Toxic Terror
Whelan, Elizabeth
I 1 1 I ing power indices, national production per capita of the United States was $14,000 in the most recent year available, against $11,500 for Germany, $11,300 for France, $10,700 for Japan,...
...Their exhaustive and devastating analysis of the scientific studies which were crucial in providing support for environmentalist campaigns against DDT, phosphate detergents, the herbicide 2, 4, 5-T etc., was for years rejected by publishers and, when finally printed, ignored by reviewers...
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...Roger Baldwin, who founded the ACLU and for three decades was almost synonymous with his organizat yn,w.,te 'n 1933 that "civil liberties, cy, are useful only as tools ange...
...ACLU leaders have at times in their writings and public remarks openly acknowledged their real political commitment...
...Fred Stare, the chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard, denied the scientific validity of a number of the claims made concerning the impact of sugar on health, CBS shifted its camera to a plaque on the building where Dr...
...Ceylon halted DDT spraying in the wake of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which also precipitated the anti-DDT campaign in the U.S...
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...In short, the social reform agenda shifts but the instrumentalist approach remains constant...
...Graduates of the New Left turned to environmentalism in increasing numbers as the Vietnam war wound down...
...This failure was first pointed out by Drs...
...As early as 1970 James Ridgeway, a long-time fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, argued in The Politics of Ecology that the environmental movement should regard attacks on pollution as "different ways of attacking concentrated corporate power, thereby opening up the possibilities of revolutionary change, and for reorganizing society and coinaminer, whose report concluded that DDT was not a carcinogenic hazard to man and that "there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT...
...This we cannot do...
...In Dewey's words, "the justification for the various civil liberties is the contribution they make to the welfare ofthe community...
...You ask me to do that which you would not do because of honor...
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...Then too scientists are wary of being humiliated by such predictable media gambits as "Who funds you...
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...A major strength of Toxic Terror is that Whelan presents the scientific evidence fairly, pointing out the health hazards of chemicals where they exist and counseling caution when the evidence is conflicting or not yet fully evaluated...
...The format for most chapters is the same...
...Your book will come out before I retire.' " If distinguished scientists display such pusillanimity, is it any wonder that the quacks triumph...
...This last episode, which involved the preparation of legal action against the conservative journal American Mercury and an attempt to muzzle H.L...
...I, too, am an honor-able man, and that which is dishonorable for you will never be less dishonorable for your king...
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...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 Minnesota, was an American...
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...Moreover, they are reluctant to speak outside of their specific fields, while the media want "generalists...
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...The book includes chapters on such environmentalist bete noires as Love Canal, DDT, PCBs, PBBs, "deadly" Rael Jean Isaac's most recent book (with Erich Isaac) is The Coercive Utopians (Regnery Gateway...
...One of the most obvious questions that may come to the reader's mind is: "If the authors alleged that a considerable number of the scientific claims of the environmentalists are false and some of the papers which support these claims are worthless or filled with errors, how does it happen that out of more than 200,000 scientists in the United States so few have spoken up in a similar vein of protest...
...This has led in practice to grotesque contradictions at worst and at best a selective approach to civil liberties...
...She recounts the major in-stances in which chemicals were used improperly, ranging from the PBBs that devastated Michigan's agricultural community after they were misidentified as animal feed, costing $100 million and more in destroyed animals and animal by-products, to the kepone poisoning that caused serious ailments among workers at a Hopewell, Virginia plant and forced closing of a hundred miles of the James River and its tributaries to commercial fishing for five years...
...deficits or deficiencies in elementary education or a significant portion of our population deteriorating on welfare—stem not from the private market system that The Zero-Sum Solution derogates,- but from the wayward public policies it proposes to expand...
...Admittedly, that's a leading question...
...Indeed, and along with that we win the bulk of the world's Nobel prizes, send more of our youth on to college, and progress with a nation as free as any on earth...
...Name (please print) Street City State Zip Language 'Masters The I 1 I I r TOXIC TERROR Elizabeth Whelan/Jameson Books/$18.95 Rael Jean Isaac 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 Nonetheless, I would have welcomed more attention to the political radicalism that forms such an important strand in the environmental movement...
...Those values—egalitarianism, rationalism, secularism, optimism, and antitraditionalism—are what motivates the ACLU...
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...There have been more detailed studies on the subjects of some of the specific chapters...
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...even allowing for a generous printing lag, opportunity must have been afforded to have seen much of the data just cited and more that I could have added...
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...And a year later: "If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties...
...What is its real agenda...
...It was rejected as "too controversial" by other publishers before former ACLUer Aaron Wildaysky, who contributes a foreword to the book, recommended it to Transaction...
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...It is you, 0 king, who must use the power...
...Whelan's own experiences with Toxic Terror illuminate the way in which the gatekeepers in publishing bar unWilliam A. Donohue has written one of those rare books that successfully combines a no-holds-barred polemic with serious scholarship of the highest order...
