who was rachel carson? >> guest: rachel carson was first of all of course the scientist for the fish and

wildlife department of interior. she was in author, a gifted writer. i read silent spring when i was in college and i read the crm bus and they captivated me. she was a mesmerizing writer and able to take scientific, dry scientific information and put it in a vibrant and colorful words that just captivate you. >> host: was she well known before silent spring came out in 1962? >> guest: she had "the sea around us," which was a pretty big seller. that is what got me interested in marine biology and scuba diving. >> host: that was published in the early 50's? >> guest: i believe so. i should have checked before i came on but i'm quite sure of that. >> host: what was the impact of silent spring in 1962 when it came out? >> guest: it was pretty serious impact. it touched on a lot of themes that had been on people's minds.

it created alarms. it presented in a political way and alarming way what might be happening out there, and was almost presented as it was happening even though much of it was conjectural and speculation. it was presented as this is happening. we are using so many chemicals, so many insecticides we are going to kill off our songbirds, we are quick to be left with a silent spring in which there are no songbirds to read we are gwen to kill off the bald eagle with our insecticides. and they got people scared. she did a marvelous job of raising people's awareness that a lot of what we were doing was poisoning the environment. the air, water, the land. she did it in a way that got people emotional, made them want to get involved to solve the

problem to end the despoliation of our environment. >> host: was this new at this time? >> guest: the modern insecticides were to read the used pretty nasty stuff for a long time, copper sulfates and a wide variety of other things -- >> host: and we don't use those today at all? >> guest: the use copper sulfate and organic farming but the use a lot of pretty toxic chemicals not only to control insects but to take care of the diseases people had. they would in jest stuff of almost be worse than what you were trying to get rid of yourself. but modern insecticides came about essentially in world war ii, ddt was probably the first one and was effective. we dustin our soldiers with it in the pacific and the cicilline campaign in europe. we dusted millions and millions of germans and italians and

holocaust survivors after the war to prevent typhus. they used ddt vary widely in the pacific to prevent malaria to kill the miskitos and after the war basically 1945 was the first test case of ddt in the tennessee valley area. beyond that they decided it is so effective against mosquitos we can get rid of malaria in the united states and europe. so they start its bringing it all over. it was also used a lot for agriculture. >> host: what are the effects of ddt? >> guest: the known affect where you want to talk about real scientific evidence are slim. rashes on your skin. there's a lot of conjecture. but ddt is probably the single most studied chemical in history -- >> host: because of "silent spring"? >> guest: partly. "silent spring" was followed

after rachel carson's death by a concerted campaign by environmental defense fund and other environmental organizations and essentially to launch the environmental movement to give it a prestigious power base funding base it never enjoyed before. so those things in combination and the pressure brought against the ddt eventually got a band under president nixon. but in the meantime it was used all over the world. it was used tremendously in the united states. you can see old video or film footage of people dancing and clouds of ddt and swimming pools with clouds of ddt often are held them. people at picnic tables. so it was very widely used and the which was studied and studied, nothing more than tangential and speculatively next to the diseases and cancer and so forth were ever

established. there were concerns about eggshells and we can get into that if you wish, but again a lot of conjecture, not a good solid proof. >> host: and we will get into that but good evening. this is book tv in primetime. and tonight's discussion, life call-in program is about rachel carson and her book, "silent spring," published in 1962. we are joined by paul driessen we've been listening to. he's a senior committee of constructive tomorrow we with congress for racial equality. he has a degree from the university of denver, be a infield ecology from lawrence university, and this is his book, "eco-imperialism: green power, black death." and we are also joined by linda lear in charleston, south carolina who is rachel carson's biographer, and her book is called quote code rachel carson witness for nature" and she has

written the introduction to the new addition of "silent spring" that came out in 2009. linda lear, what got you interested in rachel carson? >> guest: well originally it was because i was teaching environmental history of the university level and when we got to talking about "silent spring" in 1962, my students looked at me and said rachel who? and i thought mauney we have to do something about this. so i set about trying to write rachel carson's biography which had never been done. >> host: we want to get you involved. this is a call-in program. we will put the numbers on the screen so you can talk to linda lear and paul driessen 32,027,370,001 if you live in east times over, 737-0002 if you

live in the pacific and now to three sunday a mile at c-span@book tv.com or a tweet at book tv@twitter.com. was it a best seller when it came out in 1962? >> guest: in the it was. it was a blockbuster in had been serialized in the new yorker magazine in three parts beginning in june and there was nothing but a stunning, anything but silent summer. when the book was finally published in september of that year it was already a best seller. john f. kennedy helped a lot to call attention to rachel carson's ideas by commenting on them in a press conference and setting up a presidential that 53 committee to look, presidential led by sri committee to look into her claims about the massive

contamination of the environment by chemical pesticides. >> host: when you say her claims where did she get her knowledge? >> guest: kurson had studied, she was ecologist by training, marine biologists and ecologists. she had impeccable credentials and was an m.a. from johns hopkins. she didn't have a ph.d. degree but she had worked all her life of fish and wildlife service and in government and had read and studied the ocean for per great best seller, "the sea around us" and then subsequently "the edge of the cp quote she did impeccable research. she was not a person who was writing for the academic community. and the remarkable thing was that rachel carson insisted on writing for the public. she wanted the public to know what was happening in their world. >> host: paul driessen, she

was a marine biologist and writing here about non-reena issues; is that correct? >> guest: euskadi much the same. i was a fresh water ecologist major in college along with my geology and there is a tremendous cross over land to water you look, your door and they are interconnected and the marine aspects are interconnected. so, she was drifting a little bit of yield of where she was trained but not all that much. the bigger problem that i found with rachel carson and some of her work is that she tended to go on the basis of punches and speculation and conjecture or anecdotal evidence and not always well backed up and sometimes she was not that familiar with or ignored the very good literature about ddt for example the was out there and she made some conclusions that were not based in the

science available at that time. >> host: linda lear, which has been the impact of "silent spring" and rachel carson? >> guest: well first of all i want to say the airline would disagree with what paul driessen just said we can go back to that perhaps later. i would say the impact was immediate. it was to have a lot only presidential science committee which found that until rachel carson's "silent spring" the public did not know pesticides for toxic. that is an astonishing statement. and until it rachel carson's book, "silent spring," the public did not understand following a mosquito, trucks spraying for mosquitoes on a path and spraying the children might be dangerous to your health or might not be good for children.

but pesticides were ubiquitous. it was a science claiming the world after world war ii and was the end to insect problems. her book, however, after it came out was the first of all the chemical industry thought she was probably a lightweight and they considered that she would go away. she didn't. and as information gathered and she began to talk further about the book and what she was trying to argue that we were over using pesticides she did don't claim that we should never use them. she claimed we were misusing them and as that began to roll on into the public to take notice then congressional hearings were called. rachel testified before both the senate and house and 1963 and

the hearings were held that would go into creation finally of the environmental protection agency. >> host: let's take some calls for the guests. but before linda lear comegys did you disagree with something paul driessen said. what was that? >> guest: well, that rachel carson based her claims of false teeth science or had overstepped the information on chemical pesticides was very hard to get. the agricultural science agency research agency of the department of agriculture was closed. they wouldn't speak to her. they wouldn't let the material out. the national cancer institute have similarly closed its doors to anybody who asked questions that might provoke maybe what was happening to people who were subjected to the dry cleaning fluids and had developed

lymphoma and problems with blood disease of all sorts, rachel carson was against a wall of silence that people did not want to give her this information. so, while she -- the cancer chapters in "silent spring" came after she had begun the book. she was first of all starting to talk about air, water and the ground pollution and it was only later that she realized she had to talk about human health and that the skin of the human body was permeable. it wasn't as people thought, something the would keep chemical's out. >> host: paul driessen, final comment before we go to calls. >> guest: bear in mind that before she was writing that book and the pesticides were ubiquitous, it was mostly ddt.

there wasn't much else and in terms of toxicity it was pretty low toxic as i mentioned it caused skin rashes but not much else. people in just trying to kill themselves that they've been unable to. there's been scientists who would give talks about ddt and tsp of ddt and eat drink their talk to make the point that it wasn't as toxic as it was reputed to be. but there is -- you have to bear in mind we were also using a lot of other chemicals and still do and there wasn't as much care for the use of those chemicals as there should have been and people were getting sick and there are pesticides out there that one drop on your skin can kill you but those were not available at that time. >> host: and this is from "silent spring."

our first call for the two guests, linda "silent spring" and paul driessen collagen in omaha nebraska. please go ahead. >> caller: i remember when i was a kid and we used to play outside going up and down the streets trucks were spraying and when you look at the life expectancy we have right now it's kind of amazing you could draw the conclusion that was dangerous, and also how many deaths do you think can be

attributed to ms. carson for not using ddt? >> host: we will start with paul driessen dividend linda lear. >> guest: excellent points and a good question. i have seen all kind of numbers in terms of the deaths attributable to not having ddt available or talking mostly about malaria in the context of disease that affects 300 to 500 million people in here causes permanent brain damage and makes people unable to work for perhaps three, four, five weeks at a time. it is a disease that leads people permanently brain damaged. so, it is something you want to get rid of as quickly as you can and the lack of ddt mosul much as an insecticide but as a repellent to keep mosquitoes out of homes according to the various estimates has cost ten to 40 millions unnecessary deaths so it's a very serious

problem. >> host: is lear? >> guest: i don't have -- i thought your question was very good but i don't think that rachel carson was saying that ddt cause death or chemical pesticides necessarily caused death. what she was arguing was that we were prolific and kleeb misusing pesticides, particularly in agriculture when we didn't know the long term affect of the pesticides. and what was just read from the table for tomorrow and rachel carson's book was indeed a fable where she had taken many towns and put them together in a compound of evidence to say that some of these incidents have happened everywhere and that we aware of what we were doing to the total environment, not just the human environment but the total site as it, the biology of the environment and what were we thinking that we could control or not control.

>> host: linda lear was the common misperception she called for the banning of all pesticides? >> guest: well i don't know how that perception came about because that is not in "silent spring" and was never rachel's testimony or her idea. her most was to call attention to the fact that there was a prolific use of pesticides in the environment when we did not know what the total outcome was and when the public did not know that their homes and farms and animals were being sprayed from the air by airplanes in the fields and they didn't know when this was going to happen and it did indeed kill certain wildlife, birds, fish, certain mammals and there was a prolific use without the public permission and we didn't know what the total -- what the

outcome would be. she never called for a ban on pesticide use. >> host: from "silent spring mr. driessen? >> guest: one of the hard things to gauge in all of this is what is the difference between the effect that rachel carson had as an individual, her book had as a book and then the environmental groups especially after her death, what they did to campaign against ddt first and foremost but also other pesticides and chemicals. and that is where a lot of the what linda was talking about where the misinformation came in, rachel carson didn't call for the elimination but she did

take some of her speculation beyond where the science back it up. she, for example talked about the ddt as something building huge resistance in insects at an early time when she was really talking about mosquitos for example avoiding it much as they do deet, off four other republics. that is ddt's most prominent role. it doesn't compare to what we have today that time it was the best we had and we used it profitably as linda pointed out. but it's also the most powerful appellant that has ever been developed, the most powerful and long-lasting, and that's why we want to keep it in the malaria prevention arena now because spraying it once or twice a year on the walls of the house keeps

80% of the mosquitos from coming in. >> host: what developed it? what company? >> guest: it was defended to the invented by paul mueller back in their early 40's -- >> guest: [inaudible] >> host: thank you. >> guest: thank you. of the germans had evicted and what to do with it and the americans got it and we started using it in places where we were confronted with a lot of disease, mosquitos and malaria and yellow fever and so forth. so mueller got a nobel prize for his development of this. but nobody at the time knew exactly what they have on their hands, good or bad, and even though the information about the ddt repellent was available back in the early 1940's, people didn't appreciate that value right away and rachel carson

interpreted that as assistance rather of an avoidance mechanisms. >> host: lucille samet calls new york. >> caller: hi. this is for either of you although i have to say i kind of agree with linda at this point. i am a casual bird watcher and i noticed last summer i have the woods behind my house, pond next to my house which i affectionately call a cesspool. and i noticed a lot of birds just disappearing and i went out and got her book and read it and made perfect sense to me. i'm especially interested in eagles. we have a wildlife refuge your our finger lakes butter now polluted and it's worse now. i read her book about our lakes are polluted. you can't eat the fish. the birds to me are diminishing. the geese and ducks, i haven't

seen a starling all winter. and i got concerned. >> host: linda lear? >> guest: and you should be concerned. the system is here that rachel was pointing out right up route 95 from where she was was of course the fish and wildlife refuge and they were working on feeding ddt two birds, eagles, pelicans, the nesting birds that fly. and these birds were showing signs of various reproductive problems. these birds were sort of the tip of the iceberg and then came the robins and whether or not the eggshell thinning can be proven to the ingestion of pesticides i am not sure it has never been clear. but resistance and pesticides

are persistent and water soil and air. they don't go away and that was one of rachel's big points in silent spring and i sure paul doesn't disagree with this. you can't wash away so the leaks are polluted. all of the leaks are polluted and the birds and fish have ingested not just ddt but a whole lot of chemistry of pesticides and pollutants of all sorts. so there is going to be a change in the boyda and what is happening to nature. it shouldn't be lead just at the door of ddt by any circumstance but it should be laid up the door of this barrages of pesticides and chemicals that we've put into our environment. >> guest: i will agree up to a point but i think that you are dealing with mother nature in a very complex ecology out there. i live on a pond in a wooded area as well and right along the

i-95 quarter that we are speaking of i have seen far more keys in the most winters recently than i remember growing up or being around the virginia area when i was first here. they tended to winter over because they find a lot more food than they used to. and this winter has been a rough winter. a lot more snow, a lot colder, the crows and the starlings have largely disappeared from the area for the time being. but when it warms up a little bit on the m amazed that the hundreds of birds that suddenly come out of nowhere and just last week when we had some patches of bear ground in the backyard we had 20, 30 robins not there that i haven't seen for weeks so i think you are dealing with a very complex situation. the of reproductive issues going

that to rachel carson's time i think it's really important to recognize that back in those days we were dumping of justin insecticides but chemicals and they were interacting, there were synergisms. nobody could figure out what was affecting what. >> host: a quick question to the both of you. is our environment cleaner today than it was in 1962, paul driessen? >> guest: i would say absolutely yes. you look at the air quality, the water. you can measure things out there and detect them to the equivalent of one second in 32 years with modern detection technology. that wasn't the case back then. ddt actually does break down very rapidly in the environment not so much in the soil in the water and in the sunlight it breaks down into various other components. but the question becomes what level does something like that have an affect and what about

all of the leal and other things in the environment? >> host: linda lear, same question. >> guest: same question. i feel we are in the much worse shape than we were when rachel brought them here in a charleston for example we are not able to dredge the ashley river out to where the boats can actually lead anchor the cause of the leaders of pollution and toxins that would be released into the water if the dredging occurred. that is just a small example. i don't see the gallinaceous birds down here that i used to see to it i think the whole buy order has been poisoned and continues to be poisoned. >> host: clermont california thanks for holding. you are on with linda lear and paul driessen discussing rachel carson's "silent spring" on booktv prime time. >> caller: thank you. my question is primarily for mr. driessen. it reminds me of the slander

against rachel carson and the 60's and 70's by the agribusiness industry. number one ddt is extremely toxic. i spent 25 years with u.s. environmental protection agency. the ban did because it was a potential human carcinogen killing in number of birds all over the country especially the golden eagle but it showed the part of the ddt that disrupt the hormones so it was a technical hormone disrupted and carcinogen so it seems to me mr. driessen this doesn't make any sense because 48 years now after rachel carson and we have a problem in the environment.

