A FUTILE LETTER

Protesting the Greenie-run holocaust in Africa. The Greenies obviously think that the lives of a few million dumb niggers don't matter compared with their anti-DDT religion. Greenies are the new "Aryans"

"We are a group of scientists, doctors and researchers who are writing to you because of our deep concerns over the way in which WHO is conducting Roll Back Malaria (RBM) and other malaria control initiatives.

We feel that the WHO ignores the advice and research of many malaria control scientists and specialists from around the globe and supports malaria control initiatives based on political, and not scientific, criteria. We object to the stance that the WHO has taken against the use of insecticides in indoor residual spraying (IRS) programmes. More specifically, we object to WHO exerting political and financial pressure to force malaria endemic countries to reduce or not begin use of DDT for malaria control. We object to the notion that is put forward by the WHO that IRS programmes are unsuitable for most malaria endemic areas. IRS has proved extremely successful in lowering malaria morbidity and mortality in the past and remains so in many parts of the world. IRS is only unsustainable or unsuitable if countries and international organisations do not give it the required political, financial and scientific support. Where IRS programmes receive such support, they lead to a sustained reduction in malaria transmission.

While we recognise the potential importance of insecticide treated nets (ITNs) in malaria vector control programmes, their use should not exclude the use of IRS, and countries and international organizations should not support the use of ITNs at the expense of IRS.

We urge you to consider the points raised in our letter and to act fully and promptly upon them.

Our concern with Roll Back Malaria (RBM) and our desire to see significant changes in the way in which WHO conceives and conducts ongoing RBM activities prompts this letter.

As the WHO and UNICEF's Africa Malaria Report 2003 acknowledges, malaria is the biggest killer of young children and the most significant health threat to pregnant women and newborns in the developing world. As malaria scientists, we are well aware of the appalling burden that malaria places on some of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people, and we are concerned that the RBM programme increases that burden by deliberately undermining one of the most effective tools against malaria, indoor residual spraying (IRS). Not only does RBM not support the use of this life saving tool, RBM also fails to fulfil its stated objective of supporting the development of new insecticides for IRS. Furthermore, we believe that by undermining vertical malaria control programmes, RBM has undermined malaria control efforts in many poor countries and has dissipated some important human capital needed for malaria control.

Our concerns are not new. Malaria control experts have voiced them over many years. From the late 1970s, through the 1980s and 1990s, malaria control strategies evolved primarily through political processes, not by consultation and deliberation with malaria control experts. As a result, malaria has re-emerged and is now a global public health disaster. As the malaria burden increases in developing countries, the threat of malaria introductions in developed countries grows apace. For these reasons, there is now a strong consensus among experts that WHO's malaria control strategies are not appropriate and changes are necessary.

We call on RBM to reverse its policy against the use of IRS . Instead of undermining IRS use, RBM should actively promote it and support those countries that wish to implement IRS programmes. We further call on RBM to form public-private partnerships to investigate and develop new insecticides for malaria control and not to force countries to adopt horizontal malaria control programmes.....

The policy stance against IRS contrasts not only with the malaria control policies and activities of most southern African nations, but also with the clearly stated wishes of African leaders. In April 2003, the South African Minister of Health was widely quoted in her defence of the use of DDT and the South African IRS programme and urged other African countries to not only use, but also expand the use of DDT. The Ugandan Minister of Health recently made similar calls, and in Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania, researchers and politicians have made impassioned pleas for the return of DDT based IRS programmes."

More here





AN ECONOMIST DEBUNKS DIAMOND

Commenting on Jared Diamond's book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive"

Diamond thinks that in order to demonstrate that mankind is currently engaged in unsustainable economic activity, it's enough to offer a sample of the insults modern economies have been inflicting on nature. Thus he reports a case of deforestation here, increased pesticide run-off there, loss of biota somewhere else and carbon emissions everywhere. But we have been travelling that route for nearly five decades now: environmentalists have routinely pointed to the damage modern economic activity inflicts. Moreover, in recent years such environmental scientists as Paul Ehrlich, Edward Wilson and, most recently, Gretchen Daily, Harold Mooney and Walter Reid, have spoken out while taking far greater care with details and qualifications than Diamond appears to believe is necessary.

