Is the Environmentalist Movement Culpable for the Spread of Malaria?
Posted: Sunday, April 26, 2009
by Joel Kontinen
http://joelkontinen.blogspot.com/
The mainstream media (MSM) has a way of describing issues in a black and white way. Carbon dioxide, we are told, is bad, at least when there's too much of it in the atmosphere. Green is good and fossil fuels are bad. Such stereotypes are easy to grasp and easy to remember.
However, in the real world issues are not always so straightforward. World Malaria Day (April 25) was a dire reminder that one to three million people still die of the disease each year, mostly in third world countries. Transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes, malaria is a disease caused by plasmodium parasites, often causing an extremely high temperature that can be fatal.
So what has malaria to do with environmentalists? More than we might think. Malaria was on its way out but with Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring, published in 1962, pesticides, especially DDT, became evil and once again malaria began to spread.
Carson wrote her book because she was concerned about the adverse effects of pesticides on birds. However, she failed to see that the overall issue was more complicated.
Perhaps this should make us think about the dangers of green ideology. Not everything that is presented as ecological is absolutely beneficial for all people. We will probably do well to adhere to St. Paul' s admonition in 1 Thessalonians 5:21-22:
Test all things; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.
Now, Paul was certainly not speaking against environmentalists. But I believe that it would be good to test some of the prevalent ideas of the day instead of merely accepting them without critical thinking.
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