The American Spectator

Ken (Old Texican)| 4.22.10 @ 9:16AM

The huge thing I was told about DDT was that it somehow thinned out the shells of birds' eggs.

Does anyone have any knowledge of that?

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Kathi| 4.22.10 @ 1:02PM

DDT has been proven to cause thinning of eggshells in bald eagles, brown pelicans and ospreys, as well as many other birds. This is the main reason the bald eagle was on the endangered species list for so long. DDT use nearly wiped them out.

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JohnD| 4.22.10 @ 10:26AM

The environmental movement is anti-human, and its unstated, secret purpose is the death of billions of people world-wide. A few things of note:

(1) Biofuels programs, such as ethanol, supposedly for the environment, have more than doubled grain prices, leading to a very tenuous situation for the survival of the one billion people the UN says live off less than $1 a day;

(2) By opposing efficient and reliable forms of energy like oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear, environmentalists raise energy prices, which raise food prices, which. . . (see above)

(3) The effect of the ban on DDT is mentioned above, millions dead from malaria and other insect borne diseases;

(4) So called "organic" farming methods pushed by the enviros, which among other things forego the use of chemical fertilizers, leads to lower crop yields, lower yields per acre, and higher food prices, etc., etc., (again, see above).

(5) As also mentioned above, most enviros are advocates of lower population growth, and blame humanity for the "destruction of the planet" and thereby support measures that prevent the birth and health of humans;

(6) Opposition to surface mining has led to the deaths of scores of coal miners working in deep tunnels underground;

Just a few eaxmples - but the truth is below:
*********
"Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth. . ."
Genesis 1-26

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Kathi| 4.22.10 @ 1:13PM

DDT currently has minimal effect on the control of mosquitos. This has been true since as early as 1956. Mosquitos continue to develop immunities to DDT as well as other insecticides. Even if DDT was put back into widespread use, it's effectiveness in reducing the spread of malaria would be very limited. There are other, more effective pesticides which would be far more productive to use as a method of controlling malaria.

The idea of bringing back DDT for any reason would be counter-productive. It has many damaging effects on the ecological balance of nature with very few positive results for mankind. To use this as a political tool to discredit environmentalism is not only irrational but inflammatory.

We only have one planet. If we don't protect it and guard its resources we are dooming ourselves to eventual extinction. This should not be a political argument. Common sense should prevail and anyone who values breathable air, non-toxic water and soil capable of sustaining growth should see that we all need to work together to find the best, safest and most practical methods of preserving our environment.

If we continue to ravage Earth for the sake of convenience, laziness and greed, future generations will condemn our arrogance and short-sightedness.

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Lavaux| 4.22.10 @ 2:32PM

The use of DDT indoors in high concentrations is very effective against mosquitos and malaria. Therefore, the ban on DDT, which the environmental movement backs, is anti-human given the malaria death toll.

But DDT isn't the main issue. Rather, the environmental movement's advocacy against (1) human population growth, (2) current population levels and (3) economic growth in the developing world demonstrates beyond all question environmentalism's anti-human agenda.

Therefore, environmentalism forces us to choose between human life, liberty, prosperity and dignity or preserving the environment according to the mythical standard of zero-impact man. Most of us choose life, which is why environmentalism has been beaten back to a position of retrenchment.

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Jeanne| 4.22.10 @ 11:48PM

Thank you, Kathi!

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Sandy| 4.28.10 @ 2:45PM

Eventual extinction? Wouldn't that be the greenies greatest dream? No more bad old humans! Then Mother Gaia could heal herself, right? My soul is going to heaven when I die; I don't care what happens to the corpse. Greenies think they can build heaven on earth. Ain't happened in a couple of millenia so it probably ain't gonna happen. People fight. Nations fall. Utopia is impossible! We are stewards of the earth, yes. We should take care to tread lightly. But not at the expense of liberty!

