WASHINGTON--As the world celebrates the 100th birthday of environmental icon Rachel Carson today, policymakers are proposing bills to honor her legacy. Yet Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) stands largely alone in efforts to stop these measures--a position for which he deserves much credit.

Coburn apparently recognizes that the conventional wisdom about Carson's legacy is wrong, as the results of following Carson's advice have been quite grim.

Nonetheless, Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.) introduced a bill to name a post office in Pittsburgh after Carson. Similarly, Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) has a resolution to commemorate Carson's book "Silent Spring," which he dubs a "legacy of scientific rigor coupled with poetic sensibility."

Yet Carson's work is weak on "scientific rigor" and its poetry is anything but sensible. Carson used explosive rhetoric and junk science to advance an anti-technology agenda that turned the world against man-made chemicals.

She generated enough fear to prompt nations to discontinue using the pesticide DDT--even for malaria control.

Before Carson completed her book, DDT played a vitally important role in the eradication of mosquitoes carrying malaria in Western nations, and was making progress in other nations around the globe.

The success was so great that DDT's discoverer, Paul Herman Muller, earned a Nobel Prize in Medicine--and the National Academy of Sciences declared in 1970: "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable."

Today, hundreds of millions of people--mostly African children under 5 years old--get seriously ill, and more than a million die, every year from malaria, in large measure because many nations stopped using DDT.

Last September, Dr. Arata Kochi, director of the World Health Organization's Global Malaria Program, called on the environmental community to "help save African babies as you are helping to save the environment."

Kochi's plea was part of an announcement that the WHO would seek increased use of DDT to fight malaria. Rather than answer his call, the Pesticide Action Network of North America and Beyond Pesticides prefer to carry on the Carson legacy. They are shamelessly working to undermine the WHO's endorsement of DDT by spreading misinformation about DDT risks.