...In banning EDB, therefore, we not only lost an effective pesticide, but embraced others that presented the same hypothetical risk of being animal carcinogens and at the same time were known to pose much greater risks to workers who must apply them...
...This was at a time when a flood of environmentalist writing was being widely touted in the popular press and reviewed in professional journals...
...Indeed the seminal trends were long in evidence, though they contradict all that Thurow describes...
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...Wedded to liberalism, the ACLU can-not help but expose its values whenever it takes a stand on a civil liberties issue...
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...There is also the incredible spectacle of a "civil liberties" organization intervening against Allan Bakke, a victim of blatant "reverse discrimination," with a friend-of-the-court brief defending a state medical school's quota and charging that those backing Bakke were exhibiting racism...
...It was hard at the time to imagine a more unlikely target than the man-made chemical that, with the possible exception of antibiotics, had prevented more human death and disease than any substance in history...
...Stare worked...
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...But the environmentalists won, setting the pattern for the decades to follow, with regulatory decisions coming to be made routinely on the basis of pseudo-science in an inflamed political atmosphere...
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...In Donohue's view, there is an ACLU "mind-set" operating here: It is the decisions that the ACLU renders that make it a politically partisan organization...
...The data, prepared by the Office for Economic Cooperation and Development, are for 1983, but since then our lead has widened...
...Ruckelshaus later admitted he had never attended any part of the hearings or even read a transcript of them.' What are the roots of this anti-technology movement that so unremittingly refuses to weigh costs in relation to benefits...
...Whelan provides some thoughtful answers to these questions...
...The key to understanding the ACLU lies in the realization that the Union has never been concerned primarily with civil liberties in the purest sense...
...And I," said the mason, "am a layer of stone for houses and fine walls, yet I am idle, for no one gives me work...
...I am reminded of a 1978 "60 Minutes" segment attacking General Foods' marketing of pre-sweetened cereals...
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...Bureau of Labor Statistics, industrial production in America rose by 25 percent compared with 21 percent for Japan, 15 percent for Germany, 7 percent for the U.K., 3 percent for France, and 2 percent for Italy...
...She points out that genuine scientists all too often feel uncomfortable and incompetent appearing in public with glib "environmental performers...
...Apparently the liberal intellectual establishment in the publishing and media worlds remains hunkered down Robert Stuart Cohen is a writer living in New York City...
...its purpose is the defense of the Bill of Rights for every American irrespective of class, race, sex, or ideological predilection: "The Bill of Rights is the ACLU's only client...
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...As Whelan points out, the three available substitutes for EDB had not even been tested for carcinogenicity to animals at the time of the ban...
...Thus, for example, a book called Environmental Ethics revealed the peculiar ethics of environmentalism when it cited a 90 percent figure for environmentally caused cancers, relegating to a footnote (which apparently few people consulted) the acknowledgment that the figure included factors in the personal environment...
...Have we no economic or social problems then...
...Whelan offers a number of explanations...
...Thus there came one day to the royal court an artisan, a mason, and a beggar who was lame...
...Efron reports that as the reviews came in they combined extravagant praise with demands for anonymity...
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...We devote more of our GNP to "research and development" than any other country, our chief problem here being to shield our patent rights from the greedy paws of our trading partners...
...Lester Thurow's book was not published until November 1985 and, In this lucid and lively study, Elizabeth Whelan, the director and founder of the American Council on Science and Health, sets the record straight on a whole series of the most emotion-fraught issues to have been exploited, and in some instances created out of whole cloth, by the environmental and Naderite public interest movements of the last two decades...
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...And while thinking of themselves as humanitarian, they would impose deadly serious food shortages on a world that no longer numbers 2 billion, as it did in the 1930s, but 4.8 billion...
...I 1 1 I ing power indices, national production per capita of the United States was $14,000 in the most recent year available, against $11,500 for Germany, $11,300 for France, $10,700 for Japan, and $9,800 for the United Kingdom...
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...Whelan calls it "the case of the missing scientists...
...I," said the artisan, "make many useful goods...
...Donohue documents the Union's reluctance to defend capitalists, its lack of interest in First Amendment freedomof-religion cases, and even its willingness to launch a libel suit and engage in the censorship of adverse political discourse...
...One ex-pert in carcinogenesis and animal testing declared my book a `scientific work of art.' When asked for a writ-ten assessment, he agreed but insisted that his name be kept secret...
...When Dr...
...Fittingly, the book's introduction is by Norman Borlaug, father of the green revolution, which brought new methods of food production to underdeveloped countries...
...NOW ONLY THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 43 munities on different principles...
...More important, because the role of the media has been analyzed before, Whelan focuses on the failure of the scientific community to stand up to the pseudo-scientists who all but monopolize the airwaves on scientific issues...