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Sandy| 4.28.10 @ 2:45PM

Eventual extinction? Wouldn't that be the greenies greatest dream? No more bad old humans! Then Mother Gaia could heal herself, right? My soul is going to heaven when I die; I don't care what happens to the corpse. Greenies think they can build heaven on earth. Ain't happened in a couple of millenia so it probably ain't gonna happen. People fight. Nations fall. Utopia is impossible! We are stewards of the earth, yes. We should take care to tread lightly. But not at the expense of liberty!

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John3| 4.22.10 @ 2:11PM

I agree. The environmentalist/green movement has at least been consistent in what they don't like: they abhor humanity and people in particular. They will support or demonize anything that will support population growth: they support abortion, contraception and sterilization; on the other hand, they demonize agribusinesses that produce improved crop yields from genetically manipulated seeds. They say that it is NOT correct to eat genetically manipulated crops but at the same time, they support the rampant distribution of contraceptives which now contaminates our water sources and ARE causing bizarre changes in our plant and animal life.

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John3| 4.22.10 @ 2:13PM

In the same vein as the banning of DDT, we should then ban contraceptives. We have more data indicating that contraceptives is a pollutant.

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Vasu Murti | 4.22.10 @ 10:15PM

As far as everyday ethics are concerned, there are no morally relevant differences between humans and other animals. Respect for animal life means respect for human life!

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, worshiped worldwide by millions of Vaishnavaite Hindus (myself included) as a saktyavesa-avatar (or empowered representative of God), briefly mentioned the killing of unborn children, when discussing the institutionalized killing of animals in slaughterhouses:

"Who are these children being killed? They are these meat-eaters. They enjoyed themselves when so many animals were killed, and now they're being killed by their mothers.

"People do not know how nature is working. If you kill, you must be killed. If you kill the cow who is your mother, then in some future lifetime your mother will kill you. Yes. The mother becomes the child, and the child becomes the mother."

In a 1979 essay entitled "Abortion and the Language of Unconsciousness," Ravindra-svarupa dasa (Dr. William Deadwyler) explains:

"A conscious person will not kill even animals (much less very young humans) for his pleasure or convenience. Certainly the unconsciousness and brutality that allows us to erect factories of death for animals lay the groundwork for our treating humans in the same way."

A contemporary Hindu spiritual master, Srila Hridayananda dasa Goswami, comments on this shortcoming of the anti-abortion movement:

"Insisting that human life begins at conception, the anti-abortion movement seeks to shock us into the awareness that abortion means killing--killing a human being rather than an animal, a bird, an insect, or a fish. Thus although the movement calls itself 'pro-life,' it is really 'pro-human-life.' Its fudging with the terms 'life' and 'human life' reveals a disturbing assumption: that nonhuman life is somehow not actually life at all, or, if it is, then it is somehow not as 'sacred' as human life and therefore not worth protecting....If the pro-life movement can become part of a broader struggle to recognize the sacredness of all life...then undoubtedly it will attain great success."

Conservative Christians act as if they've never encountered a vegetarian before, even though vegetarianism has attracted some of the greatest minds in history.

In the Table of Contents to Rynn Berry's 1993 book, Famous Vegetarians and Their Favorite Recipes: Lives & Lore from Buddha to the Beatles, Pythagoras is described as an ancient Greek religious teacher. Gautama the Buddha is similarly described as an ancient Indian savant and religious teacher. Mahavira is described as the historical founder of the world's oldest vegetarian religion---the Jains of India. Plato (and Socrates) are described as Pythagorean philosophers who are the founders of the Western philosophical tradition. Plutarch is described as an ancient essayist and biographer, famous for his Lives of notable Greeks and Romans.

Leonardo da Vinci is described as an "Italian Renaissance man; Leonardo is one of Western Civilization's greatest geniuses." Percy Bysshe Shelley is described as a "scientist, classicist, aesthete, Shelley was probably the most gifted English Romantic poet." Leo Tolstoy: "Nineteenth century Russian author, Tolstoy is considered to be the world's greatest novelist." Annie Besant: "Nineteenth century English social reformer and spiritual leader...at once a feminist, a labor leader, a theosophist, a freethinker, a devoted mother and a founder of the planned parenthood movement. She is one of the most remarkable women of modern times."

