Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Merchants of Doubt, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science, Trust, and Public Policy
Capitalism and the Environment
Media Bias
Certainty, Doubt, and the Scientific Method
Summary
Analysis
Oreskes and Conway begin by calling the biologist Rachel Carson “an American hero” for alerting the public to the dangers of pesticides in her book Silent Spring. Her work convinced the government to ban the dangerous pesticide DDT in the 1970s. But 30 years later, conservatives on the internet started accusing Carson of mass murder and praising DDT as a lifesaving chemical. It was all part of their campaign “against regulation in general.”
Younger readers may or may not be familiar with Rachel Carson, who was arguably the most influential environmental activist of the 20th century. Regardless, this chapter can serve as a useful introduction to her work and its impact. Oreskes and Conway explore the merchants of doubt’s comments about Carson not because they worry that the U.S. will roll back DDT regulations, but rather because they believe these comments speak volumes about the doubt-mongers’ worldview, underlying goals, and long-term strategy in the 21st century.
Themes
Silent Spring and the President’s Science Advisory Committee. DDT use became widespread during World War II, when other pesticides were scarce. Experiments showed that DDT effectively killed disease-carrying insects, and it was very inexpensive and easy to spray from airplanes. It was also widely believed to be safe—until Rachel Carson and other biologists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service discovered that it was harming crucial species.
In many ways, DDT was a miracle of modern science, and Oreskes and Conway don’t mean to underplay its significance. Like CFCs and fossil fuels, it provided great benefits to modern societies and great profit to the corporations that created it—but it also came at a great environmental cost. Carson showed the public for the first time that effective policy requires balancing the social, economic, and environmental costs and benefits of new technologies and products.
Themes
In 1962, Carson published Silent Spring in The New Yorker. She showed how DDT killed fish, people’s pets, and key pollinating insects. Since DDT didn’t naturally break down, it accumulated up the food chain: small animals like rodents ate plants covered in DDT, and then the predators who ate those small animals got very sick. This led whole ecosystems to the brink of collapse. Animal experiments suggested that DDT could also seriously harm human fertility.
Carson’s research wasn’t necessarily rigorous or quantitative, but it still made a clear, definitive case about the dangers of DDT. Of course, it helped her case that DDT’s effects were more visible and direct than those of acid rain or ozone-killing pollution: poisoned animals can more easily tug at the public’s heartstrings than eroding ecosystems or a changing atmospheric chemistry.
Themes
After Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the pesticide industry—and even some fellow scientists—started attacking her. Then, the official President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) studied DDT and concluded that the government should regulate pesticides immediately, because they pose such great risks to wildlife and humans. In the following years, Congress passed bipartisan legislation and created institutions like the EPA, which banned DDT altogether in 1972.
The pesticide industry’s attacks show that corporations were already using doubt-mongering tactics long before Seitz and Singer came on the scene. However, in the 1960s, corporate lobbyists weren’t yet strong enough to significantly influence the national political agenda, so science prevailed. Meanwhile, the history of Congress establishing the EPA is an important reminder that the government’s power to regulate toxic pollutants shouldn’t be taken for granted—instead, it was the result of deliberate political decisions, and other deliberate political decisions could always take it away.
Themes
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Oreskes and Conway point out that the PSAC report focused on the overall evidence, not on whether “the hazards of persistent pesticides were ‘proven,’ ‘demonstrated,’ ‘certain,’ or even well understood.” The PSAC didn’t endlessly demand more research or make baseless political accusations against Rachel Carson. Instead, it asked pesticide companies to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that their products were safe. In other words, “science and democracy worked as they were supposed to.”
Oreskes and Conway closely examine the language used in the PSAC report because it shows how “science and democracy” should work. The government should adopt a common-sense standard for banning dangerous substances, and the burden of proof to show that a product is safe should fall on the company that sells it (and not on independent or government researchers).
Themes
Years later, in the early 2000s, conservatives started calling Rachel Carson a mass murderer. They asserted (without evidence) that DDT is safe and would have completely eradicated malaria if it weren’t banned. Mainstream newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and even the New York Times Magazine ran articles questioning Carson’s research and citing the work of bacteriologist I. L. Baldwin.
This campaign against Carson began several decades after her 1964 death. Like Fred Singer’s campaign against Roger Revelle, it took advantage of the fact that Carson was dead (and unable to defend herself) in order to make unfounded claims about her life and work. By the early 2000s, doubt-mongering tactics were far more widespread in U.S. culture and media, and so it proved easy for the people who used them to get their claims into the popular media.
Themes
In fact, world health authorities gave up on fighting malaria through DDT four years before DDT was banned. They had successfully eradicated malaria in most countries, but in sub-Saharan Africa, it wouldn’t go away unless healthcare and nutrition improved significantly. Moreover, after people’s homes get treated with DDT, they can never clean their walls, which is impractical. And most importantly, mosquitos were evolving to become DDT-resistant, largely due to DDT’s widespread use in the U.S. agriculture industry. Ultimately, DDT was never even necessary—for instance, the U.S. and Panama eradicated malaria in the early 1900s by draining the pools of stagnant water where mosquitos breed.
Just like their attacks on the science about acid rain, ozone, and climate change, the doubt-mongers' attacks on Rachel Carson were simply factually incorrect. DDT just wasn’t the miracle pesticide they claimed it was—rather, it was remarkably effective until it stopped working. In fact, DDT's fate speaks to an important truth about technology and capitalism: today's miracle cure often proves obsolete tomorrow. As Oreskes and Conway pointed out in their chapter about acid rain, environmental regulation can actually play an important role in spurring regulation because it forces researchers and corporations to come up with new, better products that don't threaten health and safety. This is deeply ironic because the merchants of doubt consistently present deregulation as a way to promote and preserve innovation. But according to the authors’ perspective, it's just the opposite: removing regulation just allows the leading players in the market to entrench their power.