>> host: paul driessen? >> guest: we think would have to recognize is ddt and others are toxic more to some species than others. for a simple as cats and fish are more susceptible to ddt in the and the province or equals three the rahman populations rapidly increasing during the time when we were screened the most ddt and they attribute that to the fact, when ddt was coming in what insects and mosquitos carrying the avian diseases and to link the insects feeding the birds@@@ @ a# ã

eggs and they were the most affected by ddt. i want to just say that when the congress after the hearings rachel creston testified with, but congress band the production of ddt in this country but they never band the sale or distribution of ddt abroad. we have had 50 plus years,

almost 50 years since of the distribution of ddt and all with its sister chemicals abroad. so the dispersion of the multiplicity of pesticides, chemical toxins in our environment has accelerated, not a decelerated since rachel carson's time. >> host: linda lear, with the founding of the epa, the environmental movement, the effect or of of what we give to the environment today recycling, taking the lead out of gas, removing phosphates from the water product, would that have occurred in your view without rachel carson "silent spring"? >> guest: that's really almost an a historical question and it's hard for historians to answer that.

i feel what rachel carson was trying to do is bring awareness to her readers and the world that we need to ask the question always what is still long term affect of what we are doing ek if to the environment to human and nonhuman environment by putting these chemicals into our wiota. did that was her primary concern. it was the interlocking ecology of life. what has happened since and whether or not she would approve of various acts of the epa or of an environmental activist groups whether they be pro or con is impossible to conjecture. i think that rachel carson would be very concerned about our environment today that we need to do better than we are doing. but that certainly she would be pleased with any steps taken to

make our planet seaver and a better place for the whole of the biota. >> host: mark in west palm beach florida. you are on with linda lear and paul driessen. >> caller: thanks for taking my call. interesting conversations. i just wanted to make a couple of points. one is that of course the falcon was one of the test cases for ddt banned in california where they are able to measure the shells in the 12-foot wingspan and the 70's. the other thing is the coinciding news headlines smith the blocks so klein announced in january they are going to make available information on the hundreds of compounds that can address malaria. these are natural compounds. it's everybody's right to make

money in this country but why is it mccaul companies can make whatever they want and these corporations shom were this stuff, they do their own testing. nobody knows whether or not this stuff is harmful or not we find out later, maybe it causes problems, maybe they fudge the numbers. at any rate -- >> host: we got the point, thanks. paul driessen >> guest: let me jump back just a second to the earlier point about the epa banning ddt. when they did they had a seventh month study and it was determined that ddt was and carcinogenic or causing the problems but william said i have a political problem and i'm going to solve it. let's go to mark's comment. i think you were talking about the convert, it is a separate situation and there were still a lot of problems of people shooting them and hope habitat losses and other things like

that. joel dittman was the guy that did the calcium -- the ddt thinning studies initially. he concluded ddt in fact this caught the thinning but that was pointed out that his studies were using by it's deficient in calcium. he ran the tests because he was a darn good scientist right here in the maryland area and lo and behold there was no impact on the eggshell thinning. my big concern with ddt and keeping it out there and using it when it is appropriate and use it responsibly and by trained personnel because i think that should be done with all chemicals is the death of children. these are 25 kids out of 50 who died at the course of one year in a one school in ugonda. friends of mine are supporters of the school so imagine in this country 10% of a class of kids

just being did from one disease in one year it's just a tragedy we don't want to repeat. >> host: lee in south carolina. you are on booktv. >> caller: i would like to challenge a few things mr. driessen has said. when ddt was used in the second world war, it was used in a power perform and it's extremely hard to absorb through the skin when it is a powder but once we started spraying get on crops in the neighborhood of the mix with oil and becomes highly toxic. another think he is overlooking is he's isolating the ddt and dr. linda lear is exactly right. what happens if you are exposed to ddt and are taking antibiotics, other drugs, what happens in your body when this mix is, does it make your antibiotics toxic and that was

certainly something she asks magnificent questions and then there were other chemicals at the time, there was dieldrin -- i'm probably murdering the pronunciation -- there were some of those much more highly toxic than ddt. >> host: paul driessen and linda lear. >> guest: i agree those are far more toxic and why there are more controls on them and clearly when you mix ddt with oil because it isn't soluble in water you exit -- it was busted as a powder troops and holocaust survivors so you are right. when it's mixed with leal id is absorbed more into the skin but even then there have never been a single study that conclusively shows any carcinogenic effect or other toxic effect on human beings that doesn't say that there is not an impact on some species and the environment

generally the certainly with all of the other chemicals we are putting in including birth control pills from women putting all sorts of things into the environment and i don't think anybody can separate what one chemical out of the mix has an affect on various species or the ecology as a whole. >> host: linda lear. >> guest: i have to say it depends on whether we are taking a at a look at our world or whether we are talking about the whole of life. rachel carson was talking about whole of life and she also observed technology was on a fast trajectory than the moral responsibility. what she was hoping by her book was to galvanize people to take moral responsibility for the whole of the wiota. humans as well as the rest of

nature and i agree with paul in this since the use of ddt or whatever the best and tight malarial chemical might be in a specific contained use to prevent these diseases like malaria is an important thing and rachel wouldn't be against it but ddt has been used in agriculture and once used prolific currently in agriculture and the other ones that this caller, thank you very much, as specified that once you use it all. the agriculture and the insects have different chemical compositions and find you can use it inside a tent. it's very effective but that doesn't mean it's effective loophole of the landscape and what she was saying is it isn't just one place. it's the whole world we are

talking about and we have to be concerned about the stream of life, the whole stream of life. and what you think about the current movement of the last couple of years to reintroduce the ddt to combat malaria? >> guest: i'm not a scientist. i would put that to paul driessen. he would be able to answer that better. i am not antichemical and i don't think that rachel would have been but we need to know what its long-term effects are. we can't just be so blind as we were with the line for example that can at the same time and put out there and then say oh no because once you put a chemical out into the society into the stream of life if you will you can't take it back so we better know what we are doing before

hand and that is what her point was. >> guest: that is my point, to match. all chemicals the to be used carefully by trained people. people need to be aware that you are dealing, you are handling of things that either in the very immediate term with some chemicals or in the longer term can have a serious deleterious effect on you as a person or the people around you or the environment around you. in terms of ddt for malaria control what i was explaining before is what you do now is not about and spray the environment to kill a mosquito. ddt has never been good at that, the slow acting compared to dial treynor icon or some of the others used today. what they do is the spring of the walls and the eaves of parts so that the mosquito's don't come in. if they come when they get excited, agitated and mostly leave before they buy it and if

they do happen to landaluze all then they die within a couple of minutes other chemicals used in a mosquito control in the united states is instantaneous. the chemical comes in contact and the microscopic drops and the mosquito is dead. what i recommend is a broad based approach to malaria we need the bed nets and the drugs. we need the mosquito killer is to keep them under control and better treatment drugs and hospitalization in the countries and we need ddt to serve as a sort of long-lasting whole house bed net that you don't have to worry about putting on each night. it's just there and you don't have to have it only when you're sleeping. >> host: a quick housekeeping noted. i've been calling you paul driessen -- it is driessen.

good. ann in north carolina. you are on with linda lear and paul driessen to a >> caller: think you for taking my call. on was 7-years-old when her book came out. i don't have any questions just more comments than anything. pesticides, herbicides, homicide, suicide, they are all in the same family. and that always struck me as kind of an interesting thing to think about. there are many chemicals into rivers and streams and what's happening down here on the appalachian mountains is mountaintop removal and that is just atrocious. nearly 500 mountains have been removed in the appalachian -- >> host: tell you what we appreciate the comments. we are going to leave it there. linda lear, this e-mail kinver martha who lives in charleston south carolina where you are right now. if you could respond i have the

feeling rachel carson's love was the earth see in her books. my favorite is "the sea around us." she also wanted children to experience a sense of wonder and nature as her posthumous books state. please comment, linda lear on the silent spring research and writing almost being forced upon her when@@@@z&

the oceans and global warming. she actually wrote something about because rachel had studied and was on the board of trustees in the oceanographic institute. she had kept up in her research. she actually wrote about the incipient rising in ocean temperatures and what that might

do. of course it was very speculative back then. but owls martha says she had a love of the ocean. but carson was passionate about the ongoing life and the whole of the biota and the interlocking this of life. so one couldn't go on without the other and that really was her love. >> host: here is the post script what happened to the fish and wildlife pamphlets for the government. doug brinkley the historian commented recently her work there was destroyed. >> guest: no. i don't believe that -- i haven't seen that from him, but her work on those pamphlets has been considered some of the best writing efficient way of life ever had. they may have lost the pamphlets but they're certainly in the archives and interregional

archive -- rachel carson archived at the college. >> host: rachel carson for 1907 by 1964. "silent spring" published in 1962. barry in norfolk nebraska. good evening. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. one comment and a quick question. i was 16-years-old in 1962. and i grew up on a farm here in nebraska. this very apparent that in those days and even for years thereafter that the wildlife was disappearing as a result of the chemicals which we are using here in agriculture and i went into the service and spent 27 years in service before i came back while i was in service i

dealt with agent orange. my comment is there was a lot of wild life lost in the nebraska and it's apparent the streams are delayed of what we used to have when we were kids, salamanders, turtles, toads, frogs, plus the song birds are just wiped out and they never have come back but my question is what you might making a couple of comments about agent orange? >> host: paul driessen? >> guest: i am not willing to cross into that because that's something i've not studied. i've read all sorts of stories about it but i'm not an expert on that and i wouldn't want -- >> host: linda lear? >> guest: i'm not an expert on that either. i just know quite interestingly enough, several of regional's scientific experts, frank and ruth scott in particular have been using the four of the

roadside for the rights of way for telephone poles and railroad sidings and so forth and ruth's got a great pennsylvania conservationist and frank both concluded that these agents, these herbicides which i think our relatives of agent orange or so detrimental to the vegetation and bird life or the insect life on those rights of ways that they advocated and hoped rachel would advocate against their use. to her, to the rachel it was all one of a peace. you don't put it out there when it is clear you are harming the whole of the biota. >> host: paul driessen use if

you are a former member of the sierra club and of the zero population growth group. why former? >> guest: i came to the conclusion having worked in these areas for a long time that part of much of what they were telling me was not totally in sync with what i was studying and i was being fed information that simply wasn't correct and there were times in discussions and things like i conclude they flat out were misrepresenting the facts about a wide variety of issues and i just had a parting of ways on different topics. most of it having to do with activities out west when i was living in colorado and wyoming. >> host: where did you come up with the name of your book "eco-imperialism: green power, black death"? >> guest: as i indicated earlier, i grew up kind of in the environmental movement. rachel carson was a huge inspiration for me. it changed a lot of my thinking that as i traveled more and more

in the other countries of the world and came in contact with the impoverishment of the communities and the diseases that we don't even see here anymore i realized that as much as the environmental movement has improved things in many ways, some of the antitechnology and antichemical positions are detrimental to the development and the health of people in these other countries. malaria is a good example. the opposition by environmental groups like the sierra club and greenpeace for example to the use of biotechnology in agriculture is something i've never been able to understand and my friend, patrick who is a co-founder of greenpeace and i are on the same page. we just don't understand what the opposition is. the opposition of fossil fuel with a lot of these countries where they just don't have

electricity. 95% of people in sub-saharan africa still don't have electricity and i cannot imagine my life without electricity. so these are the issues i brought up in foia "eco-imperialism" three >> host: peter in greenwich connecticut. you're on the air. >> caller: thank you. actually rachel affected the. i'm an architect today because she mentioned my home town where i still practicing greenwich and i witnessed the spraying to save the entries of ddt. it seems a conversation on both sides here is the theme that seems to go through is antibig business but not holding government out the task. it seems like we've trusted them with protecting us if you will and it seems example after example of the business is trying to do things better is

either sorted or put back by government regulations that are too quick from the hipaa -- >> host: peter, you said that you are a landscape architect. do you use insecticides and chemicals in your work? >> guest: >> caller: i use them sometimes, yes and especially working in the golf world and would be shocked and amazed at how absolutely precise and terrific the united states golf association in particular has studied this carefully because they were put on the rack as bad boys and they've come back and studied this very carefully. it seems the political fix to ban ddt as mentioned earlier is something that comes easily and quickly. >> host: linda lear if you would come you live in charleston south carolina, a lot of golf courses in your area.

