Editing 78-13-B5 (section)

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=== Transcript ===
Our movie screens have been horrifying audiences with stories of
monstrous fish biting people, little fish chewing on people and a
variety of things biting and stinging people. Now, while the press
hasn't really made a big thing of it, we learn the movies aren't too
far from the truth.

Swarms of locusts and grasshoppers, a plague of crickets, cutworms
and ants and swarms of mosquitos are making life miserable and even
impossible in many parts of the world. In California, pet owners are
distressed by an increase in the flea population. In Colorado, 
grasshoppers have swept across a half million acres, defoliating trees and
munching on crops. In the East, one town claims that by official
survey 100 mosquitos were landing on each human being every 60 seconds.
But that is nothing to what is happening in some of the less developed
countries. In India, malaria carried by mosquitos killed a million
children last year. In Somalia and Ethiopia, swarms of locusts
numbering in the billions have eaten crops, grassland and forests
bringing hunger and even famine to the people of those lands.

Some experts are treating this as an unexplainable mystery.
Actually, there is no mystery about it. We can blame it on what I've
called political pollution. The environmental movement, with the best
of intentions, has engendered political reaction by its demand for
action. Pesticide s have been outlawed as being more dangerous than
the pests they were design e d to control.

As the decade of the 60's began, the insects that carried malaria,
typhus, sleeping sickness, and so forth, had been reduced in number by
pesticides produced mainly in the U.S. DDT, for example, had virtually
eliminated malaria worldwide. In India by 1962 the cases of malaria
had dropped over a 10 year period from 100 million to 60,000. The
locust swarms that had plagued Africa for as long as man can remember
were wiped out by sprayings paid for by our Department of Agriculture.
Then in the late 60's malaria returned to India. In Ceylon where there
had only been 17 cases in an entire year, there were two-and-a-half
million and 10,000 deaths. In Africa the locusts returned to strip
the countryside bare.

What happened in that decade of the 60's to bring back these insect
plagues? Well, for one thing, a talented author, Rachel Carson, wrote
a book called "The Silent Spring". All of us became alarmed that perhaps
we were interfering with nature. An Environmental Protection Agency
became a part of the federal government. The most effective pesticide,
DDT, was outlawed, but we were told we'd have others as effective, but
much less hazardous. Unfortunately, as fast as the substitutes came
on line, they were outlawed.

The grasshopper plague in Nebraska could have been halted when it
began according to Nebraska agricultural director who said, "We just
don't have the chemicals to do the job." It is ironic that the hearing
examiner for EPA back in 1972 said that DDT was harmless to human beings
and that properly used, it posed no threat to animal, bird or marine
life. Yet it is banned by the EPA on the theoretical grounds that it
might, under some circumstances, someday harm someone or something. 

This is Ronald Reagan.

Thanks for listening.
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=== Details ===
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<TR><TD WIDTH="150">Batch Number</TD><TD WIDTH="150">{{PAGENAME}}</TD></TR>
<TD>Production Date</TD><TD>09/19/[[Radio1978|1978]]</TD></TR>
<TD>Book/Page</TD><TD>[[Radio_Commentary_Books#Reagan:_In_His_Own_Hand|RihoH-333]]</TD></TR>
<TD>Audio</TD><TD></TD></TR>
<TD>Youtube?</TD><TD>No</TD></TR>
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===Added Notes===
* [[wikipedia:Silent_Spring|Silent Spring]]
* [[wikipedia:DDT|DDT]]
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