Quote:
Since I'm feeling lazy and you seem to know will you please direct me towards reliable studies supporting this viewpoint.
Yes, I'd like to see the "studies" also proving that finding DDT as harmful is rigged. I'm lazy also, so please point me in that direction.
I'm sorry, let me rephrase that - the test itself was not rigged, but the reporting was highly selective about the results published. The scientist, one J. Bitman, put DDT into the birds' diet, but also reduced the calcium. Obviously, this got thinner eggshells. Mr. Bitman then redid the experiment, retaining the DDT but also restoring the calcium. The eggshells were of normal thickness. Only the first test was widely reported, however. And yes, this was THE experiment, and was cited dishonestly by Rachel Carson in
Silent Spring, if I'm not mistaken.
Then there's Edmund Sweeney, of the EPA - "The uses [of DDT] under regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife."
Researcher Joseph Hickey of the University of Wisconsin testified before the EPA that he could not kill robins by overdosing them on DDT because they just passed it through their digestive tracts - in other words, they ate it and then crapped it out. Numerous experiments by the Fish and Wildlife Service and a number of university researchers show that DDT in the diet will not kill birds under field conditions. The only way to kill a vertebrate with DDT is to have it consume obscenely massive amounts of the substance, which could not possibly come anywhere close to happening in the real world.
Audubon Christmas Bird Counts reveal that
more birds
per observer were counted during the greatest "DDT years." Including several of the birds that it was supposed to be harming.
Professor Gordon Edwards, a leading entomologist, was originally quite pleased with Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring. However, he kept noticing gross inaccuracies as well as that most of Carson's scientific sources did not, in fact, support her position. The man eventually became pro-DDT, and would regularly consume DDT during talks, with no adverse effects.
You asked. I answered.
EDIT - Geez, you didn't tell me I'd kill the thread!
Am I THAT creepy?