Mohandas Gandhi: "Indian civic and spiritual leader; inventor of the hunger strike; architect of Indian independence; father of modern India." George Bernard Shaw: "Celebrated wit; peerless music and drama critic; essayist and dramatist of genius." Bronson Alcott: "American transcendentalist philosopher; father of Louisa May Alcott; founder of the first vegetarian commune, Fruitlands." Dr. John Harvey Kellogg: "World-class surgeon, pioneering nutritionist, and food inventor extraordinaire. Kellogg invented peanut butter, flaked cereals, and the first meat substitutes made from nuts and grains."

Henry Salt: "Venerable figure in the vegetarian movement; author of such vegetarian classics as Seventy Years Among the Savages, and Animal Rights." Frances Moore Lappe: "Author of Diet for a Small Planet, Lappe's two million copy bestseller put vegetarianism on the map, and awakened Westerners to the nutritional and economic benefits of a vegetarian diet." Isaac Bashevis Singer and Malcolm Muggeridge are described as the first major literary figures in the West to turn vegetarian since Tolstoy. Brigid Brophy: "Noted for her formidable intellect, Brigid Brophy is an English novelist, biographer, and critic of the first rank. She is the first major woman novelist to become a vegetarian."

Ethical considerations influenced Benjamin Franklin, who became a vegetarian at age sixteen. Franklin noted "greater progress from that greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension." In his autobiographical writings, he called flesh-eating "unprovoked murder."

The poet Percy Shelley was a committed vegetarian. In his essay, "A Vindication of Natural Diet," he wrote, "Let the advocate of animal food...tear a living lamb with his teeth and, plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the steaming blood...Then, and only then only, would he be consistent."

Shelley's interest in vegetarianism began when he was a student at Oxford, and he and his wife Harriet took up the diet soon after their marriage. In a letter dated March 14, 1812, his wife wrote to a friend, "We have foresworn meat and adopted the Pythagorean system." Shelley, in his poem "Queen Mab," described a world where humans do not kill animals for food:

"...no longer now
He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh,
Which, still avenging Nature's broken law,
Kindled all putrid humors in his frame,
All evil passions, and all vain belief
Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,
The germs of misery, death disease and crime."

"It is necessary to correct the error that vegetarianism has made us weak in mind, or passive or inert in action," wrote Mohandas Gandhi. "I do not regard flesh-food as necessary at any stage." Gandhi wrote several books in which he discussed vegetarianism. His own daily diet included wheat sprouts, almond paste, greens, lemons, and honey. He founded Tolstoy Farm, a community based on vegetarian principles. In his Moral Basis of Vegetarianism, Gandhi wrote, "I hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species. We err in copying the lower animal world if we are superior to it...I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants."

"If you could feel or see the suffering, you wouldn't think twice. Give back life. Don't eat meat."

---actress Kim Basinger

Describing his reaction to a visit to a slaughterhouse, Canadian tennis champion Peter Burwash wrote in A Vegetarian Primer: "I'm no shrinking violet. I played hockey until half of my teeth were knocked down my throat. And I'm extremely competitive on a tennis court...But that experience at the slaughterhouse overwhelmed me. When I walked out of there, I knew all the physiological, economic, and ecological arguments supporting vegetarianism, but it was firsthand experience of man's cruelty to animals that laid the real groundwork for my commitment to vegetarianism."

"...the whole point of life is to harmonize with everything, every aspect of creation. That means down to not killing the flies, eating the meat, killing people or chopping the trees down."

