'Are you kidding me?' Today's Google doodle earns a hearty 'screw you' [pic]

Of all the people in the world to commemorate today, people who have done truly great things, this is who Google chose?

Today would have been marine biologist and “Silent Spring” author Rachel Carson’s 107th birthday. Unfortunately, thanks to Carson’s radical environmentalism, millions of children were robbed of the chance to celebrate a fraction of that many birthdays.

https://twitter.com/JayCaruso/status/471326202687672320

Dear @Google let's reflect on how many tens of millions of people are dead because of Rachel Carson's fear mongering. http://t.co/wXwsbXBBND

— Lyndsey Fifield (@lyndseyfifield) May 27, 2014

From Forbes:

Carson’s proselytizing and advocacy raised substantial anxiety about DDT and led to bans in most of the world and to restrictions on other chemical pesticides.  But the fears she raised were based on gross misrepresentations and scholarship so atrocious that, if Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of egregious academic misconduct.  Her observations about DDT have been condemned by many scientists.  In the words of Professor Robert H. White-Stevens, an agriculturist and biology professor at Rutgers University, “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”

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Carson’s disingenuous proselytizing spurred public pressure to ban DDT in many countries, with disastrous consequences: a lack of effective control of mosquitoes that carry malaria and other diseases. Malaria imposes huge costs on individuals, families and governments.  It inflicts a crushing economic burden on malaria-endemic countries and impedes their economic growth.  A study by the Harvard University Center for International Development estimated that a high incidence of malaria reduces economic growth by 1.3 percentage points each year.  Compounded over the four decades since the first bans of DDT, that lost growth has made some of the world’s poorest countries an astonishing 40 percent poorer than had there been more effective mosquito control.

…

The legacy of Rachel Carson is that tens of millions of human lives – mostly children in poor, tropical countries – have been traded for the possibility of slightly improved fertility in raptors.  This remains one of the monumental human tragedies of the last century.