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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

#221

Post by superpermutat0r »

danmaz74 wrote: post #104
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…

Actually, wheat has been the staple for peoples living near the Mediterranean for thousands of years.

Interestingly, they have raised it without pesticides for that many years too.

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

#222

Post by irq11 »

mhkool wrote: post #92
gravelc wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're already eating dsRNA. Plants have microRNA precursors and viruses. We eat plants. Roundup is a synthetic herbicide - that they both could be used in agriculture is when the similarity ends.

I know the difference between herbicides and microRNA but you do not seem to see the assumptions that you make.

Your logic disallows absolutely everything: I don’t know what the impact is of your existence, so the safe thing to do is to not allow you to exist.

At some point, you take calculated risks, because there is no action in life that comes without risk. Even your preferred solution of eliminating all chemicals and switching to alternative farming practices comes with substantial risk: it’s very likely it won’t scale. Millions would starve.

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

#223

Post by dang »

mhkool wrote: post #92
gravelc wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're already eating dsRNA. Plants have microRNA precursors and viruses. We eat plants. Roundup is a synthetic herbicide - that they both could be used in agriculture is when the similarity ends.

I know the difference between herbicides and microRNA but you do not seem to see the assumptions that you make.

Please don't cross into getting personal. No comment contains everything someone sees.

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

#224

Post by hammock »

Theodores wrote: post #170
mhkool wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are neglecting the negative effects of spraying billions of tons of Roundup on the planet before the public knows for sure that it is a dangerous poison. Same with neonics, we sprayed too much and the insect populations shrunk too much and will not revive quickly since the poison is still in plants and soil. The obvious thing is that industries work for profit and have no sympathy with insects or the health of in…

For me the example of what you cite is the wonder product 'Scotchgard'. You could put it on your shoes from new and they would stay looking new, you could spray it on furniture and it would survive spills from coffee/tea/wine. You could coat your whole house with Scotchgard and be blissfully unaware that it was a bio-hazard. Plus who thought negatively of the 3M corporation? 3M was a brand that you trusted, it was a…

Critical to Gore-tex is the DWR coating, which is still made of PFCs (basically Scotchgard). Sometimes they use shorter chain molecules like C6 (vs. C8), which have a shorter biological half-life, but the harmful effects are the same.

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

#225

Post by AnthonyMouse »

DFHippie wrote: post #218
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure. There's regulatory capture. But this particular problem, the externalization of costs, is a classic one solved by regulation rather than the free market.

The problem where the pesticides are destroying native insect populations, sure. But not the problem where the tomatoes taste like nothing and have pesticide in them -- that's not an externality, it's an information asymmetry. And then it has the same problem in the legislature as the supermarket.

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

#226

Post by your-nanny »

notacoward wrote: post #155
jlangenauer wrote: post #2

If I ever get rich enough to do so, I'm going to buy some land somewhere - perhaps old farming land that's no longer profitable, and just let it return to nature. Let the trees and bushes grow, let the insects, birds and whatever else breed there. I'm beginning to think that's one of the best things one could do for the planet right now.

You can't "let it return" any more. Land left alone will gravitate toward a state that's anything but natural, as the already-unnatural mix of species both within the land and in its surroundings assert themselves. Where I live, the most likely outcome is a patch of poison ivy. Other places, kudzu. Still others, a haven for invasive beetles or snakes or small carnivores. Returning land to a natural state takes work a…

I call bullshit on this notion of natural and unnatural. You mean return the land to some imagined pristine prior state, which in the North American context means managed landscapes, because the NA landscape was managed in lots of ways by native inhabitants. This pristine wilderness is just an imagination of white settlers.

You are not going to rid the South of Kudzu. The only thing you can do is facilitate a ecological equilibrium in which Kudzu is now a part.

Ecosystems change. Species move. We assume a constant that is likely imaginary. I also think you are overemphasizing the harm.

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

#227

Post by SolaceQuantum »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #220
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, ok, I genuinely don't understand your proposition here. We should ignore the people with the most assets, and only pay attention to the people with the most assets?

"The people with the most assets" in aggregate are the upper middle class, lawyers and nurses and chemical engineers, not Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

But Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are part of the upper class. There's the whole "millionaires paid by billionares" type stuff.

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

#228

Post by bbddg »

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…

The top 3 richest people (Gates, Buffet, Bezos) own more wealth than the bottom 50% of the country.

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

#229

Post by carapace »

Slightly tangential, but I want to point out that there's a way forward without pesticides and without economic disaster: We can switch to a "horticultural" mode of civilization. The idea is that we use applied ecology to create curated ecosystems that have a high proportion of plants that are agriculturally productive. (Not to be mysterious, I'm talking about Permaculture et. al. but that term seems to upset a few people so I just say "applied ecology" now.) "Food forest" is a search term to try..

Here's a talk "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture" by Toby Hemenway (RIP) where he talks about how we got into this mess and how we might get out.

http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-with...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6b7zJ-hx_c

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

#230

Post by ced »

gravelc wrote: post #22

I'm part of a group developing RNAi-based pesticides which are topically applied (so non-GM). They are extremely species specific; when designed properly they can avoid even close relatives of the target insect, and the by-product of the active ingredient is degraded RNA, which is harmless. The OECD had a meeting on it recently to help develop a regulatory framework - link here if interested ( https://www.oecd.org/ch…

Can you explain how it works? Why does it degrade when a human ingests it, but kills the insects it targets?
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