- How Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent Spring led to fixing the environment, but also led to an irrational fear of “chemicals” and then the anti-vax movement;
- Short items about Vance and Wallnau, Trump’s threats of a violent purge of society, how Mark Robinson fits in to the Republican freak show, more Trump lies about criminal migrants, and another Republican taking credit for a bill he voted against.
Slate, Katie MacBride, 29 Sep 2024: This Book Helped Save the Planet—but Created a Very Harmful Myth, subtitled “It radically shifted the way the world looked at the environment, but created a wave of misinformation we’re still dealing with today.”
The unintended consequence of Rachel Carson’s SILENT SPRING was that uninformed or easily frightened people came to think that everything “chemical” is bad.
On Sept. 27, 1962, biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a book that would radically shift how the nation thought about the effect of pesticides on human health and the environment. The book led to sweeping, critical environmental reforms and awareness. It also, however, planted its own destructive seed: the notion that synthetic chemicals are inherently something to fear. Over the decades, that seed has grown into a wild and unruly tangle of misinformation and hysteria, amply pollinated by social media, wellness influencers, and a lack of science literacy.
The article reviews its impact, and incidents like Love Canal in 1977. Then:
Part of the problem is our associations with the word “chemical.”
The word “has a negative connotation in our popular lexicon; ‘natural’ has a positive connotation, when those words are not inherently negative or positive,” Ryan Marino, a medical toxicologist and physician, told me. “Similarly, many believe synthetic or manufactured chemicals are inherently harmful. When in reality, nature is trying to kill us all the time. Uranium is natural. Ricin is natural.”
This is a form of cognitive bias called the “appeal to nature fallacy,” which is the false assumption that “natural” chemicals or products are inherently less toxic or dangerous than their man-made counterparts. However, it’s “easily disprovable with any one of a zillion examples,” George Zaidan, a chemist and author of Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put in Us and on Us, told me in an email. “Salmonella is natural. Soap is human-made. Should we stop washing our hands with soap, because we expose ourselves to ‘unnatural’ chemicals made by combining fats with sodium hydroxide?”
And this chemophobia has driven the anti-vax movement.
“Like with the anti-vaccination movement, people think that a disease is better for you than a killed disease, which is just purely illogical,” Marino said.
Another point in this article:
Understandably, incidents like Love Canal and the publicity they generated underscored and amplified the public’s fear of synthetic chemicals as potentially, and perhaps even inherently, harmful to human health. But that assessment ignores one of the core principles of toxicology: The dose makes the poison.
… But people don’t always think of these incidents as the outliers they are. “They don’t tend to think, ‘This chemical is harmful at a high dose,’ ” Love said. Instead, they think, “If something bad happened with this chemical, I better not use it at all.”
This recalls the web surfers who freak out when they learn that mercury goes into the manufacture of vaccines, never mind the reason or the amount. You can alarm these people by warning them about the dangers (in high doses) of dihydrogen monoxide.
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Short items.
- Slate, Molly Olmstead: The Controversy Even J.D. Vance Wants to Avoid, subtitled “He was supposed to campaign with a MAGA celebrity preacher. But something spooked him.” Vance appeared at a rally with Lance Wallnau, who recently accused Kamala Harris of witchcraft. Vance kept his distance. Wallnau walked his stances back.
- Salon, Nicholas Liu: Trump reiterates call for police to be unleashed in “violent” purge of society, subtitled “The former president presided over a dramatic spike in crime, which has steadily fallen since he left office” Of course he’s lying about the crime rate. He talks as if there’s a steady stream of shoplifters and bank robbers pouring into the streets that the police can just mow down.
- The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, 28 Sep 2024: The Republican Freak Show, subtitled “Like the man who leads it, the GOP is not just incidentally grotesque. It is grotesque at its core.”
- In turn covered by AlterNet: Conservative: Why Mark Robinson ‘fits in so well’ with the ‘moral freak show’ GOP
