Be Kind To Our Friends in The Swamp

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.

Comments

[John]

This post should be appearing in The Boston Globe, but I guess not....

But, as one who must spend time in DC, I simply cannot agree to your ban on insecticides there. That is cruel beyond bounds. If you could just prohibit Congressmen from using it, both in the DC-area homes and in their home districts, I think the results would be the same, at lower cost to innocent bystanders.