Why can’t it work forever? It doesn’t have to be short term.
Look, if I can sell people on using more nuclear, I’ll be happy to revisit this when I’m 70. But nuclear power isn’t renewable. I only suggest it because it doesn’t produce CO2 or rely on us killing brown people to obtain it. It still takes non-renewable uranium – the mining of which is a bit messy – and leaves us with non-disposable waste.

Because nobody is saying “we have to stop growth.” That’s recasting an environmentalist argument as an anti-business argument.
I will say that. When a conservative can tell me how we can grow limitlessly in a finite space, I’d love to hear it. We need a no-growth model for an economy that can sustain itself, soonish.

From the same article:
“It would be naive to say DDT is a magic bullet for malaria. It isn’t,” stressed Attaran. It won’t work in some places where mosquitoes already are resistant to a range of insecticides, he noted. He suspects DDT will be of most use in eastern Africa, where that problem hasn’t yet emerged.

Attaran called for research “to make sure we’re using insecticides and DDT not in a willy-nilly way but in an optimal way in the right places.”Nor, scientists cautioned, is indoor spraying alone a solution, as mosquitoes bite everywhere. Countries are being encouraged to adopt comprehensive malaria programs that also include newer, more effective medications, as Bush’s malaria chief, Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer, was to outline Friday.

Continued widespread use of DDT was never going to eradicate malaria. The mosquitos and Plasmodium had already turned the tide of the fight to their favor long before DDT was banned.

You said it wasn’t working. Is that to say it wasn’t working at all?

I think you could (but it still isn’t a total ban. There are exceptions for public health). There may have been places where it was still working, but malaria cases were already starting to rise again in most places due to the development of resistance long before the ban. Because of the mobility of insects, it would only be a matter of time before resistant populations migrated elsewhere.

The argument I would have made is that a ban would be necessary in order to protect entire classes of pesticides from obsolescence (I would also argue that given the loss of effectiveness, we really didn’t lose much in the way of benefits). Resistance doesn’t always just affect the pesticide at issue. Any pesticide with a similar mode of action may be at risk.

That said, I think it may be worth investigating small scale, targeted use of DDT in some areas (indoors). This won’t work in every area, because there are many places (India for one) where the mosquito population is largely resistant.

Here’s a wiki page that discusses some of this, as well as some of the environmental issues surrounding DDT.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/15/healthscience/web.0915malaria.php

“..proponents argue that until better strategies are developed, carefully controlled DDT use is warranted because in recent years, nothing else has succeeded in lowering deaths from malaria.”

You said it wasn’t working. Is that to say it wasn’t working at all?

OK, I’ll accept that, even though you didn’t provide a source. But it doesn’t follow DDT would not have saved countless lives.

Most of that comes from several years of grad school studies: plant physiology and weed science. But here’s one link.

No question that it would have saved lives right then and there, but at the cost of making it that much more difficult to deal with in the future. Resistance does not always develop to the single pesticide used. It will often develop against the whole class of pesticides that it belongs to.

If DDT use had continued at the same pace as it had in the early years, it would have been largely useless within 10 years due to widespread resistance.

That’s supposition.
Not so much. Resistance is going to happen. It’s a matter of evolution, and 6-10 years is a generally accepted time frame for resistance to herbicides and pesticides once they are put into widespread use. The only way to slow the development of resistance is to make it part of an integrated management program. Like I said, insects with resistance to DDT was being found within 1 year of the beginning of eradication programs, and even today, there are areas where DDT is useless agaisnt the mosquitos that carry Plasmodium.

With improved spraying techniques, we could and probably should reintroduce the limited use of DDT in certain areas, but it has to be part of an integrated management program.

Tell that to the survivors of the victims of malaria.

The simple fact is, that by the time DDT was dropped in the fight against malaria, it wasn’t working anymore. Just like chloroquine was dropped as a treatment for malaria: the plasmodium was resistant, not just to it, but to mnost of the quinine family of antimalarials.

OK, I’ll accept that, even though you didn’t provide a source. But it doesn’t follow DDT would not have saved countless lives.

If DDT use had continued at the same pace as it had in the early years, it would have been largely useless within 10 years due to widespread resistance.

That’s supposition.

With improved spraying techniques, we could and probably should reintroduce the limited use of DDT in certain areas, but it has to be part of an integrated management program.

Tell that to the survivors of the victims of malaria.

Does this count?

“We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions ’cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.”