The more important reason why Diamond's rhetoric doesn't play well any longer is that it presents only one side of the balance-sheet: it ignores the human benefits that accompany environmental damage. You build a road, but that destroys part of the local ecosystem; there is both a cost and a benefit and you have to weigh them up. Diamond shows no sign of wanting to look at both sides of the ledger, and his responses to environmental sceptics take the form of 'Yes, but . . .' If someone were to point out that chemical fertilisers have increased food production dozens of times over, he would reply: 'Yes, but they are a drain on fresh water, and what about all that phosphorus run-off?' Diamond is like a swimmer who competes in a race using only one arm. 'In caring for the health of our surroundings, just as of our bodies,' he writes at one point, 'it is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure illnesses after they have developed' - which sounds wise, but is simply misleading bombast. Technology brings out the worst in him. At one point he claims that 'all of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology,' to which I felt like shouting in exasperation that perhaps at some times, in some places, a few of the unintended consequences of our existing technology have been beneficial. Reading Diamond you would think our ancestors should all have remained hunter-gatherers in Africa, co-evolving with the native flora and fauna, and roaming the wilds in search of wild berries and the occasional piece of meat.

Here I should put my cards on the table. I am an economist who shares Diamond's worries, but I think he has failed to grasp both the way in which information about particular states of affairs gets transmitted (however imperfectly) in modern decentralised economies - via economic signals such as prices, demand, product quality and migration - and the way increases in the scarcity of resources can itself act to spur innovations that ease those scarcities. Without a sympathetic understanding of economic mechanisms, it isn't possible to offer advice on the interactions between nature and the human species.

Here is an example of what I mean. Forests loom large in Diamond's case studies. As deforestation was the proximate cause of the Easter Islanders' demise, he offers an extended, contrasting account of the way a deforested Japan succeeded, in the early 18th century, in averting total disaster by regenerating its forests. Now consider another island: England. Deforestation here began under the Romans, and by Elizabethan times the price of timber had begun to rise ominously. In the mid-18th century what people saw across the landscape in England wasn't trees, but stone rows separating agricultural fields. The noted economic historian Brinley Thomas argued that it was because timber had become so scarce that a lengthy search began among inventors and tinkerers for an effective coal-based energy source. By Thomas's reckoning, the defining moment of the Industrial Revolution should be located in 1784, when Henry Cort's process for manufacturing iron was first successfully deployed. His analysis would suggest that England became the centre of the Industrial Revolution not because it had abundant energy but because it was running out of energy. France, in contrast, didn't need to find a substitute energy source: it was covered in forests and therefore lost out. I'm not able to judge the plausibility of Thomas's thesis - there would appear to be almost as many views about the origins, timing and location of the Industrial Revolution (granting there was one) as there are economic historians - but the point remains that scarcities lead individuals and societies to search for ways out, which often means discovering alternatives. Diamond is dismissive of the possibility of our finding such alternatives in the future because, as he would have it, we are about to come up against natural bottlenecks. We should be persuaded by the evidence that has been gathered over the years by environmental scientists that he is right, but simply telling us that we are about to hit bottlenecks won't do, because environmental sceptics would reply that discovering alternatives is the way to avoid them.

More -- much more -- here.





There is another critique of Diamond here -- noting how Diamond twists the facts: "Another instance of forcing the facts to fit the theory is Diamond's "law of history" asserting that agricultural societies will inevitably come to dominate their non-agricultural neighbors. He ignores the multitude of instances where settled farmers were conquered by nomadic horsemen: the Hittite conquest of the ancient Middle East, (possibly) the invasion of Greece by the Dorians, the successive movements of the Celtic and Germanic people across Europe, the Aryan migration into India, the Turkish conquest of much of the Moslem world that began in the 11th century, and the vast Mongolian conquests of the 13th and 14th centuries. In fact, such examples led both the political theorist Albert Jay Nock and the economist Murray Rothbard to suggest a typical pattern in history nearly the opposite of Diamond's. They hypothesized that states arise when some nomadic people, who have been repeatedly raiding a nearby society of relatively peaceful farmers over an extended period, come to realize that it is more profitable to settle right in the farming community as rulers"





The statues of Easter Island have fascinated many for a long time now and Diamond's article explaining how they got there and why the civilization of Easter Island collapsed seems excellent. But when Diamond comes to the conclusion that the Polynesian civilization which produced the statues underwent a collapse due to their own destruction of the island's natural resources, he of course moralizes that: "The parallels between Easter Island and the modern world are chillingly obvious". He says that we too could undergo a similar fate if we are not more careful of the environment. That Western man IS wiser than the Polynesians were and that we have been actively conserving our environment and setting aside natural areas for over a century and that agricultural SURPLUSES have long been the major problem for international trade go unmentioned.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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