We'll get back to the yard and garden, and the larger environment radiating out from there. But let's look inside the house, first.
We are told that we should consider our houses to be places where no insect ever should be, and that if there is even one roach, it is not a fit place for a new baby. Here I am referring to one specific ad. A young woman was planning to bring her new baby home from the hospital the following day. She saw a roach and said, more or less, "I'm not bringing MY baby home to a house full of bugs!" She went on to say that she went out and bought this or that and sprayed, and now her house is bug-free and is now a fit place to bring a baby into. WRONG!! That roach would not have done that baby any harm. But now the whole house is toxic, and that young woman is going to bring her newborn baby into that house to be poisoned. A few years later the school is telling her about her child's learning difficulties, behavior problems, hyperactivity/ADD("Attention Deficit Disorder"), and so on. And for a frighteningly large percentage - estimated right now to be about 25% - cancer, sooner or later.
Talk to anybody who has an aquarium, or someone who has small birds. What happens to them when you do a "routine" bug-spraying or -bombing? If it kills small birds and fish dead as a wedge, do you really think that house is healthy for YOU and your CHILDREN?
Let's go back outside. We are told more or less the same thing. If there are bugs in your grass or in the trees or the garden, they MUST BE KILLED. And if there are any plants growing that you or your landscaper didn't put there, they must also die. And if your lawn is not thicker and greener and more weed-free than your neighbor's, you are to be held in contempt by your neighbors and your family. If you live in a town like mine, your city government licenses companies who will come and spray your entire property with a broad-spectrum herbicide/fungicide/insecticide/fertilizer. When they call you on the phone to solicit your business, they will tell you a pack of the most outrageous lies; depending on the TV to have already planted those notions in your head. They will tell you that in your particular area (it doesn't matter where) there are insects which will prevent you from having the lawn that you should have - various myths are spread around about chinch bugs and mole crickets and on and on. When it comes to the flower garden and the vegetable garden, it will be about aphids and caterpillars and such. (Do you and your children love butterflies? Know where they come from?). And they will end up with the most atrocious lie of all: "After all, there's no harm in it."
WRONG!! There is enormous, incalculable harm; leaving the insects aside for a moment, among the things we are not told is that these substances are more harmful to birds and fish and amphibians and reptiles than to insects. (Do you like birds? What do you think of the idea of birds feeding poisoned insects to their babies?)
Let's focus down on a few specific kinds of insects commonly found in urban/suburban/semirural lawns and gardens.
Bees: honeybees, bumblebees; many other small bees and wasps. Their importance can not be overemphasized. They are the pollinators that a great many plants depend on for reproduction; some of our vegetable crops depend utterly on them. They are being devastated all over the nation, to the point of crisis in some areas.
Aphids: these are very small (1/8" +/-), greenish or nearly transparent through shades of brown; some with wings and some without. They live on the tender new growth of roses, hibiscus, okra, and many other plants. We usually hear about them in connection with roses - ("You must dust your rosebushes regularly.") It is true that a large population of them will do some damage to rosebuds and to certain other flowers and some vegetables as well. But in a balanced ecosystem, the aphid is only one species among a great many. Without the dusts and sprays, the aphids, along with spider mites, mealybugs, and many others, would be the food of other insects, along with birds and lizards and so on. A very important controller of aphids is the Ladybird Beetle. And you'll find that the dust you put on your roses kills ladybugs more effectively than it kills the aphids.
But don't the manufacturers know that? Why would they knowingly kill the very predator which would help with the "problem" bug? You're going to have to get rid of the naive notion that those people are serving your best interests, as the image so carefully fed to you on TV would have it. Those corporate directors are serving nothing but the profit motive; they don't give the first damn about doing what is right. They are indeed deliberately designing that dust to kill the lady bugs. Here's the point:
For every organism impacted by such a chemical, we can speak of a "bounce-back" time, the time it takes a population of that creature to get back to something like a normal level. The bounce-back time of the ladybird is much LONGER than that of the aphid. Ladybugs will take weeks to recover from one dusting, but the APHIDS will be back in full force a couple days after the dust has blown away (to poison the rest of the earth) or has been washed off (to poison all sorts of other creatures in the soil of your garden - most of them beneficial). So where does that leave you? The aphids are back, likely worse than before, because now there are no ladybugs keeping their number down. So - off to the store to buy more Sevin dust.
Maybe you don't use pesticides and herbicides - if so, good for you! But maybe you
DO use fertilizer*, in which case, read on...
*
Note that "fertilizer", as used here, does NOT include organic
materials such as manure, green manure, mulch, or compost. These are sometimes
identified as "organic fertilizers", but for our purpose here, "fertilizer" should
be taken to mean the synthetic stuff that people who don't know any better buy at
the garden department at *Mart.
If you have been buying "turfbuilder" or "weednfeed" or "6-6-6" or whatever granulated artificial fertilizer, thinking that you have been told the truth that there's "no harm in it", you'd better smell the coffee again, because the very same people who design the rose dust design the fertilizer too. Its primary purpose is to kill every organism in your soil that has anything to do with natural fertility. Put it on your lawn once and you are their slave forever. Since the natural fertility of the soil has been destroyed, when the fertilizer wears off you don't go back to where you were before you applied it. Now it won't grow anything at all. So off to the store we go to buy more of it - and MORE is the operative word - the same amount won't get you there this time. You have to buy more... and more... as your soil is progressively ruined.
Another good example of exactly the same rotten conspiracy: Chemical manufacturers approach county officials with "information packets" on mosquito control. They go on and on about new strains of malaria or encephalitis that are raging through the nation and the necessity of controlling mosquitoes. (But did you ever notice that you never hear any such thing in any other connection?) Nowhere in their information packet will there be one word about all the creatures who feed on mosquitoes and who need them to nourish their young - bats; putple martins; many swallows and nighthawks and whippoorwills and so on; and above all, MOSQUITO FISH. Wherever there is a body of shallow water that mosquitoes are breeding, there will be tiny mosquito fish feeding on them and keeping their number down.
Along comes the spray truck. And now I must tell you the unpleasant truth about what really happens as a result of that spraying. The part they don't tell you and try by every means to keep you from finding out. They are feathering their nest just like the producers of the rose dust. The bounce-back time of the fish is measured in weeks or months (some kinds of mosquito fish are ready to breed when only some eight weeks of age); but the bounce-back time of the mosquito is a matter of DAYS. Long before the population of fish can recover to anywhere near the level needed to control them, the mosquitoes are back worse than ever - of course they are - their numbers are not being held down by the fish. So the mosquito control office gets a lot of calls about the mosquitoes; and they send the spray trucks out again. Systematically eliminated are the mosquito FISH, not the mosquitos.
The very same bodies of shallow water are the breeding places of amphibians - frogs, tree frogs, toads, salamanders... - who eat mosquito larvae in the tadpole stage and eat mosquitoes as adults. They are also killed by the spraying MUCH more effectively than the mosquitoes, to the point where the whole spectrum of amphibians, like the bees, are disappearing from the whole nation. The importance of this CAN NOT be emphasized enough. Some ecologists believe that the die-off of amphibians will be the death of us all. No kidding.
more on poisoning