This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 20th, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is credited with launching the modern environmental movement in the United States, but her science was at best faulty

and at worst wrong in critical ways. Andrew Morris is co-editor of the New Cato Institute

volume Silent Spring at 50, The False Crises of Rachel Carson, we spoke following a forum

for the book today.

Because we're talking about a book that is near and dear to a lot of people's hearts, I think

it's appropriate to start with this.

What did Rachel Carson get right, big picture?

One of the things she got right was she was against massive government-funded spraying programs, and that was absolutely right.

The USDA was pouring money into broadcasting pesticides all over the United States

in a vain effort to eradicate gypsy moths and fire ants and things

like that.

Those were gross violations of the property rights of the people who were being sprayed.

It injured organic farmers and bird lovers and so forth and she was absolutely right

that that was a misallocation of resources. Okay moving on then you make specific reference to Rachel Carson's communication of ideas about

rates of cancer with respect to the use of DDT.

She gave a very misleading portrayal of the situation with cancer.

So she had a very dramatic chapter entitled,

One in Four that predicted that one in four Americans would die of cancer and that

That's a number that scared the crap out of me when I read the book as a 12-year-old and it's a number of scared many people who read it now that didn't take into account a number of things. She was not looking

at age adjusted cancer rates, so there was not a giant increase in cancer rates when you took

...