---George Harrison

Kim Bartlett of Animal People in Clinton, WA, similarly writes:

"Something to think about: We believe that the Golden Rule applies to animals, too. We don't accept the prevailing notion that 'people come first' or that 'people are more important than animals.' Animals feel pain and suffer just as we do, and it is almost always humans making animals suffer and not the other way around. Yet in spite of how cruelly people behave towards animals -- not to mention human cruelty to other humans -- we are supposed to believe that humans are superior to other animals. If people want to fancy themselves as being of greater moral worth than the other creatures on this earth, we should begin behaving better than they do, and not worse. Let's start treating everyone as we would like to be treated ourselves."

Food expert Frances Moore Lappe, author of the bestseller Diet for a Small Planet, once said in a television interview that we should look at a piece of steak as if it were a Cadillac. "What I mean," she explained, "is that we in America are hooked on gas-guzzling automobiles because of the illusion of cheap petroleum. Likewise, we got hooked on a grain-fed, meat-centered diet because of the illusion of cheap grain."

The process of using grain to produce meat is incredibly wasteful: the USDA's Economic Research Service shows that we receive only one pound of beef for each sixteen pounds of grain. In his book Proteins: Their Chemistry and Politics, Dr. Aaron Altschul notes that in terms of calorie units per acre, a diet of grains, vegetables, and beans will support twenty times as many people than a meat-centered diet.

As it stands now, about half of the harvested acreage in America and in a number of European, African, and Asian countries is used to feed animals. If the earth's arable land were used primarily for the production of vegetarian foods, the planet could easily support a human population of twenty billion or larger.

Facts and points such as these have led food experts to point out that the world hunger problem is largely illusory. The Global Hunger Alliance writes: "Most hunger deaths are due to chronic malnutrition caused by inequitable distribution and inefficient use of existing food resources. At the same time, wasteful agricultural practices, such as the intensive livestock operations known as factory farming, are rapidly polluting and depleting the natural resources upon which all life depends. Trying to produce more foods by these methods would lead only to more water pollution, more soil degradation, and, ultimately, more hunger."

A report submitted to the United Nations World Food Conference concurs: "The overconsumption of meat by the rich means hunger for the poor. This wasteful agriculture must be changed--by the suppression of feedlots where beef are fattened on grains, and even a massive reduction of beef cattle."

"A diet that can lead to heart attacks, cancer, and numerous other diseases cannot be a natural diet," writes Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983). "A diet that pillages our resources of land, water, forests, and energy cannot be a natural diet. A diet that causes the unnecessary suffering and death of billions of animals each year cannot be a natural diet."

I understand there are conservative Christians who fear vegetarianism...which is kind of like being afraid of nonsmoking, nondrinking, or recycling. Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain fed to livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.

A pamphlet put out by Compassion Over Killing says raising animals for food is one of the leading causes of both pollution and resource depletion today. According to a recent United Nations report, Livestock's Long Shadow, raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined. Researchers from the University of Chicago similarly concluded that a vegetarian diet is the most energy efficient, and the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by not eating animal products than by switching to a hybrid car.

"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation."

---Union Nations' Food and Agriculture Association

70% of the grain grown and 50% of the water consumed in the U.S. are used by the meat industry. (Audubon Society)

Over 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to grow grain for livestock. (Greenpeace)

It takes nearly one gallon of fossil fuel and 5,200 gallons of water to produce just one pound of conventionally fed beef. (Mother Jones)

Farmed animals produce an estimated 1.4 billion tons of fecal waste each year in the U.S. Much of this untreated waste pollutes the land and water.

The number of animals killed for food in the United States is 70 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in animal pounds.

“If anyone wants to save the planet,” says Paul McCartney in an interview with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 2001, “all they have to do is stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let’s do it! Linda was right. Going veggie is the single best idea for the new century.”

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Vasu Murti | 4.22.10 @ 10:35PM

Mother Teresa, honored for her work amongst the poor with the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, wrote in 1992 to Marlene Ryan, a former member of the National Alliance for Animals. Her letter reads:

"I am praying for you that God's blessing may be with you in all that you are doing to create concern for the animals which are often subjected to much cruelty. They, too, are created by the same loving Hand of God which created us. As we humans are gifted with intelligence which the animals lack, it is our duty to protect them and to promote their well being.

