78-13-B5

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Transcript Our movie screens have been horrifying audiences with stories of monstrous fish biting people, little fish chewing on people and a variety of things biting and stinging people. Now, while the press hasn't really made a big thing of it, we learn the movies aren't too far from the truth. Swarms of locusts and grasshoppers, a plague of crickets, cutworms and ants and swarms of mosquitos are making life miserable and even impossible in many parts of the world. In California, pet owners are distressed by an increase in the flea population. In Colorado, grasshoppers have swept across a half million acres, defoliating trees and munching on crops. In the East, one town claims that by official survey 100 mosquitos were landing on each human being every 60 seconds. But that is nothing to what is happening in some of the less developed countries. In India, malaria carried by mosquitos killed a million children last year. In Somalia and Ethiopia, swarms of locusts numbering in the billions have eaten crops, grassland and forests bringing hunger and even famine to the people of those lands. Some experts are treating this as an unexplainable mystery. Actually, there is no mystery about it. We can blame it on what I've called political pollution. The environmental movement, with the best of intentions, has engendered political reaction by its demand for action. Pesticide s have been outlawed as being more dangerous than the pests they were design e d to control. As the decade of the 60's began, the insects that carried malaria, typhus, sleeping sickness, and so forth, had been reduced in number by pesticides produced mainly in the U.S. DDT, for example, had virtually eliminated malaria worldwide. In India by 1962 the cases of malaria had dropped over a 10 year period from 100 million to 60,000. The locust swarms that had plagued Africa for as long as man can remember were wiped out by sprayings paid for by our Department of Agriculture. Then in the late 60's malaria returned to India. In Ceylon where there had only been 17 cases in an entire year, there were two-and-a-half million and 10,000 deaths. In Africa the locusts returned to strip the countryside bare. What happened in that decade of the 60's to bring back these insect plagues? Well, for one thing, a talented author, Rachel Carson, wrote a book called "The Silent Spring". All of us became alarmed that perhaps we were interfering with nature. An Environmental Protection Agency became a part of the federal government. The most effective pesticide, DDT, was outlawed, but we were told we'd have others as effective, but much less hazardous. Unfortunately, as fast as the substitutes came on line, they were outlawed. The grasshopper plague in Nebraska could have been halted when it began according to Nebraska agricultural director who said, "We just don't have the chemicals to do the job." It is ironic that the hearing examiner for EPA back in 1972 said that DDT was harmless to human beings and that properly used, it posed no threat to animal, bird or marine life. Yet it is banned by the EPA on the theoretical grounds that it might, under some circumstances, someday harm someone or something. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.		Details Batch Number 78-13-B5 Production Date 09/19/1978 Book/Page RihoH-333 Audio Youtube? No
		Added Notes Silent Spring DDT