On This Day in History: June 14

DDT Ban

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Mother. Fucking. Mosquitos. Hate those assholes. Kill them all. Well, maybe not. Because while DDT was great at wasting the bloodsucking duckfuckers, the chemical also killed a shit-ton of other things. And when the bees are all gone, so are we. 

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: June 14, 1972--

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane is a fucking mouthful. But don’t put that shit in your mouth. Cuz cancer. Besides, it doesn’t even taste good. It doesn’t taste like anything. Or smell. Some Austrian dude synthesized it back in 1874, then in 1939 Swiss chemist Paul Müller said hey this shit kills bugs real good and since there was a big fucking war going on they dumped that shit all over to prevent their troops from catching malaria and typhus from bugs and it worked like a motherfucker, so a few years later they said hey Paul have a Nobel Prize. 

In 1945 the government said hey farmers you can use this shit on your crops. So they did, and for a time malaria was eliminated in Europe and North America. Then in 1955 the World Health Organization was all fuck yeah let’s kick malaria’s ass and they used it all over and malaria deaths plummeted. But then the fucking mosquitos started to develop a tolerance to the shit. Goddamn but I hate them.

By the mid 1940s people were already saying hey this stuff may be death to mosquitos, but it’s death to lots of other stuff too. It kills beneficial insects and fish and birds and other nice critters so can we lay off it a bit? And the government said no shut the fuck up everything is fine. DDT was used more and more, and pollinators were dying, and that was bad, but due to repeated exposure humans started to die too. So in the 50s the government said well maybe we should cut back on this shit just a bit. 

Then a woman wrote a book. 

Rachel Carson was an American marine biologist, and in 1962 Houghton Mifflin published her book Silent Spring. The book attacked the indiscriminate use of pesticides and the environmental harm it caused, saying the pesticide industry was a bunch of lying cockwaffles and the government was complicit for buying their bullshit marketing claims of oh yeah this shit is totally safe nothing to worry about. She made very clear there was much to worry about. 

A bestseller, the book created a sea change in attitudes toward safe use of pesticides, and was a rallying point for a burgeoning environmental movement. This movement led to President Nixon creating the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and on June 14, 1972, the EPA banned the use of DDT on crops. 

In 2006 Discover magazine named Silent Spring one of the 25 greatest science books of all time. 

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