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Michael Crichton has a new book out called State of Fear, in which the nefarious villains are environmentalists who provoke a deadly tsunami as a marketing stunt. I ordered the book from Amazon, and it arrived the same day the death toll from the most deadly tsunami in history rose to 22,000. Crichton has always had a prescient streak -- Disclosure, remember, preceded the Clinton-Lewisnky affair -- but this is just too weird.

I haven't read much of the book yet, but I've read some interview and speeches Crichton has given recently. And I find it interesting that Crichton has traveled so much, written so much, accomplished so much and learned so much and yet evidently had so little contact with the people who call themselves environmentalists -- the people he describes are loony idealogues, fundamentalist powermongers. I don't recognize them. I also find it fascinating that he believes in the things he believes in so dogmatically, when that's what he says he's trying to combat in the environmental movement.

Life is too short to bicker with everything Crichton has been dragging out to defend his book (which is starting to seem like the point of his writing it), but I want to address this one issue he put forward at the Commonwealth Club in September, because I know it's a popular one with the libertarians Crichton hangs with. To wit:

"I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world."

The real fantasy is the one that somehow persists among the Reason magazine set that DDT, a long-lingering pesticide (it can still be detected in some mother's milk, over three decades after it was banned) known to cause thinning in the eggshells of raptors (including the bald eagle), would eliminate all mosquito-borne illness, including malaria. But it just isn't true.

For one thing, DDT is still being used in certain developing nations where the public health threat from mosquito-borne illness is greater than the health risks from DDT.

For another, both the malaria parasite and the insects that transmit it mutate rapidly. The mosquitos quickly adapt to resist widely used insecticides (including DDT); the drugs developed to treat the malarial parasite, including chloroquine -- the cheapest, and therefore the only, drug used to treat malaria patients in sub-Saharan Africa, where the vast majority malaria deaths occur -- stop working. The World Health Organization recognized in 1969, well before the ban of DDT, that malaira would be impossible to eradicate.

Malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses pose a huge public health threat for the regions recently devastated by the tsunami. But DDT won't save them. A rigorous, complex, multi-pronged public health program might help.

In the evolutionary battle to survive toxins in the environment, the insects, as a species, will always win. They just adapt faster. What kills us slowly strengthens them significantly in only a generation -- and a generation for them is a day.

Write a thriller about that, Mr. Crichton.

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