Quote of the Day: Ann Coulter on DDT and the Environmentalists

"DDT was a miracle invention: tiny amounds of the chemical kill disease-carrying insects with no harm to humans, protecting them from malaria, dengue, and typhus. American soldiers in World War II were bathed in DDT. Jews rescued from the Nazi death camps were doused in it. During the debate on DDT prompted by Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, J. Gordon Edwards, mountain climber, park ranger, author, and professor of biology at San Jose State University, would eat spoonfuls of DDT at lectures to prove its safety to humans. Edwards lived a long and healthy life, finally dying in 2005 at the age of eighty-four while hiking. But children in America were indoctrinated with the idea [based on the book Silent Spring] that DDT would kill all the birds, and that made them sad. So in 1972, American environmentalists working through EPA banned one of the greatest inventions in modern history. Millions upon millions of people in Africa had to die because of a book by a woman dying of cancer who was obsessed with the idea that it was caused by modern chemicals.

In 1986 the State Department informed African nations that the United States would no longer provide aid to countries using DDT. Last year, 80,000 people in Uganda alone died of malaria, half of them children, but the United States and Europe have threatened to ban Ugandan imports if they use DDT to stop this scourge... [under pressure from] environmentalists who are again in a panic that African nations will use DDT to save Africans dying in droves of malaria because DDT might hurt the birds. (A few years after oil drilling began in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, a saboteur set off an explosion blowing a hole in the pipeline and releasing an estimated 550,000 gallons of oil. It was one of the most devastating environmental disasters in recent history. Six weeks later, all the birds were back. Birds are like rats - you couldn't get rid of them if you tried.)"