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Insect 'apocalypse' in U.S. driven by 50x increase in toxic pesticides: study

nationalgeographic.com

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Re: Insect 'apocalypse' in U.S. driven by 50x increase in toxic pesticides: study

#181

Post by primroot »

rollthehard6 wrote: post #41
obituary_latte wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it that society was convinced? Or was/is it that it is more “out of sight, out of mind”? I think for the layperson, little matters other than how much does it cost? If there is some invisible but safe-for-us chemical that increases yield and decreases cost, all the better for us, right? I think this is one of the great things to come out of the invention of the web. We are becoming better informed and this kind of…

Reminds of all those times we are told that 'customers demanded X', as if we all stood outside supermarkets with placards saying, "We demand huge strawberries that don't taste of anything". The market does what helps the market, it often isn't good for people or the planet they inhabit - that's the story of our current era and customers need to demand change on that basis.

It'd be more accurate to say 'commoditization favoring economies of scale for the sake of anti-competitive oligopolization demands X.' It then takes some PR money to make people 'demand' all the crap.

Addded: the mindless commoditization is abetted by subsidies, including the subsidy of not having to price in negative externalities.

Re: Insect 'apocalypse' in U.S. driven by 50x increase in toxic pesticides: study

#182

Post by slips »

gravelc wrote: post #101
superpermutat0r wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that we do nothing. We can ban pesticides, return back to heuristic based agriculture where mistakes are localized and inventions are robust and of limited scale. Pesticides are mostly used for crops that humans do not eat directly. Food safety was never about beans or sweet potato or other efficient plant sources of protein and calories, it was about wheat, soybean and corn. Their introduction, just like the int…

Ban all pesticides? Every single one of them, synthetic and organic alike? That would be interesting. Pretending that biotic stresses simply don't exist is....umm..novel.

Like the article touched on, there are regenerative practices that do not require pesticides. Frankly, pesticides are a human convenience. Utterly unnecessary for survival. If we weren't focusing on mass producing food, largely unused to directly feed people, we wouldn't need to spray everything with poison to keep things easy and profitable.

Trying to find a "smarter" way to poison things is exactly the status quo and it will lead nowhere good.

Re: Insect 'apocalypse' in U.S. driven by 50x increase in toxic pesticides: study

#183

Post by neom »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #166
neom wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's extra weird is that everything got really cheap, yet most people don't have any money, and the environment is in disarray. I'd imagine history is not going to look kindly on the wealthy.

> I'd imagine history is not going to look kindly on the wealthy. That's assuming the money is going to the wealthy, which isn't really compatible with things being cheap. What really happened is that other things -- like housing -- got more expensive. But most of that money didn't go to Bill Gates, it went to grandma when she retired to Florida and sold her house to a millennial for four times what she paid for it i…

The Walton and Mars family net worths exceed $250 billion. If you add in Aldi and Ikea you're over $340 billion, Bezos gives you another $100 billion.

Re: Insect 'apocalypse' in U.S. driven by 50x increase in toxic pesticides: study

#184

Post by rhacker »

jimhi wrote: post #50
rollthehard6 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds of all those times we are told that 'customers demanded X', as if we all stood outside supermarkets with placards saying, "We demand huge strawberries that don't taste of anything". The market does what helps the market, it often isn't good for people or the planet they inhabit - that's the story of our current era and customers need to demand change on that basis.

We did demand X though. The supermarkets had both tasteless strawberries and organic ones and we made our choice. Many supermarkets still have organic ones and we still pick the cheaper, larger, less tasty one.

This is a huge pet peeve of mine specifically with Organic Strawberries. Somehow this company called "Driscoll's" has started showing up nationwide for berries. Straw, Blue, Black, Rasp, etc... It must be a conglomerate at this point. But some people at various Whole Foods corporate and other outlets have just started bowing down to them. The offer the most tasteless organic strawberries in the world.

Re: Insect 'apocalypse' in U.S. driven by 50x increase in toxic pesticides: study

#186

Post by AnthonyMouse »

neom wrote: post #183
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd imagine history is not going to look kindly on the wealthy. That's assuming the money is going to the wealthy, which isn't really compatible with things being cheap. What really happened is that other things -- like housing -- got more expensive. But most of that money didn't go to Bill Gates, it went to grandma when she retired to Florida and sold her house to a millennial for four times what she paid for it i…

The Walton and Mars family net worths exceed $250 billion. If you add in Aldi and Ikea you're over $340 billion, Bezos gives you another $100 billion.

Comparing absolute numbers to nothing isn't very meaningful. You compare your $340 billion to the almost a hundred trillion dollars in US total net worth and the amount that went somewhere else is above 99%.

To get to the numbers like "1% of people own 40% of the wealth" you have to go the 1%, which is to say about three million people, and then you're including a bunch of doctors and software engineers who are clearly not in the same box as the Walton and Mars families.

Re: Insect 'apocalypse' in U.S. driven by 50x increase in toxic pesticides: study

#187

Post by bryanlarsen »

The article is about neonictinoid pesticides. Lots of comments here about roundup and other herbicides, which is almost completely unrelated. The connection between insect death and a pesticide designed to kill insects is pretty clear. The connection with a widely tested herbicide designed to kill broad leaf plants is pretty tenuous.

Re: Insect 'apocalypse' in U.S. driven by 50x increase in toxic pesticides: study

#188

Post by kiterunner2346 »

From the article:

“This is the second Silent Spring. Neonics are like a new DDT, except they are a thousand times more toxic to bees than DDT was,” Klein says in an interview."

Rachel Carson's conclusions in "Silent Spring" were never proven to be correct - nonetheless DDT was restricted by EPA (by bureaucratic mandate rather than by reference to convincing scientific proof).

DDT should be brought back in the USA.

Re: Insect 'apocalypse' in U.S. driven by 50x increase in toxic pesticides: study

#189

Post by adrianN »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #186
neom wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Walton and Mars family net worths exceed $250 billion. If you add in Aldi and Ikea you're over $340 billion, Bezos gives you another $100 billion.

Comparing absolute numbers to nothing isn't very meaningful. You compare your $340 billion to the almost a hundred trillion dollars in US total net worth and the amount that went somewhere else is above 99%. To get to the numbers like "1% of people own 40% of the wealth" you have to go the 1%, which is to say about three million people, and then you're including a bunch of doctors and software engineers who are clear…

If you compare 340 billion to the net worth of the median person the mind boggles.

Re: Insect 'apocalypse' in U.S. driven by 50x increase in toxic pesticides: study

#190

Post by elago »

dekhn wrote: post #176

It is soooo painful watching non-biologists debate pesticide impact based on watching biased, nonscientific reports. In the same way it's easy to train an ML model that is garbage, but you have to an expert in ML to understand why, it's easy to make mistaken conclusions with complex systems like biology/agriculture. I see comments below like "pesticides are bitter and that's why vegetables grown with pesticides are b…

> Please try to use actual logic, data, and science, not trivially disprovable claims.

Take your own advice, Monsanto

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