75-16-B4
- Main Page \ Reagan Radio Commentaries \ 1975
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Pollution # 2[edit]
Transcript[edit]Is murderous man responsible for all the endangered species, those birds and animals seemingly slated for extinction? I'll be right back. I don't think any of us can hear of an endangered species of wildlife without feeling regret in the sense of guilt that mankind has brought this about. Most of us will never actually see a tiger in his jungle home or an elephant in the wilds of Africa, but we enjoy just knowing they're there. There are plenty of people today working hard to preserve the remaining few of those species on the endangered list and I'm all for them. There are also many who are not going to rest until they've saddled all of mankind with a great guilt complex for being the murderer of all sorts of innocent creatures of field and stream. Yesterday I gave you some information collected by the chairman of the National Air Quality Commission. Well it seems his work with the commission took him into the field of disappearing animal species. His conclusion was that while it's possible that in some instances man may hasten the disappearance of a species, he really has very little to do with it and cannot be held responsible. About 50 species are expected to disappear during this century, just as 50 species disappeared in the last century, and the one before that, and the one before that and so on back for three billion years. During all that time 100 million species of plant and animal life have become extinct and man had nothing to do with it. We're relative newcomers on Earth and obviously couldn't have played a part in the disappearance of millions of creatures that existed before we even arrived here. In fact the commission chairman points out that in spite of our all-out war against certain undesirable insects over countless years, we've failed to eliminate a single species and that brought him to another bit of surprising knowledge. We may have jumped the gun in eliminating DDT and other chlorinated compounds which supposedly endanger mankind as well as some bird species by thinning their eggshells. It seems the experiments which led to this action were conducted in a manner that led to no positive conclusions. I recall when I was governor, a professor in our University's Agricultural Campus at Davis, California used to lecture against doing away with DDT and dramatized his lecture by swallowing a spoonful of pure DDT. The last I knew he was still hail and hearty. Now we learn that on balance the attributes of DDT may strongly outweigh its harmful effects. For starters there is Dr Borlaug, who won a Nobel prize for developing a new strain of wheat which can double food production per acre. Now that's quite something in a world threatened by famine. He says if DDT is banned by the United States his life work is wasted. He has dedicated his life to finding better methods of feeding the world starving people. Without DDT and other important chemicals he says, "that goal is unattainable." According to the World Health Organization, DDT has had a miraculous impact on arresting insect-borne diseases and increasing yield from grain fields once ravaged by insects. Malaria deaths dropped from 4 million a year to 1 million because of DDT. Similar declines were shown in encephalitis and yellow fever. It is estimated that 100 million people who would have died of these diseases are alive today. By the way recent tests have indicated the thinning eggshells could have been caused by mercury compounds rather than DDT. Tomorrow we'll get down to the doctor's findings on air pollution. It might surprise some of the doom and gloom criers. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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