Sure, there is a lot of chemophobia — much of it related to misinformation and disinformation.

Anyone who rides in an automobile but has a little bit of fear in an airplane suffers from a displaced risk assessment sense — but we muddle on anyway.

What we should not do is think that the restrictions on the dirty dozen chemicals are irrational or unjustified. DDT is regarded with fear in Africa today not so much because of what people read in newspapers — you’re giving way too much credit to the credibility and circulation of newspapers — but instead because in several rather famous cases DDT killed off a lot of the local fish populations, bringing starvation. If there is a culprit for fear learned through newspapers, please look no farther than the tobacco and cotton growing businesses in Africa who sue to stop the use of DDT, and don’t blame it on environmental organizations like Environmental Defense who have argued for DDT’s use in Africa for many years, or writers like Rachel Carson, who said accurately that indiscriminate use of DDT would drive resistance to it by mosquitoes, which was in fact the chief cause of the failure of the malaria eradication campaign of the 1960s.

DDT disrupts the environment and is uncontrollable in the wild. It takes out non-target, keystone species. Manufacturing plants of the stuff are notorious for their hazards to neighbors, both historically in the U.S., and currently in places like India. DDT has a special carve out for use against malaria, but that carve out is done without any evidence that the stuff can ever be used safely.

No, it won’t kill humans quickly. It will give cancer to your daughters, shrink the testes of your sons, and give the sons female-like mammaries, and make all your children sterile — but it’s not “toxic” in the sense that you’d die a quick death.

“Not toxic” does not mean “not harmless” nor “safe.”

In history, chemophobia has proven less dangerous than chemophilia. In the end, both of those diseases can be cured with information, but to cure and not aggravate the problem, the information must be good and accurate.

But generally I agree with publishing this dozen, it gives a good idea what kind a chemicals may harm the environment.

By the way, you missed one: Endrin! :)

You’re right about the chemophobia of course. But basically it’s a gut response to many decades of careless use of chemicals in agriculture and industry. Please, do read “Food for Nought.”

Here are two quotes from Chapter 11: The fabrication of Technologic man:

Alice Shabecoff, a former executive director of the National Consumers League commenting on the land-grant college system asked, “…when the colleges were perfecting these systems of stepped up production, where was the coordinated research that proved there would be no ill-effect upon the food thus produced?”

Dr. Hall’s comment: “To operate efficiently the system must remain remote and impenetrable. The public must remain passive and absorbent. To open up the system to scrutiny and judgment is to threaten the existence of the system in its present form. Is it any wonder that all the educational forces conspire to prevent the public from learning how to scrutinize and judge the system?”

In some respects, the chemophobia response is similar to the response to nuclear power plants, except that nuclear power industry has a far better safety track record than the chemical industry.

What else were you misinformed about?

It sounds as if Mr. Brown knows what he’s talking about.

The problem with synthetics is that they tend to persist and accumulate in the environment if they are chemically configured in such a way that they cannot be taken apart by natural (microbial feeding) processes. Damage to human, animal, or plant health occurs when the amount of synthetic chemical accumulated in living tissue interferes with an organism’s growth and reproductive processes by either defeating or overwhelming the organisms “natural” biochemical mechanisms designed to detoxify the internal cellular environment.

If synthetics are to be safely used in manufacturing and agriculture, it is important to track their movement in and effects on the environment. It they can be utilized without damaging or destroying the health of any life forms, fine with me.