did you have any comments regarding that? >> guest: note. i have to quickly say that i am this privilege to be down in charleston south carolina part of my life and the rest i live where paul lives in bethesda maryland, and so i don't have any comment about the golf courses but i -- nor do i know if they've improved things or not. i'm not a golfer. >> host: darnell in maryland please go ahead with your question. >> caller: as far as the chemicals we use, there are always side effects just like the medicines we take and they don't care how many people get sick, how many people die as long as it doesn't affect their bottom line. they will not tell you the truth until they are forced to. as far as the chemicals being sprayed from the trucks that come around in the summertime and kill the mosquitos my neighbor was sitting outside last summer and started getting

a headache. i suggest because the truck just came and sprayed you. that has a bug killer and people act like they are so shocked and don't know what is going on but if you try to get the information about what they are springing out of the trucks he speeds off and will give you a number. i live in a waldorf maryland and they've been doing it for years. i try to get them to stop and it's very hard. >> host: okay. got the point. linda lear, let's start with you and then paul driessen. >> guest: i couldn't agree with you more. we haven't come that far where we care more about how to clean our lawns are as opposed to how many songbirds we have or whether the worms and other drugs under the ground or in good health or in poor health. i just want to say that carson's whole point was about humility and arrogance that so long as humans act as though they can't

control nature we can spray away this and the drug away that. we are not going to have a cleaner world or a world that will sustain our planet for very long humans have to have some humility. we are not in control of nature and we can't control where it is going to go. we have to be humble and we have to think about the whole of nature and that includes all the little insects in people and yes media or green lawns and golf courses can't be so green but maybe we can live happier and longer without them. >> host: paul driessen? >> guest: i think the use of chemicals is very important and they have to be used carefully to die you need to take continuing approach to evaluating the impact of evaluating how much you need, what should be used with it is ddt or anything else but there are benefits to having these

chemicals in all aspects of our lives. we wouldn't be -- we would still be living at -- don young at age 47 as we were around 1900 if it were not for some of the chemicals and other things we've developed over time. we have to be humble and recognize, to back that sometimes say things government does is very bad. the ban on ddt by william buckles house contrary to his own scientific advisory panel recommendations and conclusions was for many people in the world one of the first things that could happen because of lead eventually to an almost international ban or did facto ban against using a chemical that could save millions of lives. if we want to take one other issue that were where peter brooke the government versus corporations, one of my big has been the cafe standards. we do them corporate automobile

efficiency standards. we do it to save gasoline. there are questions about that but the big question from my perspective is here government came along and made some decisions to enact the mileage standards and various people that have studied this say that three to 4,000 more americans are dying every year because of the cafe standards. we downsized and plasticized the cars so these are all things we should be thinking about in the context of our human environment and the broad natural environment and i hope we will continue studying them for a long time to come and making some wise policy decisions right from the get go. >> host: lancaster p.a.. you are on the air. >> caller: we need more informative programs like this. anybody know anything that the cycle of plays -- of police in? is that still applicable? you can't find in the winter and

the north grapes or berries or fruits from other than chile or mexico. >> host: cycle of plays in. >> guest: everything we create has a half life and termination point. various levels of toxicity. it depends on the type of poison, the type of exposure. so all of those things get rolled into an analysis of what the cycle of plays and actively is and we have to of laid the speculation and extrapolation and actually deal with the scientific fact. .. the biggest impact on rachel carson and "silent spring"? >> that she allowed us to think about our future, about the world, and that we would question authority, that we would ask what is it that you

are doing? why is it helpful? and who is it going to hurt? and who is it going to benefit? >> host: linda lear and paul driessen. if you want to hear more, you can talk to her. you can also go to paul's web site. thank you for being on booktv and primetime. we have two more hours of programming coming up. :

i don't know how many of you have seen the new "chanel" movie about the designer, coca chanel. she wasn't just a designer, she was the desire that pointed out what was wrong with this intrigued by pointing out what was wrong with their skirts. and with another set of markers, chanel walked out the 20th century what it should be,

women's suits come close you can wear and walking, ideas the change culture, politics, economics, not just the right to trade due to the utter precision of the artists nickel is the chanel of financial governance. [laughter] in herschler book after book will agree to talk about this morning she marks the spots that took us to the current financial crisis that made it inevitably that we would come this way with equal mastery pencils for the reform you didn't know was right until you saw it. so we want to welcome you all to this. nicole is the freedom trust fellow at the manhattan institute, a contributing editor to the strong magazine city journal. nicholas also a chartered financial analyst of her craft.

two or three things i want to mention before she comes up to talk to you. one is that this book, quote kuhl after the fall and" is a history book. today we have assumptions. deposit insurance is could we just need more of it may be. another assumption we have the world will include if we don't save institutions that are too big to fail. unless you go back to the history you won't know these are new and controversial views. the irony, since of irony of work for you and there is irony. the viewer about deposit insurance until just a few decades ago was that it should be limited as recently as 1989 the head of citicorp's john reed was born and we had to cut back deposit insurance. have less or we would have financial crises including for his bank leader. people would if you cut back deposit insurance people would

know what they were risking when they put their money in institutions. they would have to evaluate the institution and the risk. there was a time we didn't believe it too big to fail. the united states as nicole talked about what an important bank failed in the 1980's, penn square of oklahoma to read this a good achievement of after the fall is its solutions. mccaul the sidley of absolute answers. she doesn't call for more bailouts either. she goes for the logical middle ground, the classical solution that suits many like making the rules of the market will year. apply the same rules to everyone, no special friends. no more today to feel special york category. no. it's wrong to have tsar's sitting in thrones to make the kingdom nervous. we will ladies out for you, dan

howard of the manhattan institute will help nicole take questions. welcome, maestro. [applause] >> thank you, amity for the generous introduction and and limiting deposit insurance to actually injured deposits is a radical concept. now, going with amity's "chanel" metaphor, coca chanel said in the 1920's that simplicity is the keynote of elegance and she was not talking about financial markets, but she may as well have been as hopefully if i do my job right you will see at the end of my talk. so a failure of free-market. that is what the last two years look like to many people.

we've had the financial system destroy itself so thoroughly the government had to come along and provided with essentially nationalization of all of its risks so that money and credit would dog disintegrate. now we have an unemployment and underemployment and 17.5% bigot goldman sachs says that it has to pay at least $16.5 billion worth of bonuses so that its own and please don't leave the firm. now goldman sachs seems to feel bad about this. it wants to donate $500 million to small businesses. what kind of three markets do we have been small businesses have to depend on a rich company's treating it as a hobby in order to get the capitol financing. but this in fact has not been a failure of three markets.

the past 25 years are the stories of what happens when the government does not understand its proper role in the free markets and that is to provide a level predictable consistent system of prudent regulation so that markets can discipline themselves without causing unacceptable harm and destruction to the broad economy. we know how to do this. we did this for 50 years more or less well from the 1930's until the 1980's. how did we learn how to do this? we learned lessons of the 1920's the twenties were wonderful innovative decades as amity noted in her own work. the problem with the twenties as it relates to financial markets is that innovation creates optimism. optimism creates excess optimism and when you have financial markets that don't have any meaningful regulation other than monetary policy, you have

financial firms and regular people against every last dollar of optimism projected decades into the future. you have got layer upon layer of debt upon layer of your assumption going out into the future and that means and you have the slightest the altar and profit expectations for some of the expectation of the future euskadi are pulling out one level assumptions will tower of assumptions and it collapses, and then you have so much the unpaid debt the banking system is effectively bankrupt. we saw this happen in the early 1930's, not just with bordering against the stock market of course but against all kind of asset markets and what did we learn from this? we learned markets have to discipline themselves but not at the price of an acceptable destruction and the economy. so, the first a look at solution

to the puzzle of how to owned market discipline without economic destruction was the fdic. this is acceptable moral hazard where fdr and his policy makers decided we can eliminate the panicked, reduce panic in the financial system by protecting small depositors but we are not going to protect bad banks against their mistakes. they can still feel it is just the small depositors will be protected so that we will not see the destruction of money and credit again. but the most important thing that fdr realized was that you don't want to eliminate risk in the financial markets. you just want to protect the economy against the natural inevitable excess of optimism and pessimism. how do you do that? you limit borrowing first of all and limit the borrowing predictably and consistently. fdr did not set up a systemic stock regulator to figured out which stocks are safe and which are not, which ones you can

borrow against unlimited and which ones you cannot. instead, they said that the fed and sec would say you can only borrow half the price of the stock. you can speculate all you want, pick your own risk print you are wrong you will lose but the economy will not be bankrupt and then they also said you got to consistently report market activities, corporate activity so that people have a little fighting chance of understanding what risk is out there if they choose to do so. the system worked well again until the 1980's and then the financial system started to east cape prudent regulations and a steep market discipline and we are going through the result of that right now. so, how did this happen? we go back to 1984, many of 1984 a bank called continental illinois.

this was the eighth largest bank in the country at the time and continental illinois was a pioneer of sorts in the banking industry. continental was a pioneer in that it did not follow a business model of solely keeping long-term loans on its books, booking the profits as people and companies repaid the loans and having a very slow business model inslee did for the most part from into the panics and fluctuations in prices and the securities markets. instead continental purchased loans that have been securitized. that meant that they were vulnerable to fluctuations in prices from day to day and continental booked the profits from the fluctuations in those prices. that's one way that they made themselves and they made multiplied over many financial institutions in the future. they made the system of credit

more vulnerable to financial excesses'. the other was that they depended on short-term financing, and ensured short-term lenders provided a good deal of their money so they made themselves vulnerable to short-term panic and a second wave because the short-term lenders could pull their money out overnight in a crisis. now the governments in 1984, the markets started to panic in the spring once they got the wind that some of these securities that continental had were going bad. the government decided that continental could not fail, but the price would be too high for the national and indeed the global financial and economic system. so the reagan administration did something that was unprecedented at the time. they came out, the fdic and treasury came out and said that none of continental illinois

bondholders, an insured bond holders, they would not take any losses in the continental sillier and this engender quite a debate within the reagan administration. don regan that the treasury secretary at the time, said that -- he wrote this in a memo to his colleagues. we believe it is bad public policy and would be seen to be on a fair and represents an unauthorized and on legislative expansion of federal guarantees and contravention of executive branch policies. so he was against this. president reagan himself never said much publicly about the bailout. but an unnamed white house official said the president's thinking is he agreed with regulators compelling argument that the only other choice was to risk worldwide financial havoc so this is a thought sign of things to come. at the time chairman paul volcker said this would do such a precedent but the market's new is that a president.

we got a new freeze in the financial industry have not yet in the public lexicon which was too big to fail and the independent bankers association which represents small banks understood the implications of this its president of the time or not these big banks of the ultimate anti-competitive government subsidy. they are too big to fail and regardless of how mismanaged the may become the buckles stopped with the taxpayer. so, when the government wants more of something is subsidizes it. if you@ @

fail. when we hear about exotic financial instruments, credit the fault swaps and everything else, these are not so complicated. these are many of them have good innovation and market signals and all kind of other things but one of the reasons for their creationists to a scheme for was to ease keep these reasonable consistent limits on borrowing. credit stifel swaps, sprick dewitt -- this is a way to speculate without having to put

cash to single securitization creating complex financial structure is so the banks and other investors could achieve these aaa ratings and investment securities without putting a consistent amount of money down to protect them and the economy from any mistakes in their assumptions with aaa securitized mortgage loans or mortgage bonds for sable banks could purchase these bonds with just one eighth of the cash normally set aside for any mistakes in their assumptions. so by doing this we made the entire financial system much more vulnerable to mistakes in these assumptions just as we had done in the 1920's. sometimes the federal officials recognized we were not applying the old rules to the new markets and they did just that. they applied the old rules to

new markets and when a civil of this is in the 1980's when paul volcker the fed chairman of the title recognized that the jump on markets were getting ahead of themselves, speculatively, and he simply got the fed to put the old rules regulating how much borrowing people could do for stock speculation on this new market which was effectively the same thing to say and take over companies could only borrow half of the price for a takeover. this provoked a tremendous outcry but it did mean when the jump on the markets went through its turbulence and a downturn in the late 80's and early 90's the economy didn't suffer the kind of catastrophe we suffered today. unfortunately most of the time the governments and financial institutions did the opposite. they confuse what kind of risk taking needed to clear consistent limits on borrowing and what kind of risk taking

just needed discretionary surveillance. they thought the financial industry have identified and courantyne all risk with no risk let you didn't need these limits and that is exactly what alan greenspan did in 2000 when he said you don't need the regulations for the unregulated derivatives markets including would later become the credit default swap market. this was how half of a decade later aig could make half a billion dollars worth of promises by putting negligible cash durham leaving itself again, no room for error if it made a mistake in these assumptions. now, enron to exit polls of these reasonable prudent reguti thoroughly that the financial

system just was left without any market discipline to government by the time we got into the 2000's before 31990 they went bankrupt through the normal bankruptcy process. greenspan was called before congress to testify about this. he said that it would be inconceivable that we would ever applied to big to fail to an investment bank. five years later, the bearings investment bank of britain went bankrupt through bad derivatives bets. it could go bankrupt through the normal bankruptcy process with its lenders taking their losses because they had made these bets on the regulated markets where it had put cash down and the markets understood where the risk light. just three years later a hedge fund long-term capital management could not go bankrupt through the normal bankruptcy process because it had made the same derivative bets on the unregulated markets without putting any cash down so its bankruptcy could have blown up

the economy. that's what regulators worried about. the engineered a bank bailout hedge fund protecting the lenders. the last milepost on the way to 2007 and 2008 was enron. enron was a very neat distillation of the entire financial industry in that its business model was barrault tremendous amounts of money, use that money to purchase its own assets from itself at ever higher prices. this allowed it to book tremendous profits which allowed it to borrow more money. why could borrow more money? because it said it had insured its own debt and made it risk free. now this was a strange and fascinating business model. but by definition enron was saying if we go bankrupt don't worry, we will pay for it. but the strangest -- [laughter] -- the strangest and most fascinating thing about enron

was the banks and wrong did business with compaq bear stearns, lehman brothers, citigroup, did not think that this business model was very strange at all. and when people say when could we have averted this crisis by doing something different with bear stearns in 2007 by bailing out lehman kaput the last time to do anything about this was enron. after that, these regulations had so eroded the market's financial markets were not subject to any reasonable discipline because they knew that market discipline meant economic catastrophe and that is how we get from there to 2007, 2008 when the markets finally did correct the excess just as they had in the late twenties. but they could produce so without creating another great depression and that is how we got the nationalization of all of the risk in the financial industry. the opposite of the prudent regulation and market discipline and finance is not free markets

as we've seen. it is nationalization of one of the most important elements of the economy, who decides which businesses and investment capital and on what terms. no, it's fashionable to say that the crisis has been a black swan, something that we could not have anticipated once in a 100 here evened. the real black swan would be if we had gotten rid of every prudent regulation and all market discipline finance and we haven't had a historic financial crisis. what does that mean? it is good news in a way. we know exactly what we have to do. we have to go back and apply buhle principles to the new markets. we don't need huge bureaucracies , micromanagement financed by the government consumer financial protection agency's, systemic risk regulators.