"We also owe it to them as they serve us with such wonderful docility and loyalty. A person who shows cruelty to these creatures cannot be kind to other humans also. Let us do all we can to become instruments of peace--where we are--the true peace that comes from loving and caring and respecting each person as a child of God--my brother--my sister."

In an article entitled "The Primacy of Nonviolence as a Virtue," appearing in Embracing Earth: Catholic Approaches to Ecology (1994), Brother Wayne Teasdale wrote: "One key answer to a culture's preoccupation with violence is to teach, insist on, and live the value of nonviolence. It can be done successfully, and it has been done for more than 2,500 years by Jains and Buddhists.

"Neither Jainism nor Buddhism has ever supported war or personal violence; this nonviolence extends to all sentient beings. Christianity can learn something valuable from these traditions. This teaching on nonviolence has been incarnated in the lives of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama with significant results..."

According to Teasdale: "...it is necessary to elevate nonviolence to a noble place in our civilization of loving-compassion because nonviolence as 'ahimsa' in the Hindu tradition, a tradition that seems to possess the most advanced understanding of nonviolence, IS love! Love is the goal and ultimate nature of nonviolence as an inner disposition and commitment of the heart. It is the fulfillment of love and compassion in the social sphere, that is, in the normal course of relations among people in the matrix of society."

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CLARE| 4.28.10 @ 7:28PM

This is the sickness that will destroy our world. Where is "do unto others"?

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JayMar| 4.22.10 @ 1:33PM

I was born at Ramey AFB in Puerto Rico where DDT was sprayed at least once a month to control and eventually destroy the anopheles mosquito, the primary carrier of malaria. I spent the first 12 years of my life there and remember this enormous truck-sprayer driving and spraying throught all the streets at the base and the City of Aguadilla. I am now 70 years old and have never suffered any respiratory ailment nor am I aware of anyone else who was exposed to DDT as I was (and I do stay in touch with all my schoolmates).

It's a pity that the love for the planet does not include the love for your fellow human. But then, no surprise here. We know their main purpose is not to help the planet but to help themselves will a sense of all-controlling power.

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Gina| 7.11.10 @ 8:49PM

Thanks for your post. I too spent many years breathing the DDT from the mosquito trucks at Ramey. Glad you are in good health as I was wondering about this very thing! Thanks again.

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JohnD| 4.22.10 @ 2:00PM

Kathi, no one opposes conservation, or common sense measures to protect water and air. However, the environmentalists always opt for the course of action that does the most damage to human beings, is the most anti-capitalist, and the most pro-state control options for envornmental preservation.

Take gasoline. In the 1970s the enviros said we had to stop using lead in gasoline. Refiners abandoned using cheap lead compounds to boost octane, and opted for less cheap, but still cheap, butane. Then in the 1980s, the enviros wailed about gasoline volatility and hydrocarbon emissions from evaporation, and also wailed about NOx emissions, and aromatics. They pushed for reformulated gasoline and got that under the CAA Amendment of 1990. So refiners developed MTBE, an ether that boosted octane without increasing volatility, and eliminated much of the NOx . Then the enviros wailed that MTBE was getting into the groundwater, and started suing oil companies and gas stations under the Clean Water Act. Then, in 2007, refiners switched to using ethanol made from corn, and corn prices soared (there were food riots in over 40 developing nations in the spring and summer of 2008).

Now, with ultra clean burning gasolines, that limit unburned hydrocarbon and NOx emissions, and CO emissions (converting almost all the burned gasoline to CO2) , the enviros began wailing that carbon dioxide (the most benign substance known to man this side of water) was killing the planet. The only solution was to stop using oil altogether, and convert to less efficient, less reliable, and much more expensive solar, wind, etc.

What the enviros really want to do is elminate people and humanity.

