RUTHFULLY YOURS

Is there any chance that sponsoring a dance contest may be a touch far afield for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)? Isn’t the agency more accustomed to clamping down on factories with greenhouse gas emissions, which forces more unemployment?

Fear not about wise use of your tax money. The EPA also is promoting a poetry, essay, and photo contest–truly essential government projects, despite our $14.3 trillion national debt.

The EPA advises those enticed to enter the contests, the creative work submitted “should express ‘A Sense of Wonder’ about the sea, the night sky, forests, birds, wildlife, and all that is beautiful to your eyes.” The activity the EPA excitedly announced is the “Rachael Carson Sense of Wonder Contest.”

While the EPA and environmentalists everywhere glorify Rachael Carson as the inspiration for the environmental movement, her major impact on our planet has led to the deaths of millions of people, mainly innocent African children.

It all started with Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring.” She theorized that silence would occur when birds no longer would sing because the widespread use of pesticides weakened their egg shells. She also vividly wrote in her book, pesticides generally pollute the environment and even cause cancer.

The book was embraced by environmentalists and became a best- seller throughout the world. Silent Spring led to a ban on DDT in the United States. The absence of DDT has caused the needless deaths of as many as 30 million people from malaria and yellow fever in tropical countries. Most of them were helpless African children, according to Dennis Avery, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

In addition, malaria has been allowed to ruin the lives of as many as a billion people with a chronic condition of the disease, who are unable to work. These malaria cases in the tropics could account for much of the poverty in the world today.

Carson was educated as a marine biologist. She worked for some years at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. But she began writing as an eleven-year-old. She originally had a co-author for “Silent Spring.” He was Edwin Diamond, who had been science editor of Newsweek magazine. But early in the book’s drafting, Diamond walked away from the project. He said later that “Silent Spring” was an “emotional, alarmist book seeking to cause Americans to mistakenly believe their world is being poisoned.”

In third world countries, if DDT is sprayed inside homes, it is the most effective mosquito repellent known. One application every six months is said to reduce malaria by 60 percent. Currently, in some American cities, homes and apartment houses are plagued with bedbugs that can be eradicated easily if only DDT were available.

Since “Silent Spring” was published, massive testing has documented that synthetic pesticides don’t cause cancer in humans. Dr. Bruce Adams, for example, who received the National Science Medal from President Clinton, found that 99.999 percent of the cancer risks in our food supply come from natural pesticides which Mother Nature puts in fruits and vegetables to guard against fungi, diseases, and insects.

Carson was quoted as saying she had been happiest “with wild birds and creatures as her companions.” If she were alive today she would be so pleased about EPA’s Sense of Wonder Contest.

The EPA announcement said: “Entries must be from a team of two or more persons, a young person and an older person….We want you to share this love of nature with a child and others around you. When we teach our eyes and ears and senses to focus on the wonders of nature, we open ourselves to the wonders around us.

“Dance video entries are not limited to the moving body.” Then EPA explains: “You can use live performers and/or capture movement and change visible in nature: birds landing, trees shaking in a storm, a river flowing…” Now, that calls for a bit of imagination: maybe a couple of trees doing the samba in a storm. Or a river boogeying.

Let Rachel Carlson’s words inspire you,” urges the EPA. Not the words in “Silent Spring” about pesticides. But Carson’s 1961 book “The Sea Around Us.” In the chapter titled “The Birth of an Island,” the EPA release says, “she sums up the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the species: ‘In a reasonable world men would have treated these [underwater] islands as precious possessions, as natural museums filled with beautiful  and curious works of  creation, valuable beyond price because nowhere in the world are they duplicated.’”

Actually, the shell hash known as coquina is found in many places from the Persian Gulf to Pacific island waters. But let’s not spoil the Sense of Wonder.

Even if gushy or silly, dance contests and dreamy essays are surely less harmful than EPA’s creating skyrocketing costs for Americans with its limits on use of fossil fuels.