we don't need any of that to do that if we had had a systemic risk regulator five years ago the regulator would have said the tripoli mortgages are just fine. these are perfectly safe. there is no crisis, nothing to see here. a regulator cannot do any better than free-market at predicting and preventing financial crisis in fact it hurts the market's ability to do that because they do not operate under the threat of failure. all we need to do is go back to the lesson that we learned 50 years ago. consistent, predictable borrowing limits across financial instruments that are similar to one another regardless of what the financial industry thinks of their risk. the government should not be assessing risk from the top down which is effectively what they have been doing. the financial industry should be assessing risks from the bottom-up with the government setting consistent limits on borrowing so that when they are

from the firms can go bankrupt and the economy does not explode. if we had these limits in place five years ago, aig -- we can look at this from the supply side and the demand side. from the supply side of providing financing, aig could not have insured $500 billion worth of mortgage related securities and other securities putting very little cash down if they had to put ten, 20% down they would have thought twice. if they didn't think twice the could have gone under and the economy would have had some protection just as with bearings 15 years ago. from the demand side, if you have limits on borrowing to the new spec a lot of markets, the housing market became a speculative market. you have to put ten, 20% down payment down to read this market would not have gotten away from itself the way that it ended up doing because as the prices rose people would not have had the cash to keep up with the rising

prices dampening demand across all price levels. with these simple the rules in place, we can go back to a consistent predictable system where financial firms and global investors know that everyone is playing on the same level playing field with a fair chance and with the most important regulation of all, market discipline once again governing financial the industry. you can't just say your into big to fail. the markets will know if you haven't done it as long as failure means politically and socially unacceptable economic catastrophe. now, what if -- what does the failure protect that is important economically? two things. one, bad businesses and better ideas should not survive into the future with government money.

you have a company like aig, very good divisions. the corporate structure failed and using these petitions to make these tremendous debts that ended up going bad. sell the divisions to someone who can manage them better. don't have a government-backed insurance company competing against the rest of the insurance business. and it the second thing is fairness. the public can see that this is an unfair system. the public has been against bailouts every step of the way. even bailout's meant to help their own neighbors. this is not mindless, heartless populism. the public can see that this is not free markets and the public is angry at goldman sachs not because people don't like rich people. they don't want people to do well. it's because they can see this is on a fair and the public is right that goldman is operating with implicit government guarantee and it does not end the problem for these banks to pay back their t.a.r.p. money in

some ways it makes it worse because of leased with t.a.r.p. people know there is government money there. now we have, again, an unseen government presents distorting this economy. however, this is not something that the public can do by itself. we do need political leadership here. for washington to realize that reasonable regulation with the end being fair, consistent financial market discipline that this is not a barrier to free market capitalism, this is necessary prerequisite to the free-market capitalism. with that i'm very happy to take questions. thank you very much. [applause] >> i am howard, vice president for research at the manhattan institute and my job today is to

point out questioners nicole. if i might start on your point about extending simple rules to the new markets, do you have a feeling there's a lot of legislation now being consistent washington within the house and the senate. is any of eight consistent with the prescription you offered this morning? >> no. [laughter] but one thing that is consistent with the bill -- one of the first bills that came out which was that put unregulated derivatives on the regulated markets. however, that seems to have disappeared somewhere, and now we have chris dodd, senator dodd and representative barney frank going with this idea from president obama to create this systemic risk regulators. chris dodd's spokesperson said just the other day we need a system that predicts and prevents future crises. that is an impossible goal.

all they can do is protect against the effect of the future crises. >> okay. the house rules are keep it short in the form of a question. tell us who you are and wait for the microphone. i will start with the gentleman on the@@@@ rbrb@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ á

these things. if we credibly and too big to fail by protecting the economy from failure, leverage -- and if we put consistent borrowing limits across financial instruments and financial institutions matter what they call themselves, the lead rich will take care of itself through these reasonable regulations and through the market forces because lenders will know they no longer have an implicit government guarantee. they will care more what they are doing with their money. the same thing with too big to fail financial institutions. the lenders will do their own surveillance here if they know that these institutions can fail without taking the economy

hostage. glass-steagall, we are used to living in a marked to market world. we are not going back to holding loans on books for 30 years and booking the profit slowly. investors want to know what's going on. a better solution than going back to glass-steagall is to better protect the economy from fluctuating prices in securitization markets because that is what kills credit or makes credit to excessive. one way of doing that is very into the capitol requirements with liabilities. one of the most acute dangers is financial forms relying on short-term overnight lending. make them hold more capital proportionate to the amount of short-term lending that they have and you better protected the economy, and i can -- this idea comes from alan greenspan in 1984 before he was the fed chairman he was on an economist

panel after the continental illinois rescue and he said the bank's schoeppel against losses depending on the type of liabilities that they have. >> do any of the regulators currently have the power to implement the kind of solutions that you're advocating? >> in the 80's paul volcker had the power and the convincing clout to convince the fed to put the old borrowing limits on the junk market's. in the 90's alan greenspan had so much clout in congress that they took his word for what their unregulated derivatives needed to be regulated or not so in effect the fed has been a systemic risk regulator for two decades. where they had the discretion sometimes they used properly and

sometimes they didn't. where they didn't they had plenty of gravitas to go to congress and ask for it so it's not a matter of not enough power. it's a matter of failing to recognize that we need these consistent rules. >> i am kenneth silver with research magazine. what do you think about ron paul's effort to audit the fed and more importantly abolish the fed? >> welcome he sold more books than me so far. [laughter] i think this is an example of why it's reasonable politicians on both sides of the aisle don't come up with reasonable solutions people are going to gravitate toward these unreasonable solution so we don't need to get rid of the fed. what we can't depend on monetary policy is our only frigate to

retool which is effectively what we have done for 20 years. the monetary policy is wrong. it's the human condition for monetary policy to be wrong. but we need limits on borrowing so that mistakes in monetary policy don't create any asset bubble and one particular asset class that become so big that it can't fix itself without destroying the rest of the economy and of course we need to do better with monetary policy but focusing on the fed and what it's done right or wrong is a distraction in my view. thank you. >> ray miles. what about getting rid of some of the regulations i would view as the root cause of the problem and really and the 30 is the guarantee of mortgage loans, the creation athenaeum and freddie mac, securitization was created by the federal government and,

you know, why not get rid of that? that i think led to over borrowing in nine carries on your thoughts on that. >> i agree with you wholeheartedly. the government should create a consistent environment for fees' financial firms to do their business, not for certain classes of lending at the expense of free and fair and prudent markets, which is what they have done sometimes with worse affect the and other times you decide mortgages with no down payments, borrowing 120% of the value of the home. this -- there's a sort of miss that fannie and freddie made the banks do this but fannie and freddie certainly didn't help and they allowed this to look respectable. the government said it was okay therefore it must be okay. fannie and freddie were too big to fail. this is a whole other area that

goes along with inappropriate government distortion. >> [inaudible] >> janet norman triet how do you see citibank's future? [laughter] are used to work at citibank. citibank's future -- they cannot succeed without market discipline, and right now the operate without market discipline and just as importantly, they are distorting what other firms do because they have got to compete against effectively a government subsidized bank. so again this is just a place like aig you've got great business lines, people in some places but he's got to on the

lock these people and put them in the hands of managers who know how to manage the company and you've got to do that at the expense of bondholders who freely lent money to the company and should take a loss when their prospects turn out to be not with the lenders had fought. there is no justification for not having bondholders to the financial system take losses then you're just back to the problem of too much debt, no regulation in the world can overcome this subsidy. >> i am mark green. what do you think -- how do you think it too big to fail issue can be solved with a concentration of assets? the seven largest financial institutions in the country control over 70% of the total assets and have a very big competitive advantage over the other 10,000.

>> the first thing is not to make the problem worse, which is exactly what we've been doing over the past two years with the failed banks, largely being bought by these two big to fail financially institutions. and beyond that this is a place where it will be a very slow evolution. we did not build up too big to fail over night. we won't ended overnight but once the government puts in place a credible system for failure, lenders will provide market disciplinary and force the firms to pick themselves up otherwise they will have to pay much more for their financing commensurate with the prospects for the failure and for mismanagement as well. lenders will forgive mismanagement when they know that they are being subsidized by the government they lend to the government directly and put up with plenty of mismanagement there. [laughter]

>> marshall with henry armstrong associates. when one considered not only the debt holders of the larger investment banks about the equity holders were essentially made whole, one can surmise that it wasn't just the threat of systemic failure that induced the government to support those institutions. do you think that eliminating the risk of systemic failure throughout limits on leverage will eliminate the temptation to bail out those institutions for other perhaps or provoke your reasons? >> they wouldn't have the excuse -- not that it is an excuse. there was obviously risks and the reality of systemic failure but they could not go to the public or to the congress and credibly say we have got to pay

every 100% on the dollar on aig's credit redefault swaps or the system will collapse. so we've got a predictable system of bankruptcy or some other resolution as the fdic does, you eliminate the cover for doing anything for any other reasons or for the perception that you have done it for other reasons which is just as an important. and the to an geithner could learn a lesson from dubai saying why should we be allowed to buy which is effectively a bailout of sophisticated banks when we did the same thing with aig because or partly because we were under this system and pressure. >> iris, future of capitalism donner, three it would your

limits on borrowing apply just to financial firms with insured depositors or to the whole economy? and so what is the philosophical justification for the interference in the right of contract of a willing lender to loan as much money as he wants to to a borrower? >> thanks. the justification is that you are right to lend or borrow on and on a limited basis and where your ability to hold the entire economy hostage begins. but multiplied across the economy borrowing without any room for error just results in the nationalization. we saw this in the 30's. we saw it again over the past two years and we can't -- one of the lessons of the modern way of creating credit through securities is you can't protect

credit from the excess of speculation just threw the commensurate deposits. we have to have some consistent limits across these financial instruments because these are the instruments of credit. you still have fluctuation, optimism, pessimism and you should but you can't hold the economy hostage. and we've always had limits on borrowing even outside of the insured deposits. you can't margin requirements for stocks and regulated derivatives pulled to whether these are held by firms with insured deposits or not. >> robert george, new york post. forgive me if i didn't hear this -- if you answered this in the previous question, but you said that you didn't like the idea of, you know, getting rid of a fed. what about the idea of auditing

it, which again somebody pointed out it started as a fringe from ron paul and now it's got a majority of signatures in the house. >> one of the problems with all of the bailout's we've done over the past 18 months is we have a secrecy where you had the fed and the treasury pressuring bank of america possibly not to talk about the colossus that it could incur with the purchase of merrill lynch, so all of the backroom secrecy, this idea that the big government in the big banks are colluding to hide information from investors has led to these proposals to audit the fed and all kind of other things. i think if we get out of the bailout business people will feel more comfortable that there is transparency, consistent release of information that the

government isn't using its power to favor certain institutions over others so some of this pressure will go away. as for the specific proposals of auditing the fed, i don't think it's helpful because it looks like congress has a -- the fit is always publicized the@@@@ rbb

things should be and you read this in the op-ed piece averitt for the ft and other papers the interest to figure out how to make it better, too big to fail, rather of an end it and they have lived in this system where you don't have any consistent limits to protect you from your inevitable mistakes. they think they are not going to make mistakes and when they do they think they are so smart they managed to extricate themselves from those mistakes and that there is no reason to protect themselves from the future mistakes. what is the lesson we are learning from this crisis. it's the same lesson unfortunately from washington's perspective we learned from the

long-term capital management. we are so smart we figured out how to get out of this. now they are saying look at us we figured out how to prevent a depression so they are not humbled by this. >> i agree with henry it sounds plausible what you're saying that i am wondering where do you actually set these reasonable limits to borrowing? i heard you say in the beginning 50% margin for stocks. later on you said 10% would have been fighting for aig to put on. most people think 80% is a reasonable margin for mortgages. 20% down. is there rules for cities and a sensible way besides too much protection? >> it should be consistent

across any juan asset class or investment class or anything that mimics that investment class so 50% margin requirement on stocks i don't think the number -- could they have done it 50 years ago, 40%, 60%? the consistency of matters so that you don't game the system and the lubber requirement on the future markets, these have been in place for a long time. they seem to have worked reasonably well for decades so i would submit that derivatives that act like these derivatives with lou will work margin requirements should have those requirements as long as they are consistent across the class and for houses anything that is above 20% you are just making the problems raymond mentioned where people want people to afford a house, there is pressure for other ways of thinking and able to afford it. we had 20% down payment

requirement for the housing market for a long time, worked reasonably well and i feel we could go back to that as long as this holds across the housing market and no one can say there is no risk here therefore we can lower debt and eliminate it. >> share reva siegel. it sounds to me like a lot of what you are suggesting on the two big to fail is actually application of classical antitrust analysis to some of our financial limitations. if that's the case, do we have a regulator or regulators who you would trust to apply that analysis in a relatively efficient way so that we could achieve the goal of breaking up the too big to fail?

it actually lessens the need for antitrust. we see more so in britain right now and here where the public is very concerned that these banks have so much consumer power or you've got two or three banks that set the whole market and looking at it from an antitrust remedy is another example of a government solution to a government problem where there's a much easier solution allowing for market discipline and with the market's force some of the firms to break out and if that doesn't work we have certainly got antitrust and everything else but let's try the optus market discipline solution before we go to the secondary command and control government solutions

>> you have recently written about dubai and new york state. could you expand upon that a little that? >> sure. this is not -- this is actually quite on her topic because we have to buy -- dubai and abu dhabi see we are not going to be allowed our investment arm, and of course this investment arm does not have a sovereign guarantee is and the government is effectively saying we've decided we want you to read the fine print after everyone has invested. why are people surprised at this? only in a world in which the financial industry considers a bailout to be an entitlement is this a surprising announcement. what dubai is saying is very reasonable. you lend us money based on a valuations that don't hold any more. we borrowed money on these valuations. this is mama recourse lending. we've got to adjust the price of the assets and of the debt.

this happens or should happen all the time in the financial industry dealing with consequences of your actions as part of doing business. as it relates to new york, we have these off balance sheets because i state entities not officially guaranteed by the government all of the place and people are depending on this too big to fail guarantee with state and local finances as well. nobody would invest in a lot of new york's boondoggle projects if they did not think that there is a bailout from the state in a crisis. and for that matter people would not invest in new york and california debt if they did not think that washington consider these to be too big to fail so we've got these government distortions preventing states and cities from getting their spending -- the same guarantee that comes from washington makes these -- distorts the market signals said they are unrecognizable.

