Capitalism needs to be fixed immediately! The root cause is that short-term profits are more important than sustainability. Using pesticides is just one of many symptoms.
Pesticides are killing the world's soils
51–60 of 231 posts
Re: Pesticides are killing the world's soils
#52Does anyone have sources for suggestions about what we should do? I read these articles, and worry, and wonder what can I do. It's not clear to me that buying organic mono-cropped bananas at the mega mart is in anyway better or worse than buying non-organic mono-cropped bananas. I'd really like to just build up some more understanding on what I can do in my daily life to make things not worse.
Eat more diverse foods. Large monocrops are a huge part of this problem, both in the field and in the farmer’s pocket book. Commodity crops are are the mercy of many more forces working against the farmer, and the narrow margins help push people into expediencies. Four commodity grain crops are most of our volume, and if one develops a pernicious enough pest or pathogen we are truly fucked.
So eat weird fruits, vegetables, legumes. Get used to multigrain bread.
Re: Pesticides are killing the world's soils
#53The much demonized Roundup actually greatly reduces pesticide volume needed compared to older pesticides. Save the environment, love Monsanto.
Re: Pesticides are killing the world's soils
#54I've watched the entire cycle in the past thirty years as a former agronomist. We were able to genetically modify plants so they generated natural pesticides as a defense against insects. This allowed us to stop spraying thousands of tons of less insecticides. But the very people complaining about spraying chemicals rejected these new enhanced plants saying they weren't 'natural'. We have been breeding plants to do t…
Why do you think plants that produce pesticides are not an environmental problem of their own? Bees are dying from neonics getting into the pollen. You willing to bet the biosphere that you’re right, and nothing bad will happen?
I'm willing to bet it's less bad than the status quo.
Sure, bad things will happen with a few GM crops, but worse things will probably happen from existing non-GM farming practices. I think most experts would also agree with that assesment.
Re: Pesticides are killing the world's soils
#55In Switzerland, we're soon going to vote on two initiatives ¹² aiming at reducing pesticide use. The first is essentially about forbidding the use of all artificial pesticides by 2031 (also importation of food that was produced abroad using pesticides). The second is about removing subsidies to farmers that use any kind of pesticide, or regularly use antibiotics on their livestock, etc. I feel like they are quite dra…
Both initiatives are indeed quite drastic, but so is the decline in biodiversity. Double yes from my side!
Re: Pesticides are killing the world's soils
#56I work on developing pesticides based on RNA, which should significantly reduce adverse impacts on the environment (including soils) if commercialised and adopted. Biodegradable and highly species specific. https://phys.org/news/2021-01-rnai-based-products-sustainabl... Still more development to be done, but there are alternatives to existing synthetic pesticides on the horizon.
When we first started using pesticides we didn't understand the long term implications. How can you be so confident that you understand the long term implications of an arguably much more complex application (genetic vs chemical)?
There could be unintended consequences associated with any crop protection approach - synthetic, organic, whatever.
However, the active ingredient, double-stranded RNA, is ubiquitous in nature without obvious adverse impacts. It degrades very readily. It doesn't impact gene expression in mammals, even if completely homologous to a transcript (which is why in contrast to synthetic short interfering RNAs there's no obvious use as a therapeutic). It's an extraordinarily narrow spectrum approach, which is quite different to anything in the past, and why the approach is receiving a lot of interest and investment.
There's ongoing synthesis of data on environmental impacts. Have a read: https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocument...
Re: Pesticides are killing the world's soils
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We were able to genetically modify plants so they generated natural pesticides as a defense against insects. Isn't this the good old "naturalistic fallacy" though? Would you eat a poisonous mushroom because the poison is "natural"? You can at least wash some pesticides off. I'm not a biologist but I'm sure there is a difference between crossing different varieties of peas versus introducing a non-pea (or maybe non-…
Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a naturally occurring bacterium in the soil that produces proteins specifically active against certain insects. This is the exact same insecticide used by certified organic growers. Plant breeders have just engineered the plants to produce it in their leaves, not in the corn itself. For thirty years objections have been raised, scientific research has been done disproving the objections…
There are other political reasons for the ban... Do you want your whole food supply dependant on licensing from another nation who is an ally today, but could use this as a bargaining chip to "do as we say or we'll stop licensing you corn and destroy your agriculture industry".
Re: Pesticides are killing the world's soils
#58I've watched the entire cycle in the past thirty years as a former agronomist. We were able to genetically modify plants so they generated natural pesticides as a defense against insects. This allowed us to stop spraying thousands of tons of less insecticides. But the very people complaining about spraying chemicals rejected these new enhanced plants saying they weren't 'natural'. We have been breeding plants to do t…
Why do you think plants that produce pesticides are not an environmental problem of their own? Bees are dying from neonics getting into the pollen. You willing to bet the biosphere that you’re right, and nothing bad will happen?
Surely it's better to replace indiscriminate spraying of substances known to be harmful with GMO crops carefully bred to have the smallest changes possible?
Re: Pesticides are killing the world's soils
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't a healthier ecosystem better handle mosquitoes, though? Predators of mosquitoes are bats, birds, fishes, frogs…
A healthy ecosystem in Singapore will be chock-full of mosquitoes and no humans. The island started out as a swamp.
And yet 5 million humans swarmed in and Singapore is among the highest nominal GDP countries in the world. Shows that there's little hope bringing balance between humanity and other species in the current economic system.
Re: Pesticides are killing the world's soils
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a naturally occurring bacterium in the soil that produces proteins specifically active against certain insects. This is the exact same insecticide used by certified organic growers. Plant breeders have just engineered the plants to produce it in their leaves, not in the corn itself. For thirty years objections have been raised, scientific research has been done disproving the objections…
There are other political reasons for the ban... Do you want your whole food supply dependant on licensing from another nation who is an ally today, but could use this as a bargaining chip to "do as we say or we'll stop licensing you corn and destroy your agriculture industry".
Sure, but licensing/patents are entirely separate from the environment benefits here.