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JohnD| 4.22.10 @ 2:04PM

Oh, and Kathi, your straw man argument that equates my wanting to preserve the survivability of humankind by allowing them access to cheap food and energy to "ravaging the planet" is nice. I just want us to be able to extract the things from the earth we need to survive and prosper, which is why God gave man doiminion over this ball of dirt as told in Genesis 1-26.

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John3| 4.22.10 @ 2:02PM

DDT has not been shown to cause any harmful effects. It was banned during that time because it was the "politically correct" thing to do and all in the name of the All-knowing-All Good Environmentalist. It did not matter that it was a Republican EPA chief that banned it despite extensive research by government-funded scientists that it did not harm anything. Sadly, the banning of DDT caused countless unnecessary deaths, mostly in poor countries who were told that mosquito nets would be their savior against malaria. Let us be clear here--if we don't stand for the truth-democrat or republican--we will make the wrong decisions!

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Vasu Murti | 4.22.10 @ 6:34PM

Humans uber alles! Does Paul Chesser think only human life is sacred?!

Author Keith Akers, in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), notes that by arguing against the killing of plants, the meat-eater "seeks to reduce vegetarianism to absurdity. If vegetarians object to killing living creatures (it is argued), then logically they should object to killing plants and insects as well as animals. But this is absurd. Therefore, it can’t be wrong to kill animals.

"Fruitarians take the argument concerning plants quite seriously; they do not eat any food which causes injury or death to either animals or plants. This means, in their view, a diet of those fruits, nuts and seeds which can be eaten without the destruction of the plant that produces the food.

"Finding an ethically significant line between plants and animals, though, is not particularly difficult. Plants have no evolutionary need to feel pain, and completely lack a central nervous system. Nature does not create pain gratuitously, but only when it enables the organism to survive. Animals, being mobile, would benefit from having a sense of pain; plants would not."

In determining a boundary between sentient and insentient life, Peter Singer in Animal Liberation suggests that "somewhere between a shrimp and an oyster seems as good a place to draw the line as any, and better than most."

Keith Akers states further, "Even if one does not want to become a fruitarian and believes that plants have feelings (against all evidence to the contrary), it does not follow that vegetarianism is absurd. We ought to destroy as few plants as possible. And by raising and eating an animal for food, many more plants are destroyed indirectly by the animals we eat than if we merely ate the plants directly."

(Meat-eaters indirectly kill ten times more plants than do vegetarians!)

"What about insects?" asks Akers, "While there may be reason to kill insects, there is no reason to kill them for food. One distinguishes between the way meat animals are killed for food and the way insects are killed.

"Insects are killed only when they intrude upon human territory, posing a threat to the comfort, health, or well-being of humans. There is a huge difference between ridding oneself of intruders and going out of one's way to find and kill something which would otherwise be harmless."

According to Akers:

"These questions may have a certain fascination for philosophers, but most vegetarians are not bothered by them. For any vegetarian who is not a biological pacifist, there would not seem to be any particular difficulty in distinguishing ethically between insects and plants on the one hand, and animals and humans on the other."

Organic farming is a direct response to the moral question of unnecessarily killing insects!

Anna Lappe says:

"Organic farming is also proving to dramatically reduce on-farm emissions as well as related emissions associated with producing food. Cut out synthetic fertilizer and on-farm petroleum-based chemicals and you're cutting back on significant greenhouse gases."

I'd like to see a return to organic farming. In 1989, concern over the use of the pesticide Alar on apples caused many Americans to consider organic produce. John Robbins writes in his Pulitzer Prize nominated book, Diet for a New America (1987), "We produce pesticides at a rate more than 13,000 times faster than we did only 35 years ago. Our environment and food chains are being inundated by a virtual avalanche of pesticides. What three decades ago took us six years to produce, we now produce every couple of hours."