>> commentary magazine. if your recommendations were implemented, don't you think it would affect the way monetary policy works? because the fed has to be able to effectively and quickly manipulate the credit availability across-the-board limits on the borrowing were imposed, then wouldn't that create a barrier to the fed change in liquidity in markets? >> it would mean that the economy is better protected from mistakes in monetary policy. but it should not change the way that the fed sets the monetary policy. in fact, it lessens the pressure on the fed to try to recognize asset bubbles and pop them before they happen. if you've got consistent limits

on borrowing people will not be able to keep up with the rising prices with the cash they have to put down and you will see less fraud as well. the mortgage markets filled with fraud. people would not have risked their own money on their own lives to the extent that they did if they had to put 20% down payment down. >> per book again is "after the fall" saving capitalism from wall street and washington. [applause] >> thank you. there are copies available and i know nicole would be glad to sign them. please join me and thanking mccaul. [applause]

this if you don't know already is the baltimore map. the original is on display in the jefferson building in the great hall. if you haven't been over there to see it already i strongly urge you to do that. there is nothing like face time with the real thing. there's only one copy that survives in the world and it's this one. it's probably about that big. 8 feet by four and a half feet so that is a reasonable thing. it might even be a little bigger. so, please, go over there at some point. as john suggested the i didn't know anything about this matter for the history of cartography when i started. in 2003 when i was an editor and writer of the atlantic and boston opening my mail i came across a press release from the library announcing for $10 million it bought with called america's birth certificate, the map that gave america its name.

the $10 million was the most the library had ever spent on anything. it was also almost $2 million more than had recently been paid for an original copy of the declaration of independence, and that kind of caught my attention. i never heard of the map or had seen the map but the library seemed to think it was the most valuable piece and the market even seemed to think that it was worth more than the original copy of the declaration of independence so i wanted to find out more and at this point i was thinking maybe i would do an article, short piece for the cleantech. so i did some research and got the basics of the story pretty quickly. early in the 1500's in the eastern part of france in the mountains there was a small group of scholars. among them the map maker, martin waldseemuller, taken across letters from at least one early sailors chart showing the coastlines of the new world, and

they decided what they were reading it and seeing on the charts was not a part of asia as most people had assumed it was but in fact it was a new continent. people traditionally had thought of the world as having three parts. europe, asia and africa. waldseemuller and his colleagues decided this would say fourth part of the world hence the title of the book. because they made the decision is seen to represent a fourth part of the wor it needed a name just like the other continents had names and they came up with of the new america. it is a great story. there's a lot more to it than that and we will get into more of a bit later. but as i was looking to the map i learned quickly also was significant for other reasons not just for the naming of america. if you look on the left, that is the new world, south america with north america above it. this is the first map to show north and south america and in

the u.s. we surrounded by water, not as some undefined part of asia or some undefined place that isn't identified at all. because it shows north and south america surrounded by water it's really the first not to suggest the existence of the pacific ocean, and this is something of a mystery because europeans are not supposed to have known about the pacific ocean until 1313 guinn he caught sight of it from a mountaintop. so, that's something that brings a lot of people back to the map and something peter has written about extensively. it's not something i dwell on a lot in the book because i felt that the mystery is almost more fun to read as a mystery than to try to resolve. but it's a great part of the story. it's not the only part of the story the. there is more that is very significant about the map. if you look at africa flexible, this is one of the very first printed maps to show the full coastlines of africa. africa and, excuse me, had only been circumnavigated by the

portuguese foley in 1497. and maps were only beginning to show all of this to the frame at the beginning of the map is broken. it would have been pretty easy just to push the frame down a little bit. i think the point is clear this is a break with tradition, this is new knowledge and it's exciting. possibly to a lot of you more exciting than the stuff over on the left. people tend to forget that this is a great discovery because it means you can sail from a year of around africa and into the indian ocean and beyond. even beyond that facto is the fact that the map shows a full 360 degrees of longitude. it's one of the first to do that as well. maps prior to this one tended to leave a certain portion of the globe unmapped, kind and plight on the back of the map as it were and the implication was generally that it was just kind of a chartered oceanic space and you didn't really need to try to depict it. hear, is one of the first pictures of the world league of

in a full figure 360 degrees and what we see, therefore, is a picture of the world roughly as we know today. it's obviously not fully correct, it's distorted and it's full of misconceptions and deliberately odd positions, but it is basically a vision of the world we've been refining ever since and that to me was what struck me. this isn't just a map announcing the existence of the new world, it is declaring we can now see the whole world for the first time. so, great story. i felt this would be a great article provide clippings in the article i kept into the lagat sidetracked by other things for a couple of years and only in 2005 when the word came down but the way into was going to be moved from boston to washington did i start to try to think about the map again and did a good debate could it because i wanted to make a living in boston and not move to washington. excuse me. [laughter]

.. >> with the map kind of at the backdrop. so what struck me most was that

it wasn't just one world that's depicted here. it's actually many worlds. and if you just change your perfective, this way or that, it's kind of like a colead scope. you can have different mysteries as well. i wanted to do something that was complex enough to do the math in fold justice. even if you have never seen this map before or don't know maps of this period, it's pretty easy to see what we are looking at. >> north is at the top. and this period wasn't necessarily always the case. we assume today that north is always the the top. there are plenty that didn't. over here, therefore the east and up here. it's part of what we now call the pacific, china, india, middle east, europe is up here,

and the map of north america up here, maybe the gulf of mexico here, these are the islands of caribbean. the dominant visual impression that you get from looking at the new world is the giant southern place. and that's really what was making an impression on europeans in the early days of discovery. it wasn't so much the westness of the new world. it was obviously columbus had pioneered a great new route across the atlantic. but he thought he had reached asia. he and just about everybody thought he had confirmed old geographical ideas. south america, which was wrote about in the late 1490s extended

far into the south into part of the globe that people tended to think that wasn't any land in. that made a big impression. we'll get back a to that in a minute. what dominated the southern part, that's why the cart of -- cartographer put that, if you view this, the word america is here. i'll zero in on it. that's the first use of the word. these guys made the name up and put it on the map. as i said though, there's much, much more to the map than just the depiction of the new world. and i wanted to do a book for a general reader for somebody like me that was reasonably well informed but really didn't know where the world would read and learn as much as possible from. i wanted to come up with a way of making it possible for

gripping the read. the way i came up with for organizizing all of that is to use the map to use the guy as the backdrop. the book is organizized into chapters that move all other the map. details as part of the map and starts at 1200s in the england at western edge. and then eventually moves across the atlantic and over to the new world. >> this was a portion of a booktv program. you can view the entire program and many other booktv programs online. go to booktv.org. type the name of the author or book into the search area into the upper left-hand corner of the page.

select the watch. now you can view the entire program. you might also explore the recently on booktv box or the featured video box to find reasons and featured programs.

>> host: welcome to c-span booktv afterwards. i'm christopher hitchens on the role of introviewer and producer of my friend and colleague who's produced two volumes of the essays of george orwell, appreciately picked and introduced and commented upon. today, orwell is our subject. i wish we had more than an hour. i'm guessing that you will have read d.j. taylor's book on orwell. >> i haven't. >> what a shame. what i wanted to say from his

book was something that i have a feeling you will agree with. taylor writes at one point, when i read other people, i think thinking this is my george orwell. do you ever get that feeling? >> i do. we all have a -- you, i, and some other people we don't know are part of a group of orwell lovers. it's very personal. i started reading orwell late in my 20s. it was a critical moment when i needed a model. i need to know how does one become a writer. i read straight through what was then the only collection of orwell's essays in journalism, the four volumed, collected e essays, and this read straight through. it was like reading an autobiography. >> you felt yourself being

personally addressed. >> i felt address to the voice. you get close to his voice and his character in what is strong and worth emulating. i became an emulator in my 20s. it's a good way to learn how to write. and just faster their prostyle, their rhythms. and try to find your own way. that's the closeness that people provide for me and you. we feel proprietary when we read other people writing about him too. not when those people get him right. "why orwell matters" you said in

your book he got imperillism, fascism and communism, that sums up political and literary achievement. >> i always feeled they derived from each other. from what he saw about it. i think he found it easy to decode and the danger it have. it was some extent an extension of imperillism. not entirely, but to a good deal. in many ways, that was the case. and because it's funny. he hardly writes about fascism. he seems to assume that everybody will know it's evil and needs to be fought interest. there was nothing strange. there was no analysis of it. he takes it for granted that it's completely acceptable. but it's not course of fighting against one totalitarianism that he discovers that many people

can be his allyies. he turned the same scrutiny on his own side. that he had turned it on a much easier target, italy, franco, spain, that was when he made most of his enemies on his left much to the end of the life. >> i have said enough about you. those of you who don't know orwell or his work, mr. packer first came to my attention as an novelist aridessing from africa. like orwell, and other parts of the world, especially as a new yorker has brought him a great

deal of attention. i believe you now have a collection of essays of your own? >> i do. a new book out called interesting times. writings from a turbulent decade. back to fiction, you probably overpraised me. i did right two novels. they were read by 35 people. i did not learn to be a novelist, i don't think. i love them. i don't know how you feel about them, for me "keep the aspidstra flying" is great. you feel the essay going through fiction. he has something to say. he has an argument to make.

he has a proposition about the world all the time. he doesn't have the restraint and patience of a natural fiction writer. that's why he can be grateful. he once wrote in why i write if he had been left to his own devices he would have a 19th century british novellest. but events and the turbulents pushed him into becoming what he called the kind of pamphlet here. >> by the way, i have to interpret. it was his own inclination. >> also it's very rare case of him being two conceded. it wasn't -- it could have been charles dickens come on.

>> yes, orwell is still a huge present in more now a young generation who did not learn english well. they came after the generation. he wrote about -- you can find "animal farm" being sold on book stalls on the streets of rangoon. he has reemerged as a hero after being condemned for the imperillism by the hunter. >> while we were on this, contemporary totalitarianism, we

might have well stay. i've been in north korea. i'm going to try to mention 1984. everyone says it's an orwellian stage. it@@@)h pba$s#p'u"dgu'dbpã "1984" came out. it's as if someone gave him a novel in korea. do you think we could make this work? i don't know. but we'll give it his best shot. >> it's the same when people in countries like this come across as the north koreans will, they are amazed. i think the greatest compliment perhaps ever paid to one writer by another was the "captive mind." and the situation with poland. there is a book in circumstances that's called "1984", you can

only get it privately. and he said, i personally was very surprised, as we all where, to find out he'd never visited the soviet union. how would he get it right without having the experience? it's about the circulation within the inner party. he lived his entire life in england, he had husband years in burma. he was very parochial, he was confined to the island. the british writers of his generation had failed to understand totalitarianism because they had not lived it the way kessler and other continental writers had.

orwell felt it. he had the same. other than his years in burma and his suffering and heart times in the '30s, which they did not have. he had the same education and lived in the same england they did. and yet he did feel it. it's a bit of a mystery how he could have known it so well. >> i think it has a possible solution. and also a slight correction. in reverse order then. or correction first. he did spend a lot of time in the far east. but i think being a colonial cop gave him an insight. indeed, master slave relationship. it's useful in describing some of the dirty secrets to totalitarianism. then he was in spain. and he was in time when the

communist party did take over. there was a police terror. he wrote about the record. he was really afraid that was becoming a habit now in europe. if the leader said something didn't happen, then it never did. >> done partly by the father of your old nation colleague claude coburn. >> yes, and not by communist. quite a lot of other people fell for the line that the communist party was the best defended in the spanish republic. it's only appreciately that the archives of franker system, and we do know what happens in the early days in barcelona. what was happening was true. he refuses to lie. it's about growing up. his first real book is written

in french. and passing on was originally french. he spoke at least two languages. he whereof back when he was in paris. >> including when he was in barcelona. >> that's right. then wrote the manuscript" down and out" which was rejected by t.s. elliot and some of the major. >> did it -- >> no, it was ejected. yeah, it was elliot. he was at faber. >> as did hardcore embrace. one of the best that is ever

written. unfortunately, it's impossible to sell stories about animals in the united states. in the county of disney, they could make such a -- they really thought it was a story about the farm. >> then "animal farm" became a good cartoon film. they were wrong about that. just to get back to the experience of reading orwell. and the essays in this book, i didn't know about fascism or imperillism, i was looking for how the writer carried him in the world and how to transform experience into sentences. and how to do it in a way that didn't call more attention to

the self than to the experience. they review so much about a character. there's something almost -- you feel you know him when you read his essays. you feel you know how he speaks. you can hear his voice. you know his irritations. you know how he's going to react if you say manage. it's almost alive with with you. even though there's another a certain remoteness to orwell. he doesn't let you this on everything in his life. he doesn't talk about his marriage very much in his writing. he doesn't talk about his child, richard orwell. he doesn't talk about his parents. some of the basic things that american memoirist make, you

know, gold out it. that was off limits. you had the very strong sense behind the words. that was drew me to make the essays worth reading over and over. another one called facing on present facts. which is his -- more political stuff he might say. comment on both of the titles, by the way. when orwell writes about himself, he says when i got started, all i knew i had was little literary ability and a power of facing unpleasant facts. do you think the power of facing? i want you to call my book that

for a while. it's something almost biblical about it. >> yeah, it's an unusual phrase, isn't it? a power of facing. as if it's an active force. it gives you some advantage. it's almost as if he exaggerated the ugliness. nonetheless, things in himself, in england, in democracy, in literature. >> in the working class. >> and in the working class. which the famous line from his great book at goal mining and and -- coal mining and coal miners. the working classes smell. orwell said isn't necessarily true. but it's what middle and upper class people think. and it's the reason why the classdy if id is such a hard

thing. it's almost physical. it's not just mental. i think that line, am i right, that this line really bothered. >> this is what orwell with things. they smeared him with it. he doesn't romancize. he often finds them repulsive. >> absolutely. the opening lines of "shooting an elephant" it's the perfect orwell where you see his mastery of the form at it's best.

