[3] He published over 700 scientific items, of which 37 are books, and served on many national and government committees, including the National Academy of Sciences, the President's Science Advisory Council, the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. State Department, and the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, and Health, Education and Welfare.
[4] Pimentel served on committees for many national and government organizations, including the Secretary's Commission On Pesticides And Their Relationship To Environmental Health (United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) which issued a report[5] in 1969 that recommended the banning of DDT and led to the creation of the EPA.
Pimentel was an agronomist and entomologist, but he had a broad ecological perspective on agronomy, which usually is focused narrowly on yields and production.
[13] He returned to Cornell in 1955, where he remained for the rest of his life, becoming the Chairman of the Entomology Department and holding a joint appointment with Ecology and Systematics.
Pimentel began his career at Cornell studying pest control and DDT in house flies.
[21] In 1961, Pimentel published on several important topics in ecology, including diversity-stability,[22] spatial patterns,[23] and community structure.
[28] Pimentel's forays into the environmental field came out of his experiences on various government panels and study groups, especially his year as an ecological consultant to the Office of Science and Technology.
[30] By then, he was on his way to becoming a voice that was listened to on a variety of environmental issues through the numerous studies that he led and published, the results of which always could, and were, inspected and revised.
[32] They admitted that, "Outstanding biological control successes have sometimes been achieved ... by the use of natural enemies whose hosts belong to different species or genera from the pests they are needed to control,"[33] but they then rejected (pp 47–49) Pimentel's work on genetic feedback as an explanatory mechanism involved in biocontrol by insect parasites and predators.
[37][38][39] Pimentel took great solace in having had his work reviewed by "26 top scientists and engineers"[11] who found his methods to be sound.
[40][41] Pimentel claimed criticism such as that raised by Bjørn Lomborg,[42] was only a disagreement on details, rather than conclusions, stating he was correct anyway despite the fact that the numbers he used in his calculations later turned out to be wrong.