Trump’s EPA Wants Us to Cover Our Eyes

On climate policy, the Trump administration is willfully burying its head in the sand. It’s crucial newsrooms don’t follow them. 

On Silent Spring, the 1962 book that exposed the hazards of indiscriminately spreading the insecticide DDT, and other pesticides, across the American landscape, Rachel Carson wrote that the public was being “fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth” by authorities and the chemical industry. They were reassuring people that chemical insecticides were harmless to humans, pets, and plants. Carson’s research suggested that they were not—that they were, in fact, poisoning rivers, choking wildlife, and infiltrating the very cells that make life possible. “We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts,” she wrote.

Following the book’s release, and under pressure from a dismayed public, the cogs of the federal government slowly began to move. In 1970, Richard Nixon ordered the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Two years later, despite fierce lobbying from the chemical and agricultural industries, the EPA banned DDT from agricultural use across the nation. Back then, the facts still mattered. Today things look quite different.