04/20/2006

Planet Earth

[Posted early a.m., Wednesday]

Baseball Quiz: [The answers to the following are all recognizable
names and from the modern era.] 1) Who holds the A.L. record
for highest batting average, season, for a third baseman? [400 at-
bats] 2) Who holds the N.L. record for highest batting average,
season, for a catcher? 3) Who holds the major league record for
most at-bats, season? 4) Who holds the major league mark for
pinch-hits, career? 5) What is Ichiro’s major league record for
hits in a single season? Answers below.

Rachel Carson

We have a tradition here at Bar Chat, honoring Rachel Carson on
Earth Day (April 22). Of course I do this to prove to my critics
that I’m really a closet greenie. And now .the Rachel Carson
story.

Born May 1907 in a 5-room farmhouse in Springdale, Pa.,
Carson always had a certain fondness for nature, though she
grew up wanting to be a writer. Then while at Chatham College
a science teacher convinced Rachel to change her major from
English to Zoology.

Meanwhile, back during World War II, the U.S. military had
been making great use of an insect spray, DDT, which was
particularly effective in fighting lice and other disease-carrying
insects. But the effect on humans was little tested. Following
the war, however, E.I. DuPont, the manufacturer, had large
stockpiles of DDT left over and the U.S. Department of
Agriculture championed its use.

We didn’t know it at the time, but DDT wasn’t the only potential
problem. By the late 1950s, the daily flushings from industries
and cities were turning America’s waterways into sewers.
Rachel Carson was now an editor with the Fish and Wildlife
Service and she thought our nation was acting too quickly in
approving and using various chemicals and pesticides so she
sought to do a formal study. But when no one seemed interested
in supporting this effort, Carson turned to marine biology and
began a broad look at the earth’s life-support system in 1958.
The main subject of her 4-year study was the effect on wildlife of
the new poisons being produced by the likes of DuPont.
Carson’s work would thrust the concept of environmentalism
into the mainstream of human thought.

By 1962, having been convinced by friends to write a protest
article on the widespread use of DDT to control mosquitoes,
Carson published her first piece in The New Yorker, later
expanding it to a book, “Silent Spring.” It would prove to be one
of the most influential works of the 20th century. As writer /
editor Harold Evans notes, “She had the scientific training, she
had the reverence for life in all its forms and she had the literary
ability to make the subject readable.”

Here are just a few selected passages:

“There was once a town in the heart of America where all life
seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in
the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of
grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of
bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple
and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across
a backdrop of pines .

“Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began
to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community;
mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and
sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death.
The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the
town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new
kinds of sickness appearing among their patients .

“There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where
had they gone? .

“ .Even the streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer
visited them, for all the fish had died .

“No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new
life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves ..

“It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that
now inhabits the earth – eons of time in which that developing
and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment
and balance with its surroundings .Given time – time not in
years but in millennia – life adjusts, and a balance has been
reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern
world there is no time.”

The book was purposefully divided into two sections because
Rachel had to address different constituencies. The first part was
an ecology primer that millions of ordinary readers could
understand, while the second was an argument against the
chemical industry’s scientists. The book connected the new “age
of poisons” and “nature’s web on interwoven lives” to the
everyday existence of her readers.

Knowing she would face fierce counterattacks, Carson concluded
with a huge 55-page appendix of “principle sources.” The
invitation was to “tear it apart if you can.” The chemical
industry blasted her, the conclusions labeled “baloney.” Ezra
Benson, Eisenhower’s former Secretary of Agriculture, said
Carson was “probably a Communist.” She was accused of being
a hysterical woman who loved animals more than humans.

Two years into “Silent Spring” Rachel was stricken with cancer,
yet she felt a solemn obligation to finish the book.

“The beauty of the world I was trying to save has always been
uppermost in my mind,” she said. “That, and anger of the
senseless, brutish things that were being done if I didn’t at least
try I could never again be happy in nature.”

President Kennedy had his Science Advisory Committee
evaluate Carson’s findings and the prestigious group validated
her thesis.

