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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

#191

Post by feanaro »

colordrops wrote: post #139
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…

> 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 information is becoming more prevalent. It’s becoming much harder for these big corporations to hide these negative side effects We are at the end of that era. The big corporations are slowly closing down that unintended loophole in which the internet was a tool for free movement of know…

I agree with your sentiment except for its defeatist facet. Let's not act like we are defeated and helpless. We can help shape the web and the internet into the shape we want and we are not helpless.

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

#192

Post by aldoushuxley001 »

pfdietz wrote: post #105
mhkool wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I base my opinion on three court cases in the USA where evidence was borught to court that Monsanto knew many years ago about the cancer causing risks. on what do you base "this is simply a lie" ?

Court cases are not good ways to determine science. In a particularly egregious case in the 1980s, for example, a jury returned a verdict for a defendant in which it was claimed that a head injury in a car accident led to lung cancer. Scientifically, there is no good evidence that Roundup causes cancer. https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/08/17/cancer-juries-scienti...

Please don’t cite snopes, it’s the worst possible citation you can give.

Here’s a better citation: IARC (the World Health Organization’s cancer research division) conducted a review with 20 international experts of all the publicly available research on glyphosate and found that it does indeed likely cause cancer: https://www.iarc.fr/featured-news/media-centre-iarc-news-gly...

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

#193

Post by jws »

jyounker wrote: post #123
pfdietz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally serious. The anti-Roundup fervor is of a kind with anti-GMO fervor. The goal of it is to provide a pretext to exclude cheaper US agricultural products from Europe.

I don’t trust the research that was done on roundup. Supposedly it degrades within six months. The reality is that it doesn’t. We know this because the city of Davis, CA does public composting. Yard trimmings are scooped up, taken to the city compost yard, and over a year or som it becomes compost. Residents can pick up a quantity of free compost every year. Around ‘97-‘98 the city compost started killing many kinds…

The recommendation when using glyphosate to kill existing plants before reseeding is to wait a week after application before reseeding. I’ve done this seeding grasses, grains, and root vegetables. It works just fine.

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

#194

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#195

Post by primroot »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #178
DFHippie wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't put the burden on the grower either. If you have two growers, one who tries to internalizes all the costs of production and one who doesn't, the market will reward the latter, because the market -- the consumers -- only see the price and appearance of the tomatoes. Regulation is required so that externalizing costs is not an option for either grower. People who rail against regulations, most of them, just s…

It's not as simple as "regulation good" or "regulation bad" -- there are plenty of companies that lobby for regulation because they know it will exclude smaller competitors, or ward off lawsuits because they followed the regulations even if people still died, or they want them to get passed while their stooge is in the majority so they can draft the rules themselves and then claim that it was already done last year w…

Here in Panama, many years ago Nestle became the main customer of tomato growers, and then through aggressive PR managed to make their canned tomato sauce into some sort of staple ingredient. There are at least three teams in this game, the farmers, the consumers and the intermediaries. One of them won.

I think this shows how there is some naivete combined with economic need that makes it easy for corporations to drive farmers against their own interests. Commoditization and systemic effects are completely ignored by people who desperately want economic certainty, no matter the precedent. In this free market, one day peppers are scarce and expensive, then the next season peppers are rotting because not enough people buy them. And land continues to steadily degrade under monoculture and animal husbandry.

When the free trade agreement with the US was signed cattle farmers thought they would be exporting meat to the US. Nature be damned. Meat is more expensive, there is meat from the US in the supermarket shelves, drought after drought makes it hard for small cattle farmers to subsist (unless they get into money laundry), and the Darien rain forest is being destroyed.

But listen to the economists. Nordhaus got the Nobel prize telling us how 3.5 degrees by 2100 is OK. Silly physicists and ecologists can't understand the magic of money.

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

#196

Post by aedocw »

blodovnik wrote: post #25

There’s no surprise here is there? We, as a society, poison pretty much everything as a standard part of the agricultural process. The outcome -the goal - of that is of course, death of vast numbers of insects. Mission accomplished. It’s a success story, strangely. The only thing that seems weird to me is how society was so easily convinced that soaking all our food in poison is OK and not a problem all good thumbs u…

As another person said, its more about being "out of sight, out of mind". But the biggest component is cost and availability. Large scale farming (unsustainable over the long term) with a single crop per season and minimal rotation allowed for huge crop yields over the short term which drove prices down. At this point the majority of consumers do not want to pay more than they've become accustomed to paying for any fruits or vegetables.

Sustainable farming costs more in the short term. Over the long term it is the only reasonable way to farm.

The book "Lentil Underground" by Liz Carlisle was a great read on this topic.

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

#197

Post by lazyjones »

tim333 wrote: post #45

France probably shows the way forward: "France is the first country to ban all 5 pesticides linked to bee deaths" https://inhabitat.com/france-is-the-first-country-to-ban-all...

Unfortunately, this will just increase imports from countries that don't ban them and make life harder for local farmers. It's the blessing of free trade based on lowest common denominators.

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

#198

Post by bbddg »

elorant wrote: post #162
bbddg wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone wants to eat tomatoes in the middle of winter! I also want ice cream that tastes great but has no calories. If some company makes an ice cream like that but we find out 10 years later it's leading to the extinction of many insect species on the planet. Is it really my fault for buying the ice cream? Not the producers fault for using chemicals with such huge downsides?

Of course you're fucking responsible. We all are in some way. And that's the thing. We need to start acting more responsibly instead of expecting someone else to solve our problems. We can't live in a world where we consume meat three times a week. Demand drives the market and what the market does is deforesting huge areas to grow grass to feed the cows which in turn add tons of methane to the atmosphere. Companies w…

I do think we all share some blame. We live in a democracy (no matter how flawed) and we bear some of the burden of the decisions of society as a whole.

The answer to these problems however isn't just saying "everyone stop eating tomatoes in the winter." You know full well that tomatoes grown in the summer are grown using the same shit, they can just source them from somewhere a little bit further north.

Why is it that I can go to the grocery store and see two different types of tomatoes: one type is cheaper and is killing the planet and the other is more expensive but safe for the environment? I have the means and the knowledge to buy the more expensive one but we can't expect that someone living paycheck to paycheck is going to be willing or even able to do the same. They aren't the ones to blame here.

I do agree that we can't expect someone else to solve this problem for us. We need collective action to demand significant regulation and change to the economic system. Scolding individual people for making rational economic decisions when they have a boot on their neck isn't going to fix anything.

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

#200

Post by bbddg »

duckMuppet wrote: post #150
bbddg wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers in many cases don't have the information to know the potential long term damages of buying the $4.50/kg tomatoes. It's insane to put that burden on the end user as opposed to the tomato grower. How in the world is the customer supposed to know what pesticides are used and what the damages could be? Trying to flatten all these problems into the failings of individual customer decisions completely obfuscates…

Central planning is a failure throughout history. The problem isn't the capitalism that transitioned the US into a powerhouse that feeds the world or provides goods at discounted prices, or ensures that millennials in Minnesota can enjoy avocado dip while complaning about having to much. This is a failure at the local level. Ever spent time in the grocery isle? Children believe their meat comes from meat packages. No…

I stopped after you unironically started complaining about millennials and avocado dip (guacamole?)
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