that's a kind of confession about himself and about the burmese that may be painful personally, but from a literary point of view is very powerful. because it invites the reader. it says i have all sorts of conflicting feelings that i'm going to own up to them and even make them a subject of the essay. >> another thing you mentioned. >> yeah. >> about which he never says anything. you know it tells us why he resigned from the burmese police? >> that's right. but my guess is he was afraid if he carried on, he would become a atheist. >> he wrote to understand fascism, you have to have a streak of fascism. that too, i think is an answer to that question we were talking

about earlier. how could orwell understand what was happening behind the vail of terror of stalinist without direct personal experience of it, expect as you pointed out in barcelona. i think it's partly because he had a sterner stuff in him. most of his arguments were with himself. i thought that was very well incaplated. because a lot of people are -- if you are naturally liberals or progressives, they think it's just a nice way to be. he didn't think like that at all. he had scorn for himself who did. i think what's fascinated is he's somewhat educating himself out of an upbringing where he'd been taught to look down on him. to look on people in the empire as the raw material. to be very suspicious of jews, which clearly took him a long

time to reason his way out of that. >> that's right. the book make that is clear. >> sorry, do excuse me. get carried away in my own. >> that's right. he used the phrase, the pansy left. it was not the nicest side of him. there were women that think he was a terrible massage mist. that was part of why he ended with such a dark vision of the world. and i don't think it's right. i think that's giving

totalitarianism enough credit for being the darkness it was surrounding europe at the end of orwell's life. >> you don't get to know anyone in his unit in particularly well. you learn a few of their names. sometimes he resites them line an honor roll. but you don't get to the inside of their being. >> no, but it was the point about the soldier that remeets. and he feels with the first handshake. with the italian. and that's a beautiful moment at the beginning. and then at the end of the poem that concludes that essay

looking back on the spanish war. he also says i didn't want to meet him again. because if i did, i would ruin my first impression that is the flower of the european working class. that's the way his mind always goes away from the individual and towards the social type. just like the famous poet. and he says no. because i think i may want to write about him. i find it much harder. i think what i'm going to say is disobliging. it's sort of both very human. and also very inhuman. as saying i don't trust myself. @@@

one on gandhi, as i know you know. all saints should be considered guilty until proven innocent. >> we could swap orwell openers. no autobiography should be trusted until it's reveals something disgraceful. the only time in my life i've been important enough for this to happen to me. >> i think with the gandhi intro intro, it shows something else. he always thought there was something shady or creepy about that. his general contempt for religion. he knows the bible well. almost always well perfect. or as good as. that's how i know it's from memory. >> yeah, key moments. his marriage to aye lean.

he insisted on having it done in the church of england ceremony. he was buried in the church of england graveyard. he liked the songs. so yeah, he's not a religious man. there's no strong influence for revolution. and it shows in the his attachment for milton. his favorite line was a line of milton. there's a human instinct for freedom.

he writes about -- and i think in the enlightenment in "1984" the struggle against an alien language that's being imposed and the struggle to find out what is in the secret book that only the party had was a very good analogy to the struggle of withand coverdale and to have the bible translated into english. the english revolution was important. there's a prevention of literature which was about the effect of not just totalitarian countries, but the internal sensorship that came with the totalitarianization of british intellectuals. the essays begins the effect on literature. books like some wild animals can't breed in captivity. it kills the imagination. that essays beginning with sort

of a scene from a gathering of penn, the writers organization that orwell attended. it's an unusual case in which he actually places himself at some sort of public meeting as jumping off point for the essay. at this pen meeting, no one is able to stand up and defend free expression. everyone is defending the right of the soviet union. it reminds me kind of the worst of identify politics when it invaded writers organizations in this country in the '80s and '90 thes. suddenly, the last thing anyone wants to stand up for is free example. it's when simon game under fire on the iranian government. there was hardly any writer that was able to say this is an estrousty. >> there were a lot of people that did well. >> that's true.

i think you were among the first. back to orwell. that essay continues what if milton were to come back and attend the penn meeting. he'd be astonished. no one at the meeting was able to defend free expression with the unqualified force of milton, 00 years earlier. so i think you are right that people was kind of a touchstone for him in the struggle for -- >> to the other volume we say, we have a question to ask you. i know that he wrote in war time, orwell with writing is a propaganda. it's a attack on his conflict and passivism. where does it come from? >> he say says it in a couple of

places -- >> he also beginnings brilliantly. dick insons is one of those -- >> there you go. showing off the opening lines. >> showing off. >> no, it's fun. i think he might say it in another essay of the meaning after poem. the reason that i gave the book the title, not that it could have been written by, you know, the minister propaganda or even the ministry of information in war timing. but that all art implicity has a point of view. it has something to say about the world. as he says, it's trying to push one views in a certain direction. it has a persuasive function. it has a if it's worth anything, it has the kind of world view that it is advocating. and i think it's not a resignation to the crudeness of war time propaganda. it's more his sort of smoking

out the art for art sake crowd who would like to have art be separate from the world of ideas and politics and events. and he's saying, especially in the a time like his. the '40s. it was impossible to be a serious artist and not have something to say about events. even if you are writing -- >> he makes that confession for himself. he says every line i've written in the last 20 years is worth -- on any serious topic on any serious line is written with hope of forwarding the cause democratic socialism. >> democratic socialism, he used. not every writer is going to be as explicitly political as orwell, nor do we want him to be. it's his technique as literary critic and of a field he practically invented. to find the implied or hidden world view in what seems to be a

kind of benign or not particularly pointed realm of art or culture. like the postcards of sort of the donald miguel postcards that are sort of semipornographic or at least mildly risque that for mildly indecent. or the boys weekly or the detective novels in his essay. you always -- that essay is a good example. what are you going to do with an essay that basically compares two different eras in british detective fiction. and a novel called no orchids which was rather popular about 1943. there's a shift in moral point of view. raffles has a code.

which is not a particularly lovable code. it's the code of a hypocritical english gentleman. nubbles, it's the code. whereas no orchids from the blandish, and it's the power that should be pursued. it's a great passage in the essay where he says people appreciate power at the level. he has a boy and the glass goes slum. a student at a business college worships lord somebody or other. a reader of the new statesman worships stalin. it's a difference in intellectual level. that's how he finds sort of the -- i'd say the moral implications of something that seems as trivial as detective fiction. >> i'm so glad you bring this up. it wrings me in quicker than i

wanted to. it's just something that i wanted to raise. a lot of his writing about ethical codes and discretions on versus and ruthlessness were towards the his tillty to the united states. look at comments that the british boy, now look at the american ones that are full of gangsters and so. >> exactly. >> so we began by saying -- well, you said by the book, you got three great questions of the 20th century right. he got one of them them -- not totally wrong, but the importance of america. it was something that he didn't write enough. when he did, it was sketchy. >> we have a chapter on orwell of america. he loved some american writers, mark twain, jack london, henry miller, oddly enough. but i think orwell -- >> thomas paine.

>> absolutely. british born. i think for orwell, america was -- it didn't have the things that he was attached to. and that are the things that winston smith in 1984 is clinging to for sanity. the odd traditions, the nursery rhyme or song, all books and book stories that trade if all books. some of these things are available here. >> church with brass rubbings. >> the tree in the country churchyard. for orwell, those things were sort of the bull work of the paving over of everything by not just totalitarianism but by modern life. he hated concrete, central heating, he hated --

>> advertising. >> mechanical entertainment. advertising. all of these things seems to be coming not just from the soviet union but the united states. in this sense there was parochial about it. >> he did like anti-americanism, which was beginning to become a disease on the left. he understand to be an anti-liberalism. it's what you find on the left that sees america has has -- it's connected to the conservative conservativeism. he didn't see it as a guarantor as the things he cared most about. >> it's a pity that he died when

he did. his friends are partisan review knowing he was on well. try to get him to come to the u.s. for tb. because it was easy to get. very hard to get. he tried almost to death. >> yeah. >> and they said come over, you'll like it. he would have been a great edition. at one point he contemplated making a voyage down to mississippi. >> which is what he would have been. you must have orwell. >> after 1984, his book would have been a mississippi -- >> yeah. i have something about you on the american. it's very suggestive. you will have no difficulty in telling me what the sentence of 1984 is. >> the clock strikes 13. >> yup. that's right. >> i was reading john adams the other day. he was reading about how to get

the colonies together. he says it'll be very difficult to get all 13 clocks to strike at the same time. at the end of the book in the dictionary at end of "1984" it shows how the attempt to all of the possibility of thinking about freedom from the language and make it impossible to form late the thought. he gives an example of a sentence that couldn't be translated. and it is. so there is the possible one -- >> certainly. >> possible one and two implied about america. >> just imagine orwell traveling through early '50s of america. the america of the eisenhower years when the suburbanization of the country was happening, the highway system.

it's like a whole different era. and all of the abundance of comfort'tapgugu

i don't know if you saw this, his adopted son, richard orwell, has maintained his silence for 60 years. we only knew he existed. he describes being orwell's sons for the years. far from being this gloom yi apocalyptic, orwell was just a lot of fun. they nearly got killed a bunch of time. it wasn't physically easy. but orwell was completely attuned to the natural world and his son and shared his love of

physical things and nature with richard. for me, it gives me a lot of pleasure -- >> i don't find that orwell, unless he had a good childhood himself. he obviously didn't like his father. he mentioned the analogy of the family for british society. every figure in but daddy. >> right, a family with the wrong people in charge. >> yeah, aunts, cousins, no father. >> that's right. >> second, it's very rare to find a joke in orwell. when they do, they are funny and very, very dry. i'm trying to think about in "animal farm" when the animals take over, they go into the smoke house and take out the hams and give them a decent barriers. and "confessions of a book review" was extremely funny.

it's generally pretty bleak. how do you come out on the question of lionel that says the great thing about him is he's not a genius. the extraordinary thing is how someone who ordinary could just by refusing to lie and working very hard and not caring whether he's lost a job or got his book published was able to change the 20th century. >> in other words, quality of character alone are sufficient to become a great writer and to become one of the most important writers of the century. yes and no p. part of me thinks this is what available. it is not the brilliance. this is not faulkner's aerobes

key. >> i can admire it. but i can feel discouraged. no, with orwell, you feel encouraged. that's the feeling that he gives me. i want to try to write an essay like that. because the pros is simple. it has the plain style. and it seems like leading characteristic of it is honest honesty. which one ought to be capable of. just in the sense that decency alone, that's the word he uses it not not -- it's a cute orwell word. and it's an important one. but orwell was an eccentric. he was a difficult man. he had his -- full of

contradictions. he was not so simple and good, i think, as you would think. you eluded earlier to some of his -- he was a man of violent dislike. some of his earlier work before he, i think, calmed down with a certain amount of self-assurance, denunciation was his character. so he's not so -- he's certainly not a saint. and he's just -- he's not simply a good man who's qualities of character allowed him to write great books. but those -- but there's enough truth to that that he is sort of a model available to everyone. to everyone that's writing. he's afraid. >> exactly. or if he was afraid, he then would have noted it and forced himself to over come it. >> power of fating.

>> exactly. >> we only have about 10 more minutes. i thought i would take up dickens being a writer worth stealing. the other meaning of orwellian is usually describing totalitarian state or somebody that's stands for a certain set of principals. >> that's what i thought. >> he's often invoked. he was invoked against his will sometimes. but people who thought that "animal farm" was attacked on socialism. >> that's right. he had to write a statement say he supported the labor party. it's a warning about the tendency to move towards totalitarianism. >> also he was very firm of english. it was to show the english were

no better than anybody else. well, the best way we could take this on, since the different times we both new with favor the removal of had dam -- saddam hussein of power. is it worth asking what orwell would have thought? >> just to finish the history you've started. if orwell would have lived, he would have a neocon. >> well, on that i feel i can pronounce. because orwell would have taken the american side in china. i think i could be certain that that's not so. because of his and the --

anti-imperialism. and one of the great essays that's printing which is about the time to e restore french in indo-china. >> for that reason he could have -- >> iraq is different. it's not a colonial war. >> you know, in a way it's very hard to say. and it's a little dangerous to claim. but we can speculate. because we have to. there's two different arguments to be made about that. you say totalitarianism is ache

-- cliche. his face was on television all the time. you could no escape the eye of saddam's many secret police. >> iraqs use to say he thought they knew what they were dreaming. >> exactly. even after he was overthrown, they continued to suffer. >> we saw the pornographic element of power has never been so horrible. >> saddam's son was the human incarnation of totalitarianism with rape and all kinds of crimes. that one is easy to say. orwell would have seem that regime has it was. there would have been no defenses of state sovereignty or , you know, the anti-islamic

war. he used islam for his purposes. that's right. the other side of it is the language used by the bush administration. both before the war and after the invasion. which in many ways was misleading, it was bad language. it was the kind of bad language that allows bad political thought. which is the subject of politics in the english language, maybe the best known of orwell's essay s. i think orwell would have merciless in stripping away the rhetoric of dick cheney,

rumsfeld, and rove for that matter. which orwell would have had the vote, the anti-totalitarianism orwell who would have seen for iraq and known that to stand up against saddam was to stand up for the kurds, was to stand up for masses of iraqis who did not want to continue this way, and he would have understood something that one learned upon going to iraq. most iraqis were relieved to that have. >> let's not forget. >> yeah, exactly. that's been forgetten. on the other side, the orwell with who hated -- police lying and hated political lying and propaganda. >> hard to say. inconsistencies. >> it's also hard because he

never wrotemuch about the middle east. he was skeptical about the state of israel. he wasn't very drawn by the promises. and he's sympathetic to be the arabs of palestine. >> do you think he believes that the democracy and freedoms that milton stood for could take root in monowestern countries? is there evidence -- >> one thing we would have a couple of minutes left, i'm sorry. one thing he writes to his indian friend, only died a couple of years ago. >> is that right in >> budding novelist and essayist who gets attacked. and gets knocked in england for being a white indian. and they said don't worry. you are bound to get both. but i tell you what, i think one day there will be an -- a

department of english literature as a special subset written by indians in accomplish. now you can't go into a decent bookstore without seeing five or six brilliant iranian or indian writers. >> writing in english. >> right. so certainly, he was not a little englander in the view of his culture and expression. but one idea that's resulted from the -- >> i'm not a great master of ceremonies. if there was real, i wouldn't be saying you'll have to condense this in less than a minute. >> yeah. >> i'll give the last word.

>> people can't do this. that's a terrible disstate. i don't think he would have fallen into the trap that freedom is only for white people. >> which he wrote an essay to the effect. a title which i am not going to risk. can i say, it's been real? >> it's been fun. >> good luck with the books. >> all the best to you too,

who was rachel carson? >> guest: rachel carson was first of all of course the scientist for the fish and wildlife department of interior. she was in author, a gifted writer. i read silent spring when i was

in college and i read the crm bus and they captivated me. she was a mesmerizing writer and able to take scientific, dry scientific information and put it in a vibrant and colorful words that just captivate you. >> host: was she well known before silent spring came out in 1962? >> guest: she had "the sea around us," which was a pretty big seller. that is what got me interested in marine biology and scuba diving. >> host: that was published in the early 50's? >> guest: i believe so. i should have checked before i came on but i'm quite sure of that. >> host: what was the impact of silent spring in 1962 when it came out? >> guest: it was pretty serious impact. it touched on a lot of themes that had been on people's minds. it created alarms. it presented in a political way and alarming way what might be

happening out there, and was almost presented as it was happening even though much of it was conjectural and speculation. it was presented as this is happening. we are using so many chemicals, so many insecticides we are going to kill off our songbirds, we are quick to be left with a silent spring in which there are no songbirds to read we are gwen to kill off the bald eagle with our insecticides. and they got people scared. she did a marvelous job of raising people's awareness that a lot of what we were doing was poisoning the environment. the air, water, the land. she did it in a way that got people emotional, made them want to get involved to solve the problem to end the despoliation of our environment.

