Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Al Gore is on the airwaves in California this campaign season, though not as a candidate. He's filmed an advertisement for Proposition 87, which would raise taxes on crude oil and, through one of those complicated carom shots environmental activists are always hoping to set up, reduce global warming.
I thought of Gore's crusade the other day when an announcement crossed my desk about DDT. If you're a person of a certain age, an announcement like this is sure to bring you up short.
Some of us remember the municipal trucks passing through suburban neighborhoods at night in the early 1960s, releasing great billowing clouds of pesticide to eradicate mosquitoes.
In what seemed at the time like an excess of caution, residents were advised to shut their windows until the trucks passed because the clouds contained an interesting chemical called DDT.
And some of us remember, a few years later, when DDT became a symbol of environmental disaster and technological heedlessness -- a poison threatening to kill vast numbers of Americans and, even worse, many brown pelicans and peregrine falcons.
Still more of us remember, though we'd like to forget, the Joni Mitchell song in which the zither-strummer with the ironed yellow hair sang: ``Hey farmer farmer, put away that DDT now. Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees.''
Alas for farmer farmer, he had no choice choice. A year after Mitchell's song appeared, DDT was banned in the U.S. It's banned still. The U.S., indeed the whole developed world, is stuck in Joni Mitchell land.
It's Back
So imagine my surprise at the announcement from Medical News Today: ``DDT Indoor Spraying Recommended by WHO to Combat Malaria.''
WHO is the World Health Organization, a group not known (at least not yet) as a puppet of the insidious techno-chemical corporate behemoth.
DDT, in other words, is back. More, it's considered an indispensable tool in maintaining public health, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where malarial mosquitoes continue to kill as many as 2 million people a year. In several less-developed countries, only AIDS has proved deadlier than malaria.
Ramanan Laxminarayan, an economist with the environmental research group Resources for the Future, sardonically sums up the contemporary view of DDT.
``In certain parts of the world,'' he told me, ``if you walked into a gathering of public health professionals and argued for banning DDT, they'd hang you.''
DDT's shifting role in public health is a cautionary tale for anyone who's susceptible to environmental alarms.
Muller's Discovery
The tale begins in the 1930s, when DDT was synthesized by a German scientist named Paul Muller. Muller's discovery was so successful in killing bugs, especially malarial mosquitoes, that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948.
A National Academy of Sciences report declared in 1970: ``To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT... In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable.''
By the time the academy weighed in, however, a backlash against DDT and other manmade chemicals was already under way. Some of the concern was well-grounded. The success of DDT, as success often does, led to too much of a good thing.
Massive amounts of the pesticide were used on crops (to get rid of the spots on Joni's apples), and in those doses it had some ill environmental effects, most famously on the eggshells of certain birds.
Silent Spring
Yet the anti-DDT movement held a good deal of hysteria, too. Rachel Carson's 1962 book ``Silent Spring,'' which spookily described a future in which manmade pesticides had extinguished most forms of life, contaminated the environmental movement with a weakness for apocalyptic rhetoric that it still can't shake.
Alan Masur, professor of public affairs at Syracuse University, has rightly called Carson's book ``the most influential book published in the United States since `Uncle Tom's Cabin.'''
The Rachel Carson-Joni Mitchell pincer movement made a reasoned debate about DDT impossible, even though its effects were understood by most scientists, then as now, to be almost completely benign for humans. The Nixon administration succumbed and issued a blanket ban on DDT.
Disastrous Consequences
In an affluent, mostly urban country such as the U.S., where malaria had been all but eradicated, the DDT ban was little more than an inconvenience. In less-developed countries, where DDT was banned under U.S. pressure, the consequences were disastrous. From Swaziland to Belize, malaria was soon epidemic again. Millions died.
In those countries, decades later, the tide is now turning back toward the use of DDT, particularly in homes, and malaria rates are declining as a result. In countries that didn't ban DDT, such as India, malaria has all but vanished.
But the bans begun in the 1970s strike many Third Worlders as a particularly noxious example of Western paternalism.
``It's clear now,'' Laxminarayan says, ``that the alarm hadn't been based on a sound, rational judgment about evidence. A ban on DDT was something really only the West could afford.''
The DDT story reminds us that some environmental enthusiasms are less about science and health than self-congratulation and moral vanity. We should keep it in mind when we take advice about public policy from Joni Mitchell -- or Al Gore.
(Andrew Ferguson is a Bloomberg News columnist. In 1992, he wrote speeches for President George H.W. Bush. The opinions expressed are his own.)
