Guess he's never read "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson.
And not being from the US, I guess you wouldn't have heard that our national symbolic bird, the bald eagle, was nearly extincted by DDT...it made their eggshells get too thin, and they weren't able to reproduce. The bald eagle is just now recovering...I've actually been seeing them for the past couple of years-for the first time in my life.
Sounds good, but the facts don't support the oft repeated lie that DDT was the cause of the deline.
Indeed in the early 18th century, the Bald Eagle population was 300,000–500,000, but by the 1950s there were only 412 nesting pairs in the 48 contiguous states of the US, but DDT wasn't widely used in the US until after WW2, so given how long it takes for quantities to accumulate in the environment the decimation of the Bald Eagle PREDATES the widespread use of DDT.
What saved the Bald Eagle started with the 1940 Bald Eagle Protection Act which prohibited commercial trapping and killing of the birds and provided stiff fines for doing so. Just consider that more than 100,000 bald eagles were killed in Alaska from 1917 to 1953 just because Alaskan salmon fisherman feared they were a threat to the salmon population. This level of decimation caused public awareness of their plight to increase and many states placed the bald eagle on their lists of endangered species in the 1960s.
Bald eagles were officially declared an endangered species in 1967 in all areas of the United States south of the 40th parallel, under a law that preceded the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
The POINT is that Bald Eagles don't normally nest near human populations and thus effects of DDT used in agriculture were not responsible for this massive decline in their numbers. These acts, and the enforcement of these acts predated any widespread use agricultural use of DDT in the US and indeed because of these acts the population of Bald Eagles increased at the same time usage of DDT also increased.
Which of course makes blaiming their entire decline on DDT total BS
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/milloy071006.htm
But let's not turn this tread into a debate about DDT.
Stick to issues about GM because so far zip has been provided.
Arthur
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