One of the things that intrigues me most about the anti-organic rhetoric used by scientists is how unscientific and emotional it usually is. Since they can’t completely get around the fact that pesticides are, in fact, poisonous, pro-pesticide scientists usually defend them by painting a really scary picture of what the world would look like if pesticides were banned. An extreme example of this genre of pesticide-promoting horror stories is an article called “The Desolate Year,” written in 1962 by the Monsanto Chemical Company in response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
“Imagine, then, that by some incomprehensible turn of circumstances, the United States were to go through a single year completely without pesticides,” the article began. “Life-slowing winter lay on the land that New Year’s Day, the day that Nature was left to seek her own balance.” Then “spring came to America—an extremely lively spring. Genus by genus, species by species, sub-species by innumerable sub-species, the insects emerged….Some could sting, some could poison, many could kill.”
And with no pesticides, humans were helpless as armies of malicious insects destroyed all the fruit and vegetable crops. The “New York housewife” discovered that “her apartment was crawling with ticks” that “her pet had transferred there from Central Park”—and she couldn’t do anything about it. The USDA and FDA were helpless. Livestock died from parasites. A malaria epidemic killed people. Weeds took over everybody’s gardens, since herbicides were banned, too. A plague of locusts ate everything the other pests had missed. Termites devoured buildings and ate all the books in libraries. Caterpillars defoliated all the forests while bark beetles killed all the pine trees. And “finally, of course, there was the chilling news that spread as a wracked nation surveyed the damage:” insects and rodents had eaten all the food in storage. “What, at the end of such a year, would be the fate of the United States of America?” the author asked.
The epilogue was the clincher: “The terrible thing about the ‘desolate year’ is this: Its events are not built of fantasy. They are true. All of them, fortunately, did not take place in a single year, because so far man has been able to prevent such a thing. But all the major events of the ‘desolate year’ have actually occurred…They could repeat themselves next year in greatly magnified form simply by removing this country’s chemical weapons against pests.”
In reality, the “desolate year” is as ridiculous as the radiation-created monsters of a 1950s horror movie. It doesn’t take a lot of historical knowledge to realize that humans and insects have managed to coexist for thousands of years, since pesticides weren’t widely used on fruit crops until the early twentieth century and weren’t used on field crops until after World War II—less than twenty years before this piece was written.
But the weird thing is that a lot of scientists actually believed that something like this would happen if pesticides weren’t used, despite all the evidence to the contrary. While “The Desolate Year” is extreme, the scientific consensus in the 1960s was that the world would be destroyed by pests and diseases if pesticides couldn’t be used. Some scientists even today still believe that thousands of people in Africa died of malaria because DDT was banned, even though it was only banned in the US and the WHO stopped using it because the mosquitoes evolved resistance. It's fascinating how scientists don’t always base their beliefs about controversial topics on the facts.
Another really important entry by AA. Clearly seeing the resistance to emerging good ideas is so critical to innovation's acceptance.