a Mr Borst snip...
On the first page of the book widely credited with launching the environmental movement as well as bringing about the ban on DDT, Rachel Carson wrote: “Dedicated to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who said ‘Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.’

She surely knew that he was referring to atomic warfare, but she implied that he meant there were deadly hazards from chemicals such as DDT. Because I had already found a great many untruths in her book, I obtained a copy of Dr. Schweitzer’s autobiography to see whether he even mentioned DDT. He wrote: “How much labor and waste of time, these wicked insects do cause, but a ray of hope, in the use of DDT, is now held out to us.”

my reply..
a quick search tells me that Dr Schweitzer died at the age of 90 in 1965.  Mz Carson book was first published in 1962.  Certainly the author of the above must be a very literal thinkers and somewhat revisionist in his thinking (basically acting as if what is known now was also known at some distant point in time).  What connect these two topics is 'technology' and certain the benefits of technology are seen at the front side of any technological change but the cost are often only known years later.  With little doubt the atomic bomb was seen as a real benefit to US citizens (especially folks like my father who was lined up to board a ship to invade Japan) but the cost of this great break thru was only slowly recognized as time went by.  My father in law (still living) and a dinosaur (his term) of the nuclear magnetic resonance era found out pretty quickly in writing his dissertation that there was by the late 1940 that there was a certain non rational fear associated with even using the word nuclear (no matter what the context).

I suspect (certainly have no way of knowing) that if Dr Schweitzer had known of the downside of ddt that he likely would have altered his judgement somewhat.  I shall also point out that in the 1940s and 1950s there was any number of chemical that were suppose to 'save the world' from this or that malady.... but by the mid 1960's the dark side of many of these chemical was becoming more fully understood.  of course if you lived near, or had family that worked in, factories that made these chemical you pretty well knew early on that many of these were anything but benign.

given what we do now KNOW I find it difficult to understand how any thinking person could defend the use of ddt.     

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