image from from BoingBoing (http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/unfortunate-vintage-ads.html)

Remember, the issue is not wheter we should ban the use of all pesticides, its whether we should use them more responsibly, and more carefully, and of course, that’s going to mean they will be more expensive. And yes, they will have to be regulated. Poisons designed to be sprayed on our food should definitely be regulated. Anyone who thinks otherwise should be forced to eat the crops first.

Links to other related articles:

To Control Malaria, We Need DDT!
The Lies of Rachel Carson
Bring Back DDT, and Science With It!

I don’t want this guy to be allowed to decide what gets sprayed on my house from the air. That is not too much to ask.

Its about releasing a material into the environment that has a totally unexpected effect that no one could have predicted, and causes the death of creatures that shouldn’t even be affected. An effect where we don’t know exactly why it happened, or how, where it stops, what other parts of the environment might be affected, or what the results will be when the top predator in a food chain is suddenly removed.

Sure, saving people is more important than saving birds, but who decides? How do we know if that’s really what’s at stake? What if there are viable alternatives? And where do we draw the line? What if more than birds are involved? Perhaps other creatures, perhaps honeybees? They have an enormous economic impact, too, and nobody knows why the hell they’re dying off.

And what if birds (and who knows what else) are dying not because of the people that are being saved, but just because the poison is cheap and highly profitable for the guy who makes it and sells it and who lives far away and whose kids don’t live in that place. A guy who really doesn’t care if the directions on the package are not being followed. Maybe a few dead birds is a price worth paying for malaria control, but is it a price we should pay for housewives to kill spiders in suburbia? Is it worth paying to make tomatoes 10 cents cheaper per pound?

There is a lot more going on in the world than evil environmentalists out to destroy honest businessmen. When you turn something loose and things suddenly start dying, common sense should tell you you have a problem on your hands. Those dying eagles are like the dying canaries in a coal mine. They are trying to tell us something, and you’re not paying attention.

I guess maintaining nominal populations of certain raptors is more important than the lives of brown people in Africa.

Fortunately, my mom wouldn’t let me play in the fog (which never seemed to do much good anyway).

DDT became popular because it attacked insect nervous systems, not mammalian ones, so it was abused much, it didn’t seem poisonous to humans or animals at all.. It was a magic bullet, and people were routinely deloused with it, absorbing it through their skins and lungs, and in food and water, orally as well.

It wasn’t until much later that we learned its effect on mammals was very different, and subtle, and in birds, it led to thin eggshells. We almost lost the bald eagle that way.

You simply cannot turn loose vast quantities of complex compounds that have never existed in nature into the environment without expecting some unanticipated consequences. No living thing in the world had ever evolved in contact with this substance, it was bound to have metabolic effects which couldn’t possibly be anticipated.

I think many more human lives have been saved by DDT than have been lost to it, but that doesn’t mean we should have carte blanche to drench the environment with it.

He has an undiagnosed condition that showed up nine years ago, and I have almost lost him several times because his blood is like sludge, and until he got on daily shots of blood thinner, he would throw clots at the drop of a hat. He has had every test known to man and nothing has shown up.

My intuition nags at those DDT trucks.

Insecticides should be tailored to the pest they target (in your case, the W Nile vector), its vulnerability and life cycle, and to the crop they are attempting to protect (in your case, humans). An insect may be very vulnerable as a larva, but resistant as an adult, or vice-versa. The species may be easy (or hard) to kill during mating season, for example. This must be taken into account. The environment must also be factored in, both the biota (the good bugs) present and meteorological conditions that can concentrate or disperse the poisons and cause totally unexpected problems.

There are other considerations too, pests can develop a tolerance to insecticides through natural selection, just as microbes can to antibiotics. The more you use, the more you’ll need next time, until you get critters that will swim unaffected in pools of the stuff while the tomatoes are becoming too poisonous to eat and the earthworms, honeybees and ladybugs are dying off like, well, flies.

There is also a law of diminishing returns. An effective and safe pest control program may succeed at cutting crop pest losses to 10% of losses of untreated crops. But using more poison may not necessarily help all that much more. You may just have to be ready to accept some losses.

Poisons should also be rotated, so that the pest does not evolve a strategy to evade the agent, lose its natural predators, or be replaced by some other bug. Insects have been dealing with what nature can throw at them for hundreds of millions of years. They are very good at this game, and we are very new at it. They will eventually outsmart our tech unless we stay on top of it all the time.

To properly and safely use insecticides we need entomologists who research this and experiment with it constantly. Developing these strategies may be expensive, and not fully effective. The temptation to use or sell broad spectrum, highly toxic chemicals may be irresistible

On the other hand, the farmer usually thinks in terms of “How cheaply can I wipe out this pest; how many pounds per acre and how many dollars per bushel?” Or, “It worked great last year on the corn borer, lets try it this year on the weed weevil.” The farmer is often right on the razor’s edge of financial survival. He’s under a lot of pressure to save that crop, he don’t want to hear no hippy environmentalist gummint man tell him he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And the insecticide manufacturer is, of course, a business. Even if he has thoroughly researched this issue and incorporated it into his marketing plan, he is not going to tell an eager customer, “No, you can’t use this product now, you’ll have to switch to one that’s less effective and costs more.” People will always talk themselves into taking the path of least resistance, even if deep down, they know better. It’s just human nature. These are issues that require regulation because they are just not amenable to market mechanisms.

There, I’ve said it! (Take cover! Incoming fire! Hit the dirt!)

here.