...I asked him why...
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...He describes his culture-shock when, upon returning to the United States after an absence of forty years, he encountered a movement in full swing whose aim was to take us back to the 1930s, before science and technology had trans-formed food and fiber production...
...Wherever the ACLU perceives an issue of equality or social justice, the liberties of the individual must be restrained or give way to the "common good" or the rights of all...
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...Yet as Borlaug notes, the same people who wanted to outlaw most chemicals clamored for the preservation of vast areas for recreation and wilderness, most of which would have to be plowed up if we returned to the chemical-pure world they seek...
...It gave strong support to the New Deal-Fair Deal-Great Society social welfare legislative programs...
...The ACLU is ever anxious to claim for itself the politically neutral high ground...
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...Although, prior to publication, Efron's book was reviewed by twenty scientists, she was able to thank only four of them publicly...
...Whelan points out that the fundamentally counterproductive character of the environmental movement was nowhere more evident than in its pilot project—the banning of DDT...
...That would be a mistake...
...Dan Rather read it out loud: "The Harvard School of Public Health gratefully acknowledges the generosity of General Foods corporation in making possible the nutrition research laboratories within this building...
...Much of the good will of ACLU, as well as the Union' and strength, rests on th perception of its commitment to principle...
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...SIPI's slogans were "The Scientist Informs—the Citizen Decides" and "It's Your World: Don't Leave It to the Experts...
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...Extensive reading of environmentalist literature, she notes, leads to the conclusion that the movement's ultimate goal is "focused on the destruction of tecnnology, the American economic system, and the way of life as we now know it...
...Yet the book almost went unpublished...
...And only one of them, Lee Wattenberg of the University of 'The fate of the Claus and Bolander book is in itself revealing...
...Surprisingly, however, although Whelan mentions the Federation of American Scientists as a progenitor, she does not mention SIPI, the Scientists Institute for Public Information, to which the present environmental movement most directly traces its lineage...
...Then, they spoke as a group, the artisan, the mason, and the beggar who was lame: "Your power is very great, our king, and you can make the people see the folly of their ways and aid us in our troubles...
...It is no accident that in 1980 Barry Commoner was nominated the presidential candidate of the Citizens party, whose platform announced that the chief issue facing the country was "corporate power...
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...It is precisely because its behavior is so closely patterned on its values that the ACLU can be regarded as the quintessential embodiment of American liberalism...
...And, beginning in the mid-sixties, the ACLU played a central role in the black, women's, and gay "liberation" movements and took the lead in the egalitarian "equal results" affirmative action fight to try to impose social equality from above...
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...She discusses the role of journalists, who combine a professional passion for bad news with left-leaning politics, and who therefore welcome alarmist pronouncements on every-thing from nuclear energy to EDB...
...Had he taken notice, of course, he would have had to write a different treatise, if any at all...
...made any genuine contributions to science...
...BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA 47402 TELEPHONE 812 332 7251 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 45...
...But Toxic Terror is the first book to expose the gap between the scientific consensus and the "media" consensus on the entire range of environmental issues, and to present those issues in a concise yet thorough manner, easily accessible to the layman...
...I can see that your trouble is great," consoled the king, "and what would you ask of me...
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...In 1984, the latest full year for which such data are reckoned, our output per employee—or productivity—also led the world, 15 percent greater than Germany's, almost 40 percent greater than Japan's...
...Whelan then briefly sums up "The Facts," and follows these with an analysis of the issues involved, sorting out legitimate environmental concerns from false and hysterical attacks...
...Department of Agriculture threatened to place his state under quarantine...
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...The author as combatant is out to debunk the myth of the ACLU's nonpartisanship, to score the Union as America's quintessential liberal organization, to call into question the ACLU's Weltanschauung, and to engage the Union in the trenches on such sharp issues as affirmative action, poverty as a denial of civil liberty, abortion, church-state relations, the competing rights of criminals and victims, and child pornography...
...Whelan recognizes that the agenda of environmentalism goes far beyond public health...
...popular perspectives...
...Whelan is at her best analyzing why the environmental movement has enjoyed such success in enlisting public support for its most egregious campaigns...
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...We are men of honor and could not set upon our fellow man to compel him to our will...
...Peter Metzger, a scientist early prominent in the scientist-citizen movement who dropped out as he saw its purposes subverted, observes that with few exceptions the scientists who act as "experts" for the environmental movement have never 'Incidentally, the greatest price in public health for the banning of DDT was paid not in this country but in places like Ceylon, where malaria had been virtually abolished by 1962, but rose to two and a half million cases within five years after spraying of DDT was halted...
...Perhaps," said the king, "perhaps my power is great, but I must use it wisely or it shall be lost...
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...0 great and wise king," they cried, "we are sorely troubled with our plight...