Then in 1963 the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave
her an award:

“A scientist in the grand literary style of Galileo and Buffon
(French naturalist), she had used her scientific knowledge and
moral feeling to deepen our consciousness of living nature and to
alert us to the calamitous possibility that our short-sighted
technological conquests might destroy the very sources of our
being.”

Rachel Caron died on April 14, 1964. The pesticide DDT was
banned in 1972.

[Sources: American Heritage magazine; “The American
Century,” Harold Evans; “The Century,” Todd Brewster and
Peter Jennings; “Muckraking!” edited by Judith and William
Serrin.]

**BUT...we’re not finished. In a piece by Tina Rosenberg on
DDT in the Sunday Times Magazine, 4/11/04, she claims that
today DDT can help those suffering from malaria in Africa and
elsewhere. Rosenberg thus blames Rachel Carson for countless
deaths.

As Rosenberg writes, “The move away from DDT in the 60’s
and 70’s led to a resurgence of malaria in various countries
those that then returned to DDT saw their epidemics controlled.
In Mexico in the 1980s, malaria cases rose and fell with the
quantity of DDT sprayed.”

Rosenberg adds this about Carson’s classic work.

“Carson detailed how DDT travels up the food chain in greater
and greater concentrations, how robins died when they ate
earthworms exposed to DDT, how DDT doomed eagle young to
an early death, how salmon died because DDT had killed the
stream insects they ate, how fiddler crabs collapsed in
convulsions in tidal marshes sprayed with DDT .

“Rachel Carson started the environmental movement. Few
books have done more to change the world.

“But this time around, I was also struck by something that did
not occur to me when I first read the book in the early 1980’s. In
her 297 pages, Rachel Carson never mentioned the fact that by
the time she was writing, DDT was responsible for saving tens of
millions of lives, perhaps hundreds of millions

“ ‘Silent Spring’ is now killing African children because of its
persistence in the public mind. Public opinion is so firm on DDT
that even officials who know it can be employed safely dare not
recommend its use.”

[And while we’re at it, I thought I’d reprise the following.]

Richard Nixon and the Environment

Back during the campaign of 1968, neither Richard Nixon nor
opponent Hubert Humphrey discussed the environment . After
all, a poll taken following Nixon’s election showed that only 1%
believed it was the most important issue facing the new
president. Shortly after taking office, for example, Nixon told
Henry Kissinger of a meeting he had had with the Sierra Club.
“What is the Sierra Club?” Kissinger asked. Two years later,
though, the polls had changed. The environment was now the #1
issue among 25% of the people.

Nixon, ever the pragmatist, saw an opportunity to champion a
movement that was beginning to stir and so in his 1970 State of
the Union Address he declared, “Clean air, clean water, open
spaces – these should once again be the birthright of every
American.” The result was the Clean Air Act of 1970, which
forced the auto industry to meet emission standards. [Granted,
Detroit didn’t initially do a great job at this, but it was a start.]

Well, the first Earth Day was also in 1970 and 10,000 schools,
2,000 colleges and almost every town in America took part.
100,000 celebrated in New York City, alone, and the
environmental movement was officially born.

At the time environmental responsibilities were looked after in
various departments of the Federal Government; Interior for
water, Health, Education & Welfare for air quality, and the
Department of Agriculture regulated pesticides. Nixon then
proposed, just two months after the first Earth Day, the creation
of the Environmental Protection Agency to take over the
scattered functions while giving the EPA greater regulatory
power. The agency opened its doors on December 2, 1970 and
the first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, was a strong leader.

Did Richard Nixon champion the environment for political
reasons? Perhaps. Should anyone care? Of course not, the man
got things done. That’s just my opinion .I paid for this site!

[Source: “One of Us,” Tom Wicker]

Gaylord Nelson

But while President Nixon ended up being a friend of the
environment, a three-term Democratic senator from Wisconsin,
Gaylord Nelson, was, like Rachel Carson, a true founder of the
modern environmental movement.

Nelson died at the age of 89 last July (2005) and I saved an
obituary by Patricia Sullivan of the Washington Post for this
Earth Day tribute.