Themes
I. L. Baldwin, the bacteriologist cited by Rachel Carson’s 21st-century detractors, never even researched DDT. Instead, he just wrote a mildly critical book review about Silent Spring. He called the book “superbly written” and scientifically flawless, but he criticized Carson’s passion and focus on pesticides’ downsides, rather than their benefits. Carson’s argument was always based on DDT’s effects on the environment, not its direct effects on humans. And medical researchers have since found that pesticides like DDT do cause significant increases in cancer and serious birth defects. Meanwhile, there is no evidence for the contrarians’ claim that DDT saved millions of lives. Instead, like with tobacco, acid rain, ozone, and climate change, the contrarians were spreading doubt about DDT “to defend an extreme free market ideology.”
While Baldwin may have believed in free-market fundamentalist ideology, he wasn't necessarily operating as a merchant of doubt because he admitted that Carson's science was correct. He was accusing Carson of being too pessimistic and caring too much about environmental preservation, but not of lying, distorting evidence, or participating in a dark conspiracy to destroy capitalism. It was only later that the true merchants of doubt began making these unfounded suggestions and portraying Baldwin as one of their own. As Oreskes and Conway point out, their real goal wasn't to bring back DDT, but rather to attack the environmentalist movement at its root.
Themes
Denial as Political Strategy. Oreskes and Conway note that the campaign to defend DDT was also unique because, when it started, the science was long settled and Rachel Carson was long dead. DDT contrarians weren’t trying to stop new regulations: they were attacking regulations in general by trying to discredit one of the central figures in modern environmentalism. The first person to use this strategy was Dixy Lee Ray, who argued that DDT all but ended malaria in Sri Lanka—until the nation stopped using it, and malaria cases shot back up. But Ray never mentioned why Sri Lanka stopped using DDT: malaria-carrying mosquitos became totally resistant to it, and it stopped working.
Rachel Carson was an important target for the merchants of doubt because, perhaps more than anyone else, she was responsible for launching the contemporary environmentalist movement. In other words, if the merchants of doubt could implicate Carson in their conspiracy theory, then they could suggest that all environmentalism was rotten at its core. This promised to help the merchants of doubt win their other 21st-century battles (including, most importantly, their fight against climate change policy).
Themes
Eventually, the former tobacco lobbyist and “junk science” alarmist Steven Milloy worked with entomologist J. Gordon Edwards to repeat Dixy Lee Ray’s claims—again, without mentioning pesticide resistance. The radio personality Rush Limbaugh, the novelist Michael Crichton, and especially the Heartland Institute continue using the same talking points. While the nonprofit Heartland Institute is now best known for its brazen climate denialism, it also worked extensively with tobacco and chemical companies in the 1990s. It spread doubt about their products’ harmful effects in exchange for millions of dollars in tax-deductible donations.
Just like Fred Seitz's claims about the SDI and Fred Singer's claims about climate change, Ray and Milloy's assertions are difficult to refute because they depend on ignoring the available evidence. On their own terms, these ideas seem legitimate—they can only be disproven when other voices enter the conversation and direct the audience's attention to other pieces of evidence. Meanwhile, Limbaugh and Crichton show how anti-science ideas have spread by winning allies in popular conservative media. Needless to say, readers will know that this phenomenon has only become more pronounced in the years since Orestes and Conway published this book.
Themes
The Orwellian Problem. Oreskes and Conway conclude that a web of corporations, journalists, and right-wing foundations has created a crisis of disinformation in American science. This is the same right wing that heeded George Orwell’s warnings about propaganda and denounced Soviet lies during the Cold War. Now, these contrarians conveniently forget scientific evidence or label it as “junk,” while presenting utter fictions as the truth. In the process, they undermine science, which is about “studying the world as it actually is—rather than as we wish it to be.”
Oreskes and Conway use the term "The Orwellian Problem" because they suggest that capitalism's assault on science has created the same kind of unaccountable propaganda machine that conservatives viewed with so much scorn during the Cold War (although on a much smaller scale). This critique also has an important implication: if propaganda means presenting lies as facts and repeating them until the public believes them, then the opposite of propaganda—presenting the truth as such and helping the public believe in it on its own merits—is science itself.
Themes
Science has shown that unregulated capitalism is not sustainable: humans have to transform their economy if they want to hold onto the same standard of living without destroying the planet. Under the current system, companies generate profound environmental costs (or “negative externalities”) but do not have to pay for them unless the government steps in to make them through regulation. Thus, people like Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, Robert Jastrow, Bill Nierenberg, and Dixy Lee Ray spread lies about science in order to avoid accepting “the limits of free market capitalism.” These scientists turned against their own profession in the name of the free market.
Oreskes and Conway summarize their primary conclusion about why the merchants of doubt do what they do. In short, doubt-mongering is an ill-fated attempt to defend unregulated capitalism against the externalities it produces. In the authors' minds, this really amounts to a fundamental flaw in the system: corporations are not legally required to account for environmental damage in the same way as the other costs they incur, so they have a strong incentive to destroy the environment in the name of profit. While the merchants of doubt defend this system—on behalf of the corporations who most benefit from it—Oreskes and Conway merely suggest that the law should change in order to take environmental costs into account.
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