On Earth Day, forget not World Malaria Day

On Earth Day, forget not World Malaria Day

by james on April 22, 2013

Introduction

Smoke began to spread through the flashing room. Few had noticed the steady uprising of the ghostly haze before its tendrils reached the noses of most of the gyrating crowd. Strobe lights in the club ripped like lightning through the pale cloud, adding to the heat and thrill and pounding beat. Dry ice was often added for effect. But when a pungent odor reached the nose, then eye, of the first raver, it was plain to him that something was different from usual. Something was wrong.

It hurt. It burnt. A woman screamed. Like a machine gun flashing in his mind, thought racing faster than sound, a mute image sprang at his throat, gagging him. Terrorist! Poison gas!
Fear brought him low. By then the screams had intensified as others found their voice. As he tried to rise a knee slammed into his chest and knocked him down. He gagged again and gasped. Someone vomited on him.
He rose. He ran like a wild creature, splashed outward, tumbled heavily down the precipitous steps onto those who beat him to the door. Before he could rise someone landed on top of him.
Eyes rolling wide with fear, the mad flood poured down the narrow stairwell. In a moment the tide became a rising, writhing wave, throttling life at the bottom. Athleticism terminated survival of the fittest.
An investigation found that the hysterical stampede at the Chicago nightclub[i] began when security used pepper spray to break up a fight between two women. There was no need to panic. Who knew?

Crowd Dynamics

Recently in Goya, Argentina, Francisco Lotero and Miriam Coletti ate a meal with their two young children. Then Lotero and Coletti killed themselves. Fear, like guilt, is a terrible thing. It can drive people frantic.
For some the fear in the smoky club is matched by the anxiety and stress they feel over any number of crises. It is easy to panic. But how does one decide whether a crisis is real and deserving of urgent attention? When is a stampede reasonable? When is it suicide?
Lotero and his wife first shot their children. Their suicide pact, explained in a note left on the kitchen table, was prompted over fears about global warming. One can only imagine the fevered discussions around their kitchen table, their painful conclusion that the only way to reduce their carbon footprint was to destroy their family.

The Biggest Crisis

We are all familiar with the litany of our ever deteriorating environment. Images of drowning polar bears, melting icebergs, groaning trees, dirty air, and overall environmental mayhem clog our emotional arteries.
Doubtless we have problems to deal with today. The planet has a fever. Fevers can lead to death. Such arguments make sense when the music screeches to a halt as the club burns down. All arguments to the contrary will not keep people from doing whatever it takes to save their lives from hellfire. Unfortunately, moving people in the wrong direction can lead to needless pain and suffering and death. Ask the Lotero’s.
Would they reconsider self-murder if the planet had actually not warmed over the last sixteen years? It has not warmed. If only they knew that the hypothesis of human caused global warming is now so scientifically untenable that it must be rebranded as ‘climate change’.

The real killers

Are there real environmental problems? Without a doubt! Are the polar bears in danger? No they are not. Polar bear populations are larger than ever before in human history.[ii] Polar bears are in more danger of being hit by an asteroid than by being killed due to global warming.
A neurotic might now begin to have nightmares about asteroid strikes. After all, potential human deaths from an asteroid strike are staggering. But one ought to question the stability of those who fret over vanishingly remote possibilities.
North Americans quietly suffer the hardship of increased grocery prices as the corn cost spirals up due to government edicts. What we find a painful inconvenience is certain death for others in countries who might otherwise buy and eat the 40 percent of the American corn crop diverted to biofuel.[iii] Ethanol in our gas tanks not only destroys engines. It is an appalling assault on the millions of people who are desperately clinging to the edge.
In the modern environmentalist analysis, such facts go by the wayside.