Sullivan writes:

“One of the leading environmentalists of the 20th century, (aside
from founding Earth Day) Nelson also co-sponsored the 1964
Wilderness Act and sponsored or co-sponsored laws that
protected the Appalachian Trail and banned the pesticide DDT,
Agent Orange and phosphate detergents. He backed fuel
efficiency standards in vehicles and strip-mining controls. He
wrote the first environmental education act. He once proposed a
ban on the internal combustion engine, as an amendment to the
Clean Air Act.”

Nelson originally came up for the idea of Earth Day in 1969 after
visiting an oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, Ca., one I
remember vividly from the pictures in LIFE magazine. The
senator was also a leader in the anti-war movement at the time
(Nelson was one of just three senators to vote against funding for
U.S. ground troops in Vietnam) and while reading of a “teach-
in,” decided to adapt that principle as a way of promoting
environmental awareness.

Sen. Nelson then hired a fellow by the name of Denis Hayes, a
student at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, to
organize Earth Day. Both were staggered that 20 million turned
out across the country, April 22, 1970.

Hayes commented upon Nelson’s death, “(The senator)
recognized the partnership between traditional conservative
issues and the new emerging urban and industrial issues. Largely
forgotten is that he was the first and most important to help us
build bridges between environmental concerns and organized
labor.”

One of Gaylord Nelson’s closest friends was Nixon defense
secretary Melvin Laird. The two had served together in the
Wisconsin state senate and were known to argue on the floor, but
then adjourn for dinner and drinks after.

“There was no closer political friendship and love between two
opposite party members in the history of Wisconsin politics than
that of Gaylord and me,” Laird said.

And there was this classic story of the two when they both ended
up in Washington.

“Late one night at the Army and Navy Club, after arguing
whether the ‘hotline’ to Moscow was at the White House or the
Pentagon; Laird summoned his driver, loaded Nelson into the
back seat with him and took him over to the Pentagon command
center, where service members on duty must have been stunned
to see the defense secretary and the antiwar Democrat stroll in.”
[Patricia Sullivan / Washington Post]

“I said, ‘Right there is the hotline, and I’m going to have them
run through an experiment with it right now’ and have them call
Moscow,” Laird said. Nelson finally admitted he was wrong.

So we salute Gaylord Nelson. An old-time senator in the purest,
best sense of the word; unlike the 80 or 90 jerks that people the
place today.

One more tidbit on Earth Day:

The other day I saw four hawks flying together near my home.
30 years ago it was rare to see one a year in this part of New
Jersey. So I was reading a recent piece in the Washington Post
(4/17/2006) on the Chesapeake Bay region and the population of
eagles there has grown from 100 in the late 1970s to about 1,000
this year. But as reporter D’Vera Cohn writes, a wildlife center
in Waynesboro, Va., that takes in injured eagles has discovered
many of the wounds are occurring because of fights between the
birds themselves!

“All of this relates to the fact that the population is reaching
some level of capacity at this point,” said Bryan Watts, a
conservation expert. “The bay has produced more chicks in the
past five years than it has in the previous 25.”

Of course a big reason for the eagle’s recovery is the above
mentioned banning of DDT, which had thinned eggshells of
many bird species to the breaking point.

But may I be the first to suggest the Nazgul could also have
something to do with the infighting. That’s my opinion I could
be wrong.

Stuff

--Wow .did you hear about the find in Argentina? The remains
of a dinosaur, Mapusaurus roseae, that may have stretched 41
feet and weighed as much as 15,000 lbs.?! Said a paleontologist
at the San Diego Natural History Museum, “When I was growing
up, Tyrannosaurus rex was the big, nasty meat-eater but here
we’ve got other things vying for the king of nasty.”

Jia-Rui Chong writes in the Los Angeles Times, “The new
dinosaur ran on its hind legs like Tyrannosaurus rex, but had
teeth that suggested a different way of killing its prey. The thin,
blade-like teeth of Mapusaurus probably sliced the flesh of other
dinosaurs, in contrast to Tyrannosaurus rex’s stronger, spike-
shaped teeth that crunched through its prey.”

Hey, this is Argentina beef country .what did researchers
expect?

