. 

But it doesn't end there.  The ban created an emotional, almost hysterical mindset, to create oversight bureaucracies, that were filled with activists and quickly became out of control creating regulations regarding the the , the Endangered Species Act, just to name a few.  Often times working in collusion with activist groups in "sue and settle" schemes to allow the courts to give them powers the Congress never intended.  

All of this goes back to the foundational thinking with ban on DDT. 

That ban laid the foundation for the emotional, financial and legislative foundation for the power these various sects of leftism, the environmental movement merely being one of them, to create an unending list of crises to disrupt the nation.  All with the goal of getting the people to turn all power over to these radicals, all in the name of safety and good health, allowing them to impose a tyrannical worldwide system of governance on the nation and the world.  The ban on DDT needs to be overturned for that reason alone.  

Let's try and understand this.  DDT isn't a dead issue.  It's a foundational issue.   

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