>> host: was this new at this time? >> guest: the modern insecticides were to read the used pretty nasty stuff for a long time, copper sulfates and a wide variety of other things -- >> host: and we don't use those today at all? >> guest: the use copper sulfate and organic farming but the use a lot of pretty toxic chemicals not only to control insects but to take care of the diseases people had. they would in jest stuff of almost be worse than what you were trying to get rid of yourself. but modern insecticides came about essentially in world war ii, ddt was probably the first one and was effective. we dustin our soldiers with it in the pacific and the cicilline campaign in europe. we dusted millions and millions of germans and italians and holocaust survivors after the war to prevent typhus. they used ddt vary widely in the

pacific to prevent malaria to kill the miskitos and after the war basically 1945 was the first test case of ddt in the tennessee valley area. beyond that they decided it is so effective against mosquitos we can get rid of malaria in the united states and europe. so they start its bringing it all over. it was also used a lot for agriculture. >> host: what are the effects of ddt? >> guest: the known affect where you want to talk about real scientific evidence are slim. rashes on your skin. there's a lot of conjecture. but ddt is probably the single most studied chemical in history -- >> host: because of "silent spring"? >> guest: partly. "silent spring" was followed after rachel carson's death by a concerted campaign by environmental defense fund and other environmental

organizations and essentially to launch the environmental movement to give it a prestigious power base funding base it never enjoyed before. so those things in combination and the pressure brought against the ddt eventually got a band under president nixon. but in the meantime it was used all over the world. it was used tremendously in the united states. you can see old video or film footage of people dancing and clouds of ddt and swimming pools with clouds of ddt often are held them. people at picnic tables. so it was very widely used and the which was studied and studied, nothing more than tangential and speculatively next to the diseases and cancer and so forth were ever established. there were concerns about eggshells and we can get into that if you wish, but again a

lot of conjecture, not a good solid proof. >> host: and we will get into that but good evening. this is book tv in primetime. and tonight's discussion, life call-in program is about rachel carson and her book, "silent spring," published in 1962. we are joined by paul driessen we've been listening to. he's a senior committee of constructive tomorrow we with congress for racial equality. he has a degree from the university of denver, be a infield ecology from lawrence university, and this is his book, "eco-imperialism: green power, black death." and we are also joined by linda lear in charleston, south carolina who is rachel carson's biographer, and her book is called quote code rachel carson witness for nature" and she has written the introduction to the new addition of "silent spring"

that came out in 2009. linda lear, what got you interested in rachel carson? >> guest: well originally it was because i was teaching environmental history of the university level and when we got to talking about "silent spring" in 1962, my students looked at me and said rachel who? and i thought mauney we have to do something about this. so i set about trying to write rachel carson's biography which had never been done. >> host: we want to get you involved. this is a call-in program. we will put the numbers on the screen so you can talk to linda lear and paul driessen 32,027,370,001 if you live in east times over, 737-0002 if you live in the pacific and now to three sunday a mile at c-span@book tv.com or a tweet at

book tv@twitter.com. was it a best seller when it came out in 1962? >> guest: in the it was. it was a blockbuster in had been serialized in the new yorker magazine in three parts beginning in june and there was nothing but a stunning, anything but silent summer. when the book was finally published in september of that year it was already a best seller. john f. kennedy helped a lot to call attention to rachel carson's ideas by commenting on them in a press conference and setting up a presidential that 53 committee to look, presidential led by sri committee to look into her claims about the massive contamination of the environment by chemical pesticides. >> host: when you say her claims where did she get her

knowledge? >> guest: kurson had studied, she was ecologist by training, marine biologists and ecologists. she had impeccable credentials and was an m.a. from johns hopkins. she didn't have a ph.d. degree but she had worked all her life of fish and wildlife service and in government and had read and studied the ocean for per great best seller, "the sea around us" and then subsequently "the edge of the cp quote she did impeccable research. she was not a person who was writing for the academic community. and the remarkable thing was that rachel carson insisted on writing for the public. she wanted the public to know what was happening in their world. >> host: paul driessen, she was a marine biologist and writing here about non-reena issues; is that correct?

>> guest: euskadi much the same. i was a fresh water ecologist major in college along with my geology and there is a tremendous cross over land to water you look, your door and they are interconnected and the marine aspects are interconnected. so, she was drifting a little bit of yield of where she was trained but not all that much. the bigger problem that i found with rachel carson and some of her work is that she tended to go on the basis of punches and speculation and conjecture or anecdotal evidence and not always well backed up and sometimes she was not that familiar with or ignored the very good literature about ddt for example the was out there and she made some conclusions that were not based in the science available at that time. >> host: linda lear, which has been the impact of "silent

spring" and rachel carson? >> guest: well first of all i want to say the airline would disagree with what paul driessen just said we can go back to that perhaps later. i would say the impact was immediate. it was to have a lot only presidential science committee which found that until rachel carson's "silent spring" the public did not know pesticides for toxic. that is an astonishing statement. and until it rachel carson's book, "silent spring," the public did not understand following a mosquito, trucks spraying for mosquitoes on a path and spraying the children might be dangerous to your health or might not be good for children. but pesticides were ubiquitous. it was a science claiming the

world after world war ii and was the end to insect problems. her book, however, after it came out was the first of all the chemical industry thought she was probably a lightweight and they considered that she would go away. she didn't. and as information gathered and she began to talk further about the book and what she was trying to argue that we were over using pesticides she did don't claim that we should never use them. she claimed we were misusing them and as that began to roll on into the public to take notice then congressional hearings were called. rachel testified before both the senate and house and 1963 and the hearings were held that would go into creation finally

of the environmental protection agency. >> host: let's take some calls for the guests. but before linda lear comegys did you disagree with something paul driessen said. what was that? >> guest: well, that rachel carson based her claims of false teeth science or had overstepped the information on chemical pesticides was very hard to get. the agricultural science agency research agency of the department of agriculture was closed. they wouldn't speak to her. they wouldn't let the material out. the national cancer institute have similarly closed its doors to anybody who asked questions that might provoke maybe what was happening to people who were subjected to the dry cleaning fluids and had developed lymphoma and problems with blood

disease of all sorts, rachel carson was against a wall of silence that people did not want to give her this information. so, while she -- the cancer chapters in "silent spring" came after she had begun the book. she was first of all starting to talk about air, water and@@@@@

talk to make the point that it wasn't as toxic as it was reputed to be. but there is -- you have to bear in mind we were also using a lot of other chemicals and still do and there wasn't as much care for the use of those chemicals as there should have been and people were getting sick and there are pesticides out there that one drop on your skin can kill you but those were not available at that time. >> host: and this is from "silent spring."

our first call for the two guests, linda "silent spring" and paul driessen collagen in omaha nebraska. please go ahead. >> caller: i remember when i was a kid and we used to play outside going up and down the streets trucks were spraying and when you look at the life expectancy we have right now it's kind of amazing you could draw the conclusion that was dangerous, and also how many deaths do you think can be attributed to ms. carson for not using ddt?

>> host: we will start with paul driessen dividend linda lear. >> guest: excellent points and a good question. i have seen all kind of numbers in terms of the deaths attributable to not having ddt available or talking mostly about malaria in the context of disease that affects 300 to 500 million people in here causes permanent brain damage and makes people unable to work for perhaps three, four, five weeks at a time. it is a disease that leads people permanently brain damaged. so, it is something you want to get rid of as quickly as you can and the lack of ddt mosul much as an insecticide but as a repellent to keep mosquitoes out of homes according to the various estimates has cost ten to 40 millions unnecessary deaths so it's a very serious problem. >> host: is lear? >> guest: i don't have -- i thought your question was very good but i don't think that

rachel carson was saying that ddt cause death or chemical pesticides necessarily caused death. what she was arguing was that we were prolific and kleeb misusing pesticides, particularly in agriculture when we didn't know the long term affect of the pesticides. and what was just read from the table for tomorrow and rachel carson's book was indeed a fable where she had taken many towns and put them together in a compound of evidence to say that some of these incidents have happened everywhere and that we aware of what we were doing to the total environment, not just the human environment but the total site as it, the biology of the environment and what were we thinking that we could control or not control. >> host: linda lear was the common misperception she called for the banning of all

pesticides? >> guest: well i don't know how that perception came about because that is not in "silent spring" and was never rachel's testimony or her idea. her most was to call attention to the fact that there was a prolific use of pesticides in the environment when we did not know what the total outcome was and when the public did not know that their homes and farms and animals were being sprayed from the air by airplanes in the fields and they didn't know when this was going to happen and it did indeed kill certain wildlife, birds, fish, certain mammals and there was a prolific use without the public permission and we didn't know what the total -- what the outcome would be. she never called for a ban on pesticide use. >> host: from "silent spring

mr. driessen? >> guest: one of the hard things to gauge in all of this is what is the difference between the effect that rachel carson had as an individual, her book had as a book and then the environmental groups especially after her death, what they did to campaign against ddt first and foremost but also other pesticides and chemicals. and that is where a lot of the what linda was talking about where the misinformation came in, rachel carson didn't call for the elimination but she did take some of her speculation beyond where the science back it

up. she, for example talked about the ddt as something building huge resistance in insects at an early time when she was really talking about mosquitos for example avoiding it much as they do deet, off four other republics. that is ddt's most prominent role. it doesn't compare to what we have today that time it was the best we had and we used it profitably as linda pointed out. but it's also the most powerful appellant that has ever been developed, the most powerful and long-lasting, and that's why we want to keep it in the malaria prevention arena now because spraying it once or twice a year on the walls of the house keeps 80% of the mosquitos from coming in. >> host: what developed it? what company?

>> guest: it was defended to the invented by paul mueller back in their early 40's -- >> guest: [inaudible] >> host: thank you. >> guest: thank you. of the germans had evicted and what to do with it and the americans got it and we started using it in places where we were confronted with a lot of disease, mosquitos and malaria and yellow fever and so forth. so mueller got a nobel prize for his development of this. but nobody at the time knew exactly what they have on their hands, good or bad, and even though the information about the ddt repellent was available back in the early 1940's, people didn't appreciate that value right away and rachel carson interpreted that as assistance rather of an avoidance mechanisms. >> host: lucille samet calls new york.

>> caller: hi. this is for either of you although i have to say i kind of agree with linda at this point. i am a casual bird watcher and i noticed last summer i have the woods behind my house, pond next to my house which i affectionately call a cesspool. and i noticed a lot of birds just disappearing and i went out and got her book and read it and made perfect sense to me. i'm especially interested in eagles. we have a wildlife refuge your our finger lakes butter now polluted and it's worse now. i read her book about our lakes are polluted. you can't eat the fish. the birds to me are diminishing. the geese and ducks, i haven't seen a starling all winter. and i got concerned. >> host: linda lear?

>> guest: and you should be concerned. the system is here that rachel was pointing out right up route 95 from where she was was of course the fish and wildlife refuge and they were working on feeding ddt two birds, eagles, pelicans, the nesting birds that fly. and these birds were showing signs of various reproductive problems. these birds were sort of the tip of the iceberg and then came the robins and whether or not the eggshell thinning can be proven to the ingestion of pesticides i am not sure it has never been clear. but resistance and pesticides are persistent and water soil and air. they don't go away and that was

one of rachel's big points in silent spring and i sure paul doesn't disagree with this. you can't wash away so the leaks are polluted. all of the leaks are polluted and the birds and fish have ingested not just ddt but a whole lot of chemistry of pesticides and pollutants of all sorts. so there is going to be a change in the boyda and what is happening to nature. it shouldn't be lead just at the door of ddt by any circumstance but it should be laid up the door of this barrages of pesticides and chemicals that we've put into our environment. >> guest: i will agree up to a point but i think that you are dealing with mother nature in a very complex ecology out there. i live on a pond in a wooded area as well and right along the i-95 quarter that we are speaking of i have seen far more

keys in the most winters recently than i remember growing up or being around the virginia area when i was first here. they tended to winter over because they find a lot more food than they used to. and this winter has been a rough winter. a lot more snow, a lot colder, the crows and the starlings have largely disappeared from the area for the time being. but when it warms up a little bit on the m amazed that the hundreds of birds that suddenly come out of nowhere and just last week when we had some patches of bear ground in the backyard we had 20, 30 robins not there that i haven't seen for weeks so i think you are dealing with a very complex situation. the of reproductive issues going that to rachel carson's time i think it's really important to recognize that back in those days we were dumping of justin

insecticides but chemicals and they were interacting, there were synergisms. nobody could figure out what was affecting what. >> host: a quick question to the both of you. is our environment cleaner today than it was in 1962, paul driessen? >> guest: i would say absolutely yes. you look at the air quality, the water. you can measure things out there and detect them to the equivalent of one second in 32 years with modern detection technology. that wasn't the case back then. ddt actually does break down very rapidly in the environment not so much in the soil in the water and in the sunlight it breaks down into various other components. but the question becomes what level does something like that have an affect and what about all of the leal and other things in the environment? >> host: linda lear, same

question. >> guest: same question. i feel we are in the much worse shape than we were when rachel brought them here in a charleston for example we are not able to dredge the ashley river out to where the boats can actually lead anchor the cause of the leaders of pollution and toxins that would be released into the water if the dredging occurred. that is just a small example. i don't see the gallinaceous birds down here that i used to see to it i think the whole buy order has been poisoned and continues to be poisoned. >> host: clermont california thanks for holding. you are on with linda lear and paul driessen discussing rachel carson's "silent spring" on booktv prime time. >> caller: thank you. my question is primarily for mr. driessen. it reminds me of the slander against rachel carson and the 60's and 70's by the agribusiness industry.

