Afternoon UPDATE — Readers respond:
“‘Audubon autoban to Hades’ — Exceptionally great phrase even for you!”
PLUS:
That was a great piece today on Carson. The link to the Cato report was fascinating. Teaching a course on the history of the environmentalist movement, I already knew that Fairfield Osborne had anticipated her by about 15 years. Also, with provincial governments suing the tobacco companies left, right, and center, it’s nothing short of scandalous that Carson ignored the evidence that linked smoking to cancer in her obsessive determination to argue that herbicides and pesticides caused cancer.
Keep up the great work!
***
If Carson was a right-wing villain, her reliance upon research conducted by a contemporary doctor who also claimed smoking didn’t cause cancer would be fodder for dark, snotty satire. I suspect this “inconvenient truth” won’t make it into the Carson biopic, though.
The fact that noble, selfless humanitarians such as Rachel Carson are typically smug, self-satisfied misanthropes has been a truism since Dickens invented Mrs. Jellyby.
Yet in the case of the DDT ban, good intentions didn’t pave another liberal road to hell. They bulldozed the way for an Audubon autobahn to Hades on Earth.
