DDT Wars
DDT Wars

Author: Charles F. Wurster

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-06-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0190219432

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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.

DDT Wars
DDT Wars

Author: Charles F. Wurster

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0190219416

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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.

Silent Spring
Silent Spring

Author: Rachel Carson

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780618249060

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The essential, cornerstone book of modern environmentalism is now offered in a handsome 40th anniversary edition which features a new Introduction by activist Terry Tempest Williams and a new Afterword by Carson biographer Linda Lear.

The Fire Ant Wars
The Fire Ant Wars

Author: Joshua Blu Buhs

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-11-15

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0226079848

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Sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, a coterie of fire ants came ashore from South American ships docked in Mobile, Alabama. Fanning out across the region, the fire ants invaded the South, damaging crops, harassing game animals, and hindering harvesting methods. Responding to a collective call from southerners to eliminate these invasive pests, the U.S. Department of Agriculture developed a campaign that not only failed to eradicate the fire ants but left a wake of dead wildlife, sickened cattle, and public protest. With political intrigue, environmental tragedy, and such figures as Rachel Carson and E. O. Wilson, The Fire Ant Wars is a grippingly perceptive tale of changing social attitudes and scientific practices. Tracing the political and scientific eradication campaigns, Joshua Buhs's bracing study uses the saga as a means to consider twentieth-century American concepts of nature and environmental stewardship. In telling the story, Buhs explores how human concepts of nature evolve and how these ideas affect the natural and social worlds. Spotlighting a particular issue to discuss larger questions of science, public perceptions, and public policy—from pre-environmental awareness to the activist years of the early environmental movement—The Fire Ant Wars will appeal to historians of science, environmentalists, and biologists alike.

Egypt's Other Wars
Egypt's Other Wars

Author: Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2021-10-29

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0815655525

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Three devastating epidemics swept Egypt in the 1940’s killing more people than all the wars Egypt has fought in the twentieth century. Egypt’s Other Wars vividly reconstructs the nation’s struggle against malaria, relapsing fever, and cholera and explores the unique combination of forces that put public health at the top of the national political agenda. Egypt in the 1940’s as in the throes of a nationalist upheaval. Nationalists of all political ideologies attributed the sever epidemics that the country was experiencing to Egypt’s status as an underdeveloped and colonized nation. The epidemics were therefore viewed for the first time as not only a public health crisis but also a political problem that called for a political solution.

Rethinking the American Environmental Movement post-1945
Rethinking the American Environmental Movement post-1945

Author: Ellen Spears

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-28

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1136175296

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Rethinking the American Environmental Movement post-1945 turns a fresh interpretive lens on the past, drawing on a wide range of new histories of environmental activism to analyze the actions of those who created the movement and those who tried to thwart them. Concentrating on the decades since World War II, environmental historian Ellen Griffith Spears explores environmentalism as a "field of movements" rooted in broader social justice activism. Noting major legislative accomplishments, strengths, and contributions, as well as the divisions within the ranks, the book reveals how new scientific developments, the nuclear threat, and pollution, as well as changes in urban living spurred activism among diverse populations. The book outlines the key precursors, events, participants, and strategies of the environmental movement, and contextualizes the story in the dramatic trajectory of U.S. history after World War II. The result is a synthesis of American environmental politics that one reader called both "ambitious in its scope and concise in its presentation." This book provides a succinct overview of the American environmental movement and is the perfect introduction for students or scholars seeking to understand one of the largest social movements of the twentieth century up through the robust climate movement of today.

The War on Bugs
The War on Bugs

Author: Will Allen

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1933392460

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"From the start, farmers and consumers opposed the marketers' noxious shill. But more than a century of collusion among advertisers, editors, scientists, large-scale farmers, government agencies - and even Dr. Seuss - convinced most farmers to use deadly chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, and, more recently, genetically modified organisms." "Akin to seminal works on the topic like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Arthur Kallet and F. J. Schlink's 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, The War on Bugs - richly illustrated with dozens of original advertisements and promotions - details both the chemical industry's relentless efforts and the recurring waves of resistance by generations of consumers, farmers, and activists against toxic food, a struggle that continues today but with deep roots in the long rise of industrial agriculture."--BOOK JACKET.

Silent Spring at 50
Silent Spring at 50

Author: Roger Meiners

Publisher: Cato Institute

Published: 2012-09-18

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1937184196

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Widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement when published 50 years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had a profound impact on our society. As an iconic work, the book has often been shielded from critical inquiry, but this landmark anniversary provides an excellent opportunity to reassess its legacy and influence. In Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson, a team of national experts explores the book’s historical context, the science it was built on, and the policy consequences of its core ideas. Their findings: much of what Carson presented as fact was slanted, and today we know much of it is simply wrong.