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...Despite her track record as an author (one of her books has sold over a million copies), even her agent refused to touch this book and none of the familiar houses were willing to bring it out...
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...The ACLU has no problem supporting big government when big government can further what it sees as social reforms...
...More recently, in 1976, Aryeh Neier, the executive director of the ACLU, declared that the Union was "the legal branch of the women's movement...
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...Jameson Books, a small publisher in Ottawa, Illinois, is to be congratulated for its good sense, for Whelan's book fills an important gap...
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...in a kind of mutual protection society...
...These three shall go forth in the land and compel those who will not voluntarily deal with them to obey their command...
...Thus, in the 1920s and 1930s, when many of the high-ranking members of the ACLU were either Communist party members, collaborators, or sympathizers, the Union served as the legal arm of militant labor...
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...Even way back in the Carter years, Thurow's favorite period, our leads were nearly as large...
...Whelan narrates the Wodehouse-worthy saga of how California Governor Jerry Brown refused to give the go-ahead for spraying malathion (one of the safest pesticides in use) to eradicate the medfly until the U.S...
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...Two worked at the Japanese National Cancer Center Research Institute and one at the Weizmann Institute in Israel...
...Increasingly the citizens who were part of SIPI or inspired by it did indeed make the decisions, and scientists, far from serving as guides, were automatically disqualified—unless of course they became part of the coterie which said what the citizen groups wanted them to say...
...L,, . the continental U.S.A...
...Also of particular interest is a segment on the outlawing of EDB, not on the basis of scientific data, but as a result of political pressures flowing "from a spectacular media hype...
...Whelan begins with "The Charges," presenting a series of quotations from books whose titles carry much of their message, e.g., America the Poisoned, Who's Poisoning America, Malignant Neglect, The Poison Conspiracy, The Politics of Cancer, Laying Waste, and from newspapers and magazines ranging from the New York Times to the Progressive, which echo their themes...
...Since these involve personal choice, environmentalists not only ignore butdeliberately obfuscate the role of these factors...
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...Amazingly, the decision to ban DDT was made by then-EPA head William Ruckelshaus following 81 days of hearings by the agency's own hearing ex1 A world class economy...
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...But the major theme of Toxic Terror is that the public has been misled into believing that chemicals are destructive of health—above all, are causing a dramatic increase in cancer deaths—when in fact Americans are healthier and live longer than ever before, thanks in large part to those very same chemicals...
...And it would be easy to dismiss Donohue's main charge—that the ACLU is a highly partisan, ideologically driven organization-as attacking a straw man...
...Edith Efron's experience in publishing her splendid The Apocalyptics• Cancer and the Big Lie is testimony to the extent to which scientists have allowed themselves to be intimidated...
...Rather, the ACLU has generally viewed civil liberties as mere instruments of more fundamental political purposes and goals, embracing important aspects of what Donohue, following John Dewey, calls "collectivistic liberalism...
...without tools...
...She points out that the present day environmental movement had its origins in the antinuclear testing movement of the 1950s—which addressed a genuine health issue—and burgeoned in the void that developed once the problem of uncontrolled atmospheric testing was solved...
...His people were free to go their own way, and his rule granted no privilege to one that was not a privilege to all equally They also were free to petition their king and seek his wisdom in their affairs...
...In that case the reward was national celebrity...
...This anti-corporate thrust provides much of the explanation for why the environmental movement, for all its obsession with cancer-causation, pays virtually no attention—as Whelan emphasizes—to the major causes of cancer, which have to do with cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and diet...
...Nuclear power, for example, has been masterfully discussed in Samuel McCracken's The War Against the Atom...
...I am a poor lame beggar," said the third man, "who seeks alms from those who pass, as they find it in their hearts to do so, but alms are so few I fear I shall soon perish...
...I use great skill and labor long, and yet when I am finished, the people will not pay my price...
...Claus and Bolander in their 1977 book Ecological Sanity.' Whelan quotes them: A Question Of Honor T here once lived a king in a distant land—a just and wise old king, who had observed and learned much about him-self, his people and his power...
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...Characteristic is her chapter on pesticides...
...Donohue the social scientist and historian strives for an artful, objective reconstruction of the ACLU's 65-year history and in the process offers an analysis of the broader history of American liberalism in the twentieth century, as well as an intelligent commentary on important issues of constitutional law...
...Bring forth three swords," he commanded, "one for each of these men, and instruct them in their use...
...SIPI was founded in 1963 by the master toxic terrorist, scientist-turnedpolitician Barry Commoner, to coordinate the work of the local scientific-information committees that had mobilized against nuclear atmospheric testing and had already turned their attention to what would become the staple topics of the environmental movement: pesticides, air and water pollution, toxic wastes, uranium mining, medical technology, and waste disposal, among others...
Vol. 19 • February 1986 • No. 2
