A decade ago, I didn’t know that The Story of DDT was bad. I now feel lied to. I didn’t realize how egregiously they would lie. I should have been more skeptical. I did have higher scholarship standards than them back then which is one of the major reasons I stopped working with Epstein (another big issue was his lack of Paths Forward). Today I have higher standards and am more skeptical than before.
I recently saw Rachel Carson mentioned positively in a couple places. The places weren’t good (IMO) and didn’t give arguments. But it reminded me that I didn’t actually know enough about Silent Spring to judge it. I updated my opinion to be uncertain. Then I read the book. I think it’s good and it doesn’t say what its haters say that it says. I’m not saying that the pro-Silent Spring tribe is good or that all the political policies influenced by the book were good; just the single book Silent Spring is good. I think Epstein and some others may have been misled by secondary sources without actually reading it.
Silent Spring isn’t primarily about malaria and DDT. It’s primarily about stupid government programs to spray insecticides within the U.S. for non-health reasons (Canada gets some attention too, and other countries get occasional mentions). It reads in some way as a libertarian book (government is the biggest villain) but it seems to be hated by libertarians. Cato Institute’s book flaming Silent Spring is really bad: https://www.amazon.com/Silent-Spring-50-Crises-Rachel/dp/1937184994 I only read a few parts and I thought it was too bad to read. It says Carson was bad at science but after some skimming I couldn’t find what science she got wrong, and in general found a lack of quotes+criticism of Carson. Another big theme is saying Carson advocates the Precautionary Principle (PP). There’s a straw man definition of PP and (when skimming I saw) no evidence or arguments that Carson advocated any version of PP. And Silent Spring doesn’t have any section openly advocating any kind of PP…
I looked at some other critical stuff too. The best things I found were linked from The Story of DDT. They’re both from the same author:
http://21sci-tech.com/articles/summ02/Carson.html
I went through all the detailed criticisms in the first link and read a bit of the second. I say they’re the best because they actually make some effort to give detailed criticism of things Carson said. They use more quotes from Carson than other sources and sometimes give direct criticisms about those quotes. There are also a bunch of page numbers for stuff Carson talked about. However, most of the criticisms are dumb, some wouldn’t matter even if they were true, some are just flaming, some are dishonest, and the scholarship standards are bad. After reviewing his stuff, it seems Carson made like 2-3 factual errors that don’t affect her conclusions at all which could be fixed by editing one sentence of the book. I had to do my own research to figure that out because the critical fact checker guy didn’t give nearly enough information for anyone to see he was actually right (and in some other cases I checked, he was not right). He also often makes unsourced claims or occasionally gives sources incorrectly, like the journal name and the date without the title and sometimes without the author.
I have some more detailed notes and some draft writing about Silent Spring stuff but I’m not sure what if anything I’m going to do with it. BTW, I didn’t really like the start of Silent Spring but it gets better in chapter 2 or 3 (just starting at chapter 2 shouldn’t be confusing IIRC, but I’m not sure about starting at 3). It started out kinda vague and tribalist, but then later it started giving more detailed arguments and science and being less tribalist.
I ended up liking it and I think it wasn’t perfect but was way better than most books. I think it was correctly criticizing important problems and it didn’t actually talk about or oppose using DDT to fight malaria. It also wasn’t about eggshell thinning and didn’t make cancer a main point (those are some of the main topics people complain about, while the complainers rarely seem to discuss or acknowledge the main stuff the book actually talked about). After reviewing criticism of it, I still think it’s good. If it’s actually junk science I’d like to know with specifics.