Malaria: A real environmental crisis

Malaria is a case in point.
Arguably the greatest environmental tragedy of the last forty years is the needless death of over fifty million people due to malaria. This is more people than Hitler killed, twice as many as Stalin killed, and approaching as many as Mao killed. And it is the direct result of eco-hysteria.
For environmental activists, the facts about malaria are an inconvenient truth that conflicts with their ideology. The global warming myth makers, alarmists and creators of hysteria, argue that malaria is a tropical disease greatly expanding due to global warming. The reality is that even during the Little Ice Age, hundreds of years ago, when the River Thames froze over, malaria was rampant in Essex marshes.[iv]
Ague, as it was known, is common throughout human history. At least three million people a year died of malaria just a century ago. In the early 1920s an epidemic swept the Soviet Union as far north as the Arctic Circle, killing about six hundred thousand people.
The New England puritan Jonathan Edwards suffered severely from malarial fevers. When New England was first settled yellow fever and malaria were common diseases, persisting well into the twentieth century.[v]
Pioneers to Wisconsin were no strangers to malaria[vi] and in 1878 the New York Times reported malarial outbreaks in Brooklyn and Coney Island.[vii] Malaria epidemics were once common in Canada;[viii] infection rates up to 60% and death rates of 4% were reported among laborers in Ontario.
Surely no one would blame these outbreaks on global warming. Neither are these places tropical paradise then or now.
It is arguable that in the history of the world there has been no greater killer plague than malaria. The numbers are staggering. Today over three billion people somehow find the strength to cope with its debilitating effects. Those people are largely in the impoverished South.
You see, malaria was eliminated in the West and North because of the invention of the miracle pesticide DDT. Soon after the first Earth Day, as eco-hysteria drove public policy, DDT was banned in the United States.
DDT is not without its detriments. But, in the absence of effective and affordable alternatives, when one weighs the costs of the use of DDT versus the benefits of the elimination of disease ridden pests, it is a small price to pay.
Anyone who has lost a child or parent understands this. In Africa a child dies because of malaria every thirty seconds, and someone is infected every twelve seconds. This is a clear and present legacy of eco-hysteria.
Christians may be attracted to the environmental movement because they understand they must be good stewards of God’s creation. But they are mistaken to think the work of the environmental movement is the work of the Lord. It is not enough to have good intentions. In this regard, environmentalists are beginning to drown in credibility problems.
In 1970 Joni Mitchell sang with a certain self-righteous moral outrage, “Hey Farmer Farmer, put away that DDT now. Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees.”
Poor farmer farmer had no choice choice. In spite of questionable science, the heavy hand of the federal government slammed down, and within a year after Mitchell’s song became a hit, DDT was banned in the United States. No problem for Americans and Canadians – spraying had already eliminated malaria and yellow fever. Big problem for parts of the world still suffering the scourge.
The American ban reverberated around the world. Africans could actually afford to use DDT, were they allowed. But large, multinational green organizations with massive budgets blew the risks of DDT so out of proportion that it became virtually impossible to use it. After the US ban worldwide deaths from DDT skyrocketed as did the budgets of the green multinationals.
Greens congratulated themselves on a prodigious victory, on being caring people. The fact is that organic coffee is more dangerous than equal concentrations of DDT. Joni Mitchell could have birds birds and fifty million people did not need to die.
Today DDT is still the best agent against mosquitoes. Despite decades of rhetoric against it there is nothing anywhere near as good or as safe.
But the eco-hysteria of radical environmentalists, who worry more about overpopulation than human rights, knows no reasonable boundaries. Environmental activists should be ashamed of their role in promoting the demonization of a cheap life-saving pesticide. Instead they receive Nobel peace prizes.
This is not environmental justice. It is scandalous eco-hysteria, with terrible results.

Conclusion

Eco-hysteria also imposes unreasonable economic costs, resulting in lower standards of living. The fragile “Earth in the balance” scenario is fake. It satisfies emotional needs, but does not comport with the data. It does not comport with scientific data.[ix] And it does not comport with biblical data, such as Genesis 8:22: “While the Earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”
The greatest challenge facing mankind, the biggest crisis, is not ultimately environmental. We are not mere products of our environment, as evolutionists and materialists teach. The greatest problem is spiritual. This sin problem leads to all the other problems that we so keenly feel. The problem is that of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.
World Malaria Day comes three days after Earth Day. Ironically, if it were not for Earth Day there would be no World Malaria Day.

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[i] David E. Thigpen, In Chicago, Jesse on the Spot, Time Magazine, February 24, 2003.

[ii] Paul Waldie, Healthy Polar Bear Count confounds doomsayers, The Globe and Mail, 5 April 2012.

[iii] Elisabeth Rosenthal, Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food Prices and Hunger Fears, New York Times, 7 April 2011, p. A1.

[iv] Paul Reiter, The inconvenient truth about malaria, The Spectator, 2 December 2009; online at http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/5592863/the-inconvenient-truth-about-malaria/, last viewed 1/25/2013.

[v] Curtis R . Best, A History of Mosquitoes in Massachusetts, Northeastern Mosquito Control Association, November 1993.

[vi] Peter T. Harstad, Sickness and Disease on the Wisconsin Frontier: Malaria, 1820 – 1850, Wisconsin Magazine of History, volume 43, 2, Winter 1959-1960.

[vii] Malaria on the Hudson, The New York Times, October 10, 1878.

[viii] J. Dick McLean, and Brian J. Ward, the return of Swamp fever: malaria in Canadians, Journal of the Canadian medical Association, January 26, 1999; 160 (2), 211-212.

[ix] Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marvier, Robert Lalasz, Conservation in the Anthropocene, Breakthrough Journal, Winter 2012; online at http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-2/conservation-in-the-anthropocene/, last viewed 1/25/2013.