"DDT Wars: Rescuing Our National Bird, Preventing Cancer, and Creating the Environmental Defense Fund"

In April of 1963, Charles Wurster anda small group of fellow scientists decidedthey would monitor a planned DDTspraying in Hanover, N.H. They hadn’tread Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” published the year before; norhad they looked at much of the scientific literature.“We were unbiased and empty-headed,” Wurster recalls in acompelling new memoir, “DDT Wars,” about the early days of theEnvironmental Defense Fund and the fight to ban most uses of persistentorganic pollutants such as DDT.With a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, Wurster was an assistant professorteaching at Dartmouth when the spraying started.Town officials were spraying DDT in the hope of eradicatingDutch elm disease, and Wurster expected a few dead birds the dayafter the spraying. Instead, people brought in dying birds for weeksas the poison slowly worked its way up the food chain.Each bird that came to his lab had lethal concentrations of DDTin its brain.“We had rediscovered what other ornithologists had already reportedfrom DDT spray programs in the American Midwest,”Wurster writes. “Hundreds of towns were killing thousands or millionsof birds while not protecting their elms. The whole thing struckme as absurd and tragic.”Wurster kept thinking about what to do as he took a new job atthe State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island.At the time, DDT and similar chlorinated hydrocarbons had attaineda symbolic status as a miracle of science, despite being ineffectivein many applications, and also despite the serious collateraldamage described in “Silent Spring” and many scientific studies.But big agriculture and chemical industries embraced the symbolism,and some ultra-conservatives have continued to uncriticallydefend it, even to the point of accusing environmentalists of humangenocide in recent years. That’s why an inside account of the earlydays of activism around pesticides is so important today.For Wurster and others, law and science law turned out to be apotent combination, far more effective than the usual round of letters,petitions, hearings and appeals.On Oct 6, 1967, incorporation papers were signed for the EnvironmentalDefense Fund.EDF is important because it pioneered the use of environmental law, an approach that has been used in other nations and by othergroups, such as Earthjustice and the Natural Resources DefenseCouncil. It’s an important theme in environmental history.Although “DDT Wars” does not address some of the relativelyrecent criticism about the group, it is a valuable memoir. The storyof the formation of the EDF and the fight to ban indiscriminate usesof DDT underscores the pressing need to preserve the documentationand oral histories of the entire environmental movement.Bill Kovarik is a professor of communication at Radford Universityin Radford, Va., where he teaches media history, media lawand journalism. He also curates the web publication environmentalhistory.org.