number one ddt is extremely toxic. i spent 25 years with u.s. environmental protection agency. the ban did because it was a potential human carcinogen@@@@@á #

time when we were screened the most ddt and they attribute that to the fact, when ddt was coming in what insects and mosquitos carrying the avian diseases and to link the insects feeding the birds food as to the eagles. the interesting thing is before 1922 the ottoman society in ecology magazine said that the eagles were threatened with extinction but by the 1960's when ddt was being used the most the eagle populations were up 25% and what happened in the interim was people stopped shooting the eagles. we passed the bald eagle

protection act and the that was a huge difference and we amended to cover the golden eagles as well lead that is when the eagle population started coming back and it happened in the midst of using ddt. >> host: linda lear? >> guest: what about the republicans when we finally stopped using ddt as much as we have, the brown pelicans once again began to combat. these are birds, there's a difference in the kind of birds and how they hatch and later eggs and they were the most affected by ddt. i want to just say that when the congress after the hearings rachel creston testified with, but congress band the production of ddt in this country but they never band the sale or distribution of ddt abroad. we have had 50 plus years, almost 50 years since of the distribution of ddt and all with

its sister chemicals abroad. so the dispersion of the multiplicity of pesticides, chemical toxins in our environment has accelerated, not a decelerated since rachel carson's time. >> host: linda lear, with the founding of the epa, the environmental movement, the effect or of of what we give to the environment today recycling, taking the lead out of gas, removing phosphates from the water product, would that have occurred in your view without rachel carson "silent spring"? >> guest: that's really almost an a historical question and it's hard for historians to answer that. i feel what rachel carson was trying to do is bring awareness to her readers and the world

that we need to ask the question always what is still long term affect of what we are doing ek if to the environment to human and nonhuman environment by putting these chemicals into our wiota. did that was her primary concern. it was the interlocking ecology of life. what has happened since and whether or not she would approve of various acts of the epa or of an environmental activist groups whether they be pro or con is impossible to conjecture. i think that rachel carson would be very concerned about our environment today that we need to do better than we are doing. but that certainly she would be pleased with any steps taken to make our planet seaver and a better place for the whole of

the biota. >> host: mark in west palm beach florida. you are on with linda lear and paul driessen. >> caller: thanks for taking my call. interesting conversations. i just wanted to make a couple of points. one is that of course the falcon was one of the test cases for ddt banned in california where they are able to measure the shells in the 12-foot wingspan and the 70's. the other thing is the coinciding news headlines smith the blocks so klein announced in january they are going to make available information on the hundreds of compounds that can address malaria. these are natural compounds. it's everybody's right to make money in this country but why is it mccaul companies can make whatever they want and these

corporations shom were this stuff, they do their own testing. nobody knows whether or not this stuff is harmful or not we find out later, maybe it causes problems, maybe they fudge the numbers. at any rate -- >> host: we got the point, thanks. paul driessen >> guest: let me jump back just a second to the earlier point about the epa banning ddt. when they did they had a seventh month study and it was determined that ddt was and carcinogenic or causing the problems but william said i have a political problem and i'm going to solve it. let's go to mark's comment. i think you were talking about the convert, it is a separate situation and there were still a lot of problems of people shooting them and hope habitat losses and other things like that. joel dittman was the guy that did the calcium -- the ddt thinning studies initially.

he concluded ddt in fact this caught the thinning but that was pointed out that his studies were using by it's deficient in calcium. he ran the tests because he was a darn good scientist right here in the maryland area and lo and behold there was no impact on the eggshell thinning. my big concern with ddt and keeping it out there and using it when it is appropriate and use it responsibly and by trained personnel because i think that should be done with all chemicals is the death of children. these are 25 kids out of 50 who died at the course of one year in a one school in ugonda. friends of mine are supporters of the school so imagine in this country 10% of a class of kids just being did from one disease in one year it's just a tragedy we don't want to repeat.

>> host: lee in south carolina. you are on booktv. >> caller: i would like to challenge a few things mr. driessen has said. when ddt was used in the second world war, it was used in a power perform and it's extremely hard to absorb through the skin when it is a powder but once we started spraying get on crops in the neighborhood of the mix with oil and becomes highly toxic. another think he is overlooking is he's isolating the ddt and dr. linda lear is exactly right. what happens if you are exposed to ddt and are taking antibiotics, other drugs, what happens in your body when this mix is, does it make your antibiotics toxic and that was certainly something she asks magnificent questions and then there were other chemicals at the time, there was dieldrin --

i'm probably murdering the pronunciation -- there were some of those much more highly toxic than ddt. >> host: paul driessen and linda lear. >> guest: i agree those are far more toxic and why there are more controls on them and clearly when you mix ddt with oil because it isn't soluble in water you exit -- it was busted as a powder troops and holocaust survivors so you are right. when it's mixed with leal id is absorbed more into the skin but even then there have never been a single study that conclusively shows any carcinogenic effect or other toxic effect on human beings that doesn't say that there is not an impact on some species and the environment generally the certainly with all of the other chemicals we are putting in including birth control pills from women putting

all sorts of things into the environment and i don't think anybody can separate what one chemical out of the mix has an affect on various species or the ecology as a whole. >> host: linda lear. >> guest: i have to say it depends on whether we are taking a at a look at our world or whether we are talking about the whole of life. rachel carson was talking about whole of life and she also observed technology was on a fast trajectory than the moral responsibility. what she was hoping by her book was to galvanize people to take moral responsibility for the whole of the wiota. humans as well as the rest of nature and i agree with paul in

this since the use of ddt or whatever the best and tight malarial chemical might be in a specific contained use to prevent these diseases like malaria is an important thing and rachel wouldn't be against it but ddt has been used in agriculture and once used prolific currently in agriculture and the other ones that this caller, thank you very much, as specified that once you use it all. the agriculture and the insects have different chemical compositions and find you can use it inside a tent. it's very effective but that doesn't mean it's effective loophole of the landscape and what she was saying is it isn't just one place. it's the whole world we are talking about and we have to be concerned about the stream of life, the whole stream of life.

and what you think about the current movement of the last couple of years to reintroduce the ddt to combat malaria? >> guest: i'm not a scientist. i would put that to paul driessen. he would be able to answer that better. i am not antichemical and i don't think that rachel would have been but we need to know what its long-term effects are. we can't just be so blind as we were with the line for example that can at the same time and put out there and then say oh no because once you put a chemical out into the society into the stream of life if you will you can't take it back so we better know what we are doing before hand and that is what her point was. >> guest: that is my point, to match. all chemicals the to be used carefully by trained people.

people need to be aware that you are dealing, you are handling of things that either in the very immediate term with some chemicals or in the longer term can have a serious deleterious effect on you as a person or the people around you or the environment around you. in terms of ddt for malaria control what i was explaining before is what you do now is not about and spray the environment to kill a mosquito. ddt has never been good at that, the slow acting compared to dial treynor icon or some of the others used today. what they do is the spring of the walls and the eaves of parts so that the mosquito's don't come in. if they come when they get excited, agitated and mostly leave before they buy it and if they do happen to landaluze all then they die within a couple of

minutes other chemicals used in a mosquito control in the united states is instantaneous. the chemical comes in contact and the microscopic drops and the mosquito is dead. what i recommend is a broad based approach to malaria we need the bed nets and the drugs. we need the mosquito killer is to keep them under control and better treatment drugs and hospitalization in the countries and we need ddt to serve as a sort of long-lasting whole house bed net that you don't have to worry about putting on each night. it's just there and you don't have to have it only when you're sleeping. >> host: a quick housekeeping noted. i've been calling you paul driessen -- it is driessen. good. ann in north carolina. you are on with linda lear and paul driessen to a >> caller: think you for

taking my call. on was 7-years-old when her book came out. i don't have any questions just more comments than anything. pesticides, herbicides, homicide, suicide, they are all in the same family. and that always@@@@@@j% @ @ rr"r

but i don't believe on the other hand that rachel carson wasn't wholeheartedly involved in this

book, speak or that she gave up the love of her seat because she didn't. the 1961 preface to "the sea around us" is a preface in which she talks a great deal about the threat of atomic dumping into the ocean. she was one of the earliest people to call attention to what kind of contamination ocean dumping what do to the biota, to the oceans and global warming. she actually wrote something about because rachel had studied and was on the board of trustees in the oceanographic institute. she had kept up in her research. incipient rising in ocean temperatures and what that might do. of course it was very speculative back then.

but owls martha says she had a love of the ocean. but carson was passionate about the ongoing life and the whole of the biota and the interlocking this of life. so one couldn't go on without the other and that really was her love. >> host: here is the post script what happened to the fish and wildlife pamphlets for the government. doug brinkley the historian commented recently her work there was destroyed. >> guest: no. i don't believe that -- i haven't seen that from him, but her work on those pamphlets has been considered some of the best writing efficient way of life ever had. they may have lost the pamphlets but they're certainly in the archives and interregional archive -- rachel carson archived at the college.

>> host: rachel carson for 1907 by 1964. "silent spring" published in 1962. barry in norfolk nebraska. good evening. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. one comment and a quick question. i was 16-years-old in 1962. and i grew up on a farm here in nebraska. this very apparent that in those days and even for years thereafter that the wildlife was disappearing as a result of the chemicals which we are using here in agriculture and i went into the service and spent 27 years in service before i came back while i was in service i dealt with agent orange. my comment is there was a lot of

wild life lost in the nebraska and it's apparent the streams are delayed of what we used to have when we were kids, salamanders, turtles, toads, frogs, plus the song birds are just wiped out and they never have come back but my question is what you might making a couple of comments about agent orange? >> host: paul driessen? >> guest: i am not willing to cross into that because that's something i've not studied. i've read all sorts of stories about it but i'm not an expert on that and i wouldn't want -- >> host: linda lear? >> guest: i'm not an expert on that either. i just know quite interestingly enough, several of regional's scientific experts, frank and ruth scott in particular have been using the four of the roadside for the rights of way for telephone poles and railroad

sidings and so forth and ruth's got a great pennsylvania conservationist and frank both concluded that these agents, these herbicides which i think our relatives of agent orange or so detrimental to the vegetation and bird life or the insect life on those rights of ways that they advocated and hoped rachel would advocate against their use. to her, to the rachel it was all one of a peace. you don't put it out there when it is clear you are harming the whole of the biota. >> host: paul driessen use if you are a former member of the sierra club and of the zero population growth group. why former? >> guest: i came to the

conclusion having worked in these areas for a long time that part of much of what they were telling me was not totally in sync with what i was studying and i was being fed information that simply wasn't correct and there were times in discussions and things like i conclude they flat out were misrepresenting the facts about a wide variety of issues and i just had a parting of ways on different topics. most of it having to do with activities out west when i was living in colorado and wyoming. >> host: where did you come up with the name of your book "eco-imperialism: green power, black death"? >> guest: as i indicated earlier, i grew up kind of in the environmental movement. rachel carson was a huge inspiration for me. it changed a lot of my thinking that as i traveled more and more in the other countries of the world and came in contact with

the impoverishment of the communities and the diseases that we don't even see here anymore i realized that as much as the environmental movement has improved things in many ways, some of the antitechnology and antichemical positions are detrimental to the development and the health of people in these other countries. malaria is a good example. the opposition by environmental groups like the sierra club and greenpeace for example to the use of biotechnology in agriculture is something i've never been able to understand and my friend, patrick who is a co-founder of greenpeace and i are on the same page. we just don't understand what the opposition is. the opposition of fossil fuel with a lot of these countries where they just don't have electricity. 95% of people in sub-saharan africa still don't have electricity and i cannot imagine my life without electricity.

so these are the issues i brought up in foia "eco-imperialism" three >> host: peter in greenwich connecticut. you're on the air. >> caller: thank you. actually rachel affected the. i'm an architect today because she mentioned my home town where i still practicing greenwich and i witnessed the spraying to save the entries of ddt. it seems a conversation on both sides here is the theme that seems to go through is antibig business but not holding government out the task. it seems like we've trusted them with protecting us if you will and it seems example after example of the business is trying to do things better is either sorted or put back by government regulations that are

too quick from the hipaa -- >> host: peter, you said that you are a landscape architect. do you use insecticides and chemicals in your work? >> guest: >> caller: i use them sometimes, yes and especially working in the golf world and would be shocked and amazed at how absolutely precise and terrific the united states golf association in particular has studied this carefully because they were put on the rack as bad boys and they've come back and studied this very carefully. it seems the political fix to ban ddt as mentioned earlier is something that comes easily and quickly. >> host: linda lear if you would come you live in charleston south carolina, a lot of golf courses in your area. did you have any comments regarding that? >> guest: note. i have to quickly say that i am

this privilege to be down in charleston south carolina part of my life and the rest i live where paul lives in bethesda maryland, and so i don't have any comment about the golf courses but i -- nor do i know if they've improved things or not. i'm not a golfer. >> host: darnell in maryland please go ahead with your question. >> caller: as far as the chemicals we use, there are always side effects just like the medicines we take and they don't care how many people get sick, how many people die as long as it doesn't affect their bottom line. they will not tell you the truth until they are forced to. as far as the chemicals being sprayed from the trucks that come around in the summertime and kill the mosquitos my neighbor was sitting outside last summer and started getting a headache. i suggest because the truck just came and sprayed you. that has a bug killer and people act like they are so shocked and

don't know what is going on but if you try to get the information about what they are springing out of the trucks he speeds off and will give you a number. i live in a waldorf maryland and they've been doing it for years. i try to get them to stop and it's very hard. >> host: okay. got the point. linda lear, let's start with you and then paul driessen. >> guest: i couldn't agree with you more. we haven't come that far where we care more about how to clean our lawns are as opposed to how many songbirds we have or whether the worms and other drugs under the ground or in good health or in poor health. i just want to say that carson's whole point was about humility and arrogance that so long as humans act as though they can't control nature we can spray away this and the drug away that. we are not going to have a

cleaner world or a world that will sustain our planet for very long humans have to have some humility. we are not in control of nature and we can't control where it is going to go. we have to be humble and we have to think about the whole of nature and that includes all the little insects in people and yes media or green lawns and golf courses can't be so green but maybe we can live happier and longer without them. >> host: paul driessen? >> guest: i think the use of chemicals is very important and they have to be used carefully to die you need to take continuing approach to evaluating the impact of evaluating how much you need, what should be used with it is ddt or anything else but there are benefits to having these chemicals in all aspects of our lives. we wouldn't be -- we would still be living at -- don young at age

47 as we were around 1900 if it were not for some of the chemicals and other things we've developed over time. we have to be humble and recognize, to back that sometimes say things government does is very bad. the ban on ddt by william buckles house contrary to his own scientific advisory panel recommendations and conclusions was for many people in the world one of the first things that could happen because of lead eventually to an almost international ban or did facto ban against using a chemical that could save millions of lives. if we want to take one other issue that were where peter brooke the government versus corporations, one of my big has been the cafe standards. we do them corporate automobile efficiency standards. we do it to save gasoline. there are questions about that