"It is hard for us to imagine how destructive these substances are. Pesticides are extraordinarily concentrated and powerful chemicals which have been intentionally developed to kill living creatures. In fact, some of them were originally developed to kill human beings. Phosgene, used today to produce chemical herbicides and insecticides, was originally developed for use in chemical warfare, and as, in fact, the agent of almost all deaths due to poison gas in World War I. Zykon-B, another modern pesticide, is the substance which the Nazis used to produce deadly hydrogen cyanide gas, used to kill millions upon millions at Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps.

"Many of today's most widely used pesticides--including malathion and parathion--are members of the nerve gas family. So lethal is parathion that a chemist who swallowed an infinitesimal dose, amounting to 0.00424 of an ounce, was instantaneously paralyzed and died before he could take an antidote he prepared in advance and had at hand.

"Pesticides are not the kind of substances you'd want to have hanging around in your environment. But hang around many of them do. In fact, the chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides--DDT, aldrin, kepone, dieldrin, chlordane, heptachlor, endrin, mirex, PCB's, toxaphene, lindane, etc.--are extremely stable compounds. Ominously, they do not break down for decades, and in some cases, centuries."

Poisons used to kill insects accumulate on crops, in the soil and in greater concentration in the tissues of living creatures higher on the food chain. The Environmental Protection Agency's Pesticide Monitoring Journal reports that "Foods of animal origin (are) the major source of...pesticide residues in the diet."

John Robbins writes: "Recent studies indicate that of all the toxic chemical residues in the American diet, almost all, 95% to 99%, comes from meat, fish, dairy products and eggs. If you want to include pesticides in your diet, these are the foods to eat. Fortunately, you can overwhelmingly reduce your intake of these poisons by eating lower on the food chain, and not choosing foods of animal origin...

"While DDT has gotten most of the publicity, there are unfortunately many other toxic chemicals that are equally widespread in the environment, and actually more poisonous. The pesticide dieldrin, for example, is five times more poisonous than DDT when swallowed, and forty times more so when absorbed by the skin. Yet by the time dieldrin was finally banned in 1974, the FDA found it in 96 percent of all the meat, fish and poultry in the country, in 85% of all dairy products, and in the flesh of 99.5% of the American people! Sadly, dieldrin will remain with us for a long time; it is one of the most biologically stable of all pesticides, taking many decades to break down."

In his Pulitzer Prize nominated book, How to Survive in America the Poisoned, pesticide authority Lewis Regenstein writes: "Meat contains approximately 14 times more pesticides than do plant foods; dairy products 5 1/2 times more. Thus, by eating foods of animal origin, one ingests greatly concentrated amounts of hazardous chemicals. Analysis of various foods by the FDA shows that meat, poultry, fish, cheese and other dairy products contain levels of these pesticides more often and in greater amount than in other foods."

As far back as 1966, it was admitted in Congressional hearings that:

"No milk available on the market, today, in any part of the United States, is free of pesticide residues."

In 1975, the Council on Environmental Quality concluded dairy and meat products account for over 95% of the population's intake of DDT. The same is true of other pesticides.

A 1976 study by the Environmental Protection Agency found the breast milk of mothers who consume animal products to be 50 to 100 times more contaminated by pesticide residues than the milk of vegetarian or vegan mothers.

John Robbins writes: "Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon, used to say that before the United States could consider organic farming, it would have to decide which 50 or 60 million Americans were going to be allowed to starve. His attitude exemplified the stance that government and agribusiness have taken in the past: that organic farming is a luxury we can ill-afford, and we need these chemicals to feed ourselves. The chemical companies...have spent millions to reinforce this way of thinking.

"But it could hardly be less true."

Organic farming and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) are getting more attention today. These utilize natural insect controls, such as predatory insects, weather, crop rotation, pest-resistant varieties, soil tillage, and other environmentally safe practices.

A 1979 Department of Agriculture task force of scientists and economists came to "...positive conclusions on the importance of organic farming and its potential contributions to agriculture and society." Until the end of the Second World War, American farmers produced bountiful harvests without relying on pesticides. There is no reason why America cannot do so again.

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Dofus kamas | 4.28.10 @ 2:52AM

whether you know it ffxiv gil or not

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