William Ruckelshaus Quotes
I didn’t do this [banned DDT] for scientific reasons. I did it for political reasons.
The scientific panel he had appointed to study the issue, did not recommend that DDT be banned. However, powerful environmental groups and lobbyists were able to force the ban politically. When he banned DDT, there were other pesticides available which were not as potentially toxic but were reasonably effective in controlling mosquitoes and hence malaria. However, the other pesticides are much more expensive and third world countries could not afford the alternatives. By the beginning of the 21st century, malaria affected over 100 million people, It is interesting to note that in Colonial America malaria was the largest single cause of premature death in the United States.
William Ruckelshaus, U. S. Environmental Protection Administrator, Deputy Attorney General (Republican), Quoted by Paul Driessen, C-SPAN Book TV, September 11, 2004
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Most environmentalists limit the vision of their solutions to using less of our precious natural resources which is very important but just as important and perhaps more so in the long run is increasing the supply of these resources. Food is an example. The major reason that there is no serious food shortage world-wide is that we have increased the productivity of agriculture requiring less labor, less water, less fertilizer, less land, and less dependency on weather. Distribution has also improved, but there is no very good way of distributing something for which there is a great shortage.
A number of Americans believe that these and other elements of our civilization are dangerous to human health. Yet all the evidence, and there has been much on each of therse, has shown that there is no causal link between these and health problems. Yet there are people who claim that they observed bad things like autism developing after childhood vaccines. Some people have been diagnozed with cancer shortly after they began to eat a genitically modified food. Some people developed migrane headaches shortly after they started using a cell phone. The rumors travel and many people are concerned. Hoever, there are a number of children who are diagnozed with autism every year, Some of those had their diagnosis shortly after they had the recomended childhood vaccines. But it woud be impossible for out of 1,000 children who contracted autism in a given year to not have had their annual vaccines within 3 months from the time they had their shots, Actually about 250 of them would have that. Of all of the people who started using a cell phone for the first time, there will always be some who also have headaches after they started with cellphones. Epidemiologists can and have actually measures most of these things and either there is no causal relationship, or it is so slight as to not be serious enough to be a threat.
William Doyle Ruckelshaus was an American attorney and government official.
