This Sunday , all good Greens , and countless greenflies , will
celebrate the centennial of Rachel Carson's birth. The numbers
attending this year's festivities will of course be lower than they
might, for if The World Health Organization is to be credited , there
are between 300 and 500 million cases of malaria annually, a million of
them fatal.
Never fear- Green funding will not suffer. The deceased are largely Third World infants without a credit card to their name. Why cavil that tens of millions of them would be alive but for the ban on applying DDT to their thatched hovels, when their absence has scarcely trimmed the fuse on the population bomb ? Had they lived to drive the rising spiral of Greenhouse gases , the inconvenient truth is that arctic meltdown would have accelerated , thawing ever more tundra into an ideal mosquito habitat, and creating a vicious circle of insect borne disease.
Give thanks instead for the living. The tropical DDT ban has so far
killed scarcely one child per square kilometer , while saving literally
thousands of mosquitoes per square meter--sixty of the peaceable
creatures share a square yard of pesticide-free organic swamp. To do
the math is to discover one of the wonders of post-modern creation.
Over the half century since Silent Spring,
mother Earth has been graced by tens of billions of extra mosquitoes
per absent child , yet not a single polar bear cub has perished of
malaria.
We owe it to Rachel Carson's memory to sustain our winged allies in the war on terrifying population growth by promoting the ecological recovery of the nation's capital. So write Former Next President Gore before the 4th of July , and demand a District Of Columbia-wide ban on insect repellents during his LiveEarth concert. The Tree Of Life cannot flourish unless watered with the blood of patriots.
