Post by gakaren on Mar 26, 2015 7:55:34 GMT -5
The chemical companies are STILL fighting it's message!
In the fall of 1962, a group of chemical companies including Monsanto – at the time the largest producer of the cancer-causing chemical compound, PCB – launched a full-throttle public relations campaign against Silent Spring and its author, biologist Rachel Carson.
In Silent Spring, Carson dared to take on the world’s biggest chemical companies, explaining that their products were not only harmful to birds and bees, but to humans, too. In the wake of its publication, the chemical industry PR machine kicked into gear. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent attempting to discredit not only the book but the ‘hysterical’ woman who wrote it,” says Kaiulani Lee, the playwright and actor who wrote and performs the definitive play about Carson, A Sense of Wonder.
In addition to paying spokespeople to tarnish Carson’s reputation, Monsanto also sent a parody to newspapers around the country. In “The Desolate Year,” Monsanto painted a frightening picture of a world without chemicals. It was a bleak place. “Genus by genus, species by species, sub-species by innumerable sub-species, the insects emerged,” the article warned. “Creeping and flying and crawling. … They were chewers, and piercer-suckers, spongers, siphoners and chewer-lappers, and all their vast progeny were chewers – rasping, sawing biting maggots and worms and caterpillars.” It goes on and on like this for five pages. (As we now know, that diatribe was fear-mongering, not fact-marshalling. Organic and low-chemical farmers across the United States are proving that you can eliminate, or greatly reduce, toxic chemical use on the farm without having to worry about being overrun by pests, weeds, or diseases.)
I can’t help but notice that in its recent PR missives against anti-GMO activists, Monsanto, which is today the world’s largest manufacturer of genetically modified seeds, is using the same fear tactics. Only this time, it’s stirring up fear of a world without biotech crops.
In Silent Spring, Carson dared to take on the world’s biggest chemical companies, explaining that their products were not only harmful to birds and bees, but to humans, too. In the wake of its publication, the chemical industry PR machine kicked into gear. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent attempting to discredit not only the book but the ‘hysterical’ woman who wrote it,” says Kaiulani Lee, the playwright and actor who wrote and performs the definitive play about Carson, A Sense of Wonder.
In addition to paying spokespeople to tarnish Carson’s reputation, Monsanto also sent a parody to newspapers around the country. In “The Desolate Year,” Monsanto painted a frightening picture of a world without chemicals. It was a bleak place. “Genus by genus, species by species, sub-species by innumerable sub-species, the insects emerged,” the article warned. “Creeping and flying and crawling. … They were chewers, and piercer-suckers, spongers, siphoners and chewer-lappers, and all their vast progeny were chewers – rasping, sawing biting maggots and worms and caterpillars.” It goes on and on like this for five pages. (As we now know, that diatribe was fear-mongering, not fact-marshalling. Organic and low-chemical farmers across the United States are proving that you can eliminate, or greatly reduce, toxic chemical use on the farm without having to worry about being overrun by pests, weeds, or diseases.)
I can’t help but notice that in its recent PR missives against anti-GMO activists, Monsanto, which is today the world’s largest manufacturer of genetically modified seeds, is using the same fear tactics. Only this time, it’s stirring up fear of a world without biotech crops.
