DDT Wars
Rescuing Our National Bird, Preventing Cancer, and Creating the Environmental Defense Fund
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- 299,00 kr
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- 299,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
DDT Wars is the untold inside story of the decade-long scientific, legal and strategic campaign that culminated in the national ban of the insecticide DDT in 1972. The widespread misinformation, disinformation and mythology of the DDT issue are corrected in this book. DDT contamination had become worldwide, concentrating up food chains and causing birds to lay thin-shelled eggs that broke in the nests. Populations of many species of predatory and fish-eating birds collapsed, including the American Bald Eagle, Osprey, Peregrine Falcon and Brown Pelican. Their numbers recovered spectacularly in the decades following the ban. During the campaign DDT and five other insecticides were found to cause cancer in laboratory tests, which led to bans of these six pesticides by international treaty in 2001. This campaign produced lasting changes in American pesticide policies. The legal precedents broke down the court "standing" barrier, forming the basis for the development of environmental law as we know it today. This case history represents one of the greatest environmental victories of recent decades. DDT is still "controversial" because it has been deceptively interjected into the "climate wars."
This campaign was led by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), founded in 1967 by ten citizens, most of them scientists, volunteers without special political connections or financial resources. Their strategy was to take environmental problems to court. There were many setbacks along the way in this exciting and entertaining story. The group was often kicked out of court, but a few determined citizens made a large difference for environmental protection and public health. Author Charles Wurster was one of the leaders of the campaign. The first six years of EDF history are described as it struggled to survive. Now EDF is one of the world's great environmental advocacy organizations defending our climate, ecosystems, oceans and public health.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was a pesticide used during WWII to help block the "transmission of several important insect-borne diseases, especially typhus and malaria," but the chemical is arguably better known for its contentious status among environmental activists. In this vital account, Wurster, an environmental toxicologist at SUNY Stony Brook and a cofounder of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), offers a moderately accessible history of DDT and its detrimental effects while looking behind the scenes at the EDF. The Fund formed in the mid-1960s as a national organization with a mission "to take environmental problems to court using scientific evidence." Studies in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s revealed "an assortment of problems with birds, fish, mammals, human health, and ecological disruptions," all of which could be tied to DDT contamination. Battles against its use, as well as against soil and water contamination, would be the core of the EDF's efforts over the years. Though some details of court hearings and presentations are too nitty-gritty for general readers, descriptions of EDF's early office setups provide an enlightening window on how such organizations functioned, without being overly nostalgic. Wurster's recollections serve to remind readers not only of the progress environmentalists made against DDT, but also of the changes in everyday tools they had at their disposal.