Poisoning the Environment

Just a quickie, a hold-that-thought post:

Two things — herbicides and pesticides, and controlling vermin.

Humans are an intelligent evolved species. We didn’t get where we are by allowing the environment to take over our lives — we legitimately manage our environment in enlightened ways that secure the future of humanity.

Rats we control — scare away from habitation, kill as humanely as we can if we have to. Except for domesticated individuals we don’t invite rat tribes to share our space. Crows we control, they outcompete for food supplies and steal eggs from physically weaker species. Moles we control, and so on.

Ditto, we control invertebrate pests and vigorous weeds in agriculture and domestic gardening. We do it with as much humanity and consideration for unintended consequences as we can, but we do it.

But we’ve controlled ourselves down to barely sustainable levels.

Whether it’s controlling crows on grouse-moors or moorland inhabited by Curlew (@BBCR4Today, today) — takes some ingenuity, not to disturb other breeding species and the environment more generally. In our domestic garden context — judicious scaring and discouraging seems to work, but only just. It is ideological to defend crows rights as somehow sacrosanct over broader environmental care.

Neonicotinoids have a bad rap for poisoning bees and other pollinating insects beyond originally intended environmental control — obviously before that the likes of DDT were the villain.

As herbicides, strong poisons used to be the norm 2–4-DP, Paraquat, Chlorate, you name it. These days domestically at least — there is only one game in town — Glyphosate, whether it’s branded RoundUp or not, made by Monsanto or not.

Neonics and Glyphosate have their own unintended consequences — we need to care about that. But the fact is these “modern” control chemicals are much less effective that older blunter instruments AND with more pervasive negative consequences.

Safer to use simple strong poisons — oxidising agents and other crude methods — that degrade into safer side-products locally, than persistent and pervasive complex chemicals. (I now Glyphosate degrades — but it’s so safe it’s useless for its intended purpose except when used on an industrial scale — counter-intuitive unintended consequence is the drive for greater use(!) — eg for crop desiccation as well as herbicidal use.)

KISS — otherwise we’re just kicking environmental risks into the long grass.

Originally published at Psybertron Asks.