--So last time I wrote of the iguanas of Boca Grande, Florida,
and then the London Times had a piece on the topic. But one
thing I didn’t know before is if you find an iguana in your toilet,
as residents here often do, you kill it by pouring in a bottle of
bleach.

Bleach it’s not just for whitening anymore!

--The New York Mets’ Pedro Martinez won his 200th game on
Monday night, but he has only 84 losses for a .704 winning
percentage. In fact by my records, the only pitcher in the history
of the game with at least 100 wins who is better is Spud Chandler
(1937-47), who was 109-43, .717.

But speaking of the Mets, after beating the Atlanta Braves on
Monday, they became the first team in major league history to
build a five-game lead after just 12 games.

--Quinnipiac University surveyed 1,316 New York City baseball
fans – men and women alike – and 52% said they were Yankee
fans while 38% said they favored the Mets. [The other 10% are
jerks or Red Sox fans or both.]

But guys actually favor the Mets, slightly, while girls like the
Yanks by a whopping 52-30 margin.

“It’s Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter,” one fan, Yonancys
DeJesus, ''cooed'' to Nancy Dillon of the New York Daily News.
“I love everything about them, they’re so handsome and nice. I
love to see them in those tight pants.”

Hey, Yonancys, your boys are all on steroids! [Except Jeter.]

Actually, the Mets have their own budding matinee idol in David
Wright, who has the City by the .you know .

--The Chicago Cubs’ Greg Maddux, who just turned 40, is off to
his best start, 3-0, since 1994. In defeating the Dodgers on
Monday night, Maddux won #321 in his amazing career.

--Goodness gracious. Albert Pujols now has 10 home runs in the
Cardinals’ first 14 games. [Thru Tues.] And Barry Bonds has
zero!!!!!!! The Giants’ team trainer and Bonds’ surgeon have
been subpoenaed to appear on April 27 in the perjury
investigation.

[Pujols, by the way, hit four home runs in four at-bats, over two
games, with his shot on Monday, the 35th time this has been
accomplished.]

--ESPN reported that “a high school track athlete who uses a
wheelchair will be allowed to race alongside her teammates for
the rest of the school year under a federal judge’s order.” Boy, I
want to comment on this one but I’ll let you all discuss it
amongst yourself.

--The Philadelphia 76ers’ Allen Iverson and Chris Webber didn’t
show up for Fan Appreciation Night until around game time and
then didn’t play. They supposedly had minor injuries. What they
really are is primo jerks and I submit, again, that a buffalo is
smarter than most NBA ballplayers.

--UConn’s Rudy Gay is going into the NBA draft after his
sophomore season. He is said to be a top six selection, but his
attitude sucks so look for me to be writing about him in this
space quite often in coming years.

--Is it me or does it seem like more runs have already been
scored in baseball this year than the entire 1968 season?

Top 3 songs for the week of 4/19/69: #1 “Aquarius / Let The
Sunshine In” (The 5th Dimension) #2 “You’ve Made Me So
Very Happy” (Blood, Sweat & Tears) #3 “It’s Your Thing” (The
Isley Brothers) and #4 “Only The Strong Survive” (Jerry
Butler) #5 “Dizzy” (Tommy Roe) #6 “Galveston” (Glen
Campbell) #7 “Hair” (The Cowsills) #9 “Time Of The Season”
(The Zombies)

Baseball Quiz Answers: 1) Highest batting average, season, 3B,
A.L. – George Brett, .390, K.C., 1980. 2) Highest batting
average, season, C, N.L. – Mike Piazza, .362, L.A., 1997. [Same
avg. as Bill Dickey, A.L. (Yankees). 3) Major league record, at-
bats, season – Willie Wilson, 705, K.C., 1980. [Juan Samuel
holds the N.L. record with 701, Philadelphia, 1984 (also his
rookie year)]. 4) Pinch-hits, career, major league mark – Lenny
Harris, 212. 5) Ichiro holds the major league mark for hits in a
single season with 262, Seattle, 2004.

Next Bar Chat Tuesday. I’m taking off on a very long trip this
coming weekend and will be spending a ton of time in the air. In
some spots it will be difficult (impossible) to get net access, but
I’ll have something up here next time and then we’ll take it
from there.