Against Pesticides Quotes

Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and so forth. Most individuals are not in a position to secure themselves against these threats to more [than] a very limited extent.

I loathe popular pulp, I loathe go-go gangs, I loathe jungle music, I loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories. I especially loathe vulgar movies—cripples raping nuns under tables, or naked-girl breasts squeezing against the tanned torsos of repulsive young males. And, really, I don't think I mock popular trash more often than do other authors who believe with me that a good laugh is the best pesticide.

Thank you for inviting me here today " I said my voice sounding nothing like me. "I'm here to testify about things I've seen and experienced myself. I'm here because the human race has become more powerful than ever. We've gone to the moon. Our crops resist diseases and pests. We can stop and restart a human heart. And we've harvested vast amounts of energy for everything from night-lights to enormous super-jets. We've even created new kinds of people, like me. "But everything mankind" - I frowned - "personkind has accomplished has had a price. One that we're all gonna have to pay." I heard coughing and shifting in the audience. I looked down at my notes and all the little black words blurred together on the page. I just could not get through this. I put the speech down picked up the microphone and came out from behind the podium. "Look " I said. "There's a lot of official stuff I could quote and put up on the screen with PowerPoint. But what you need to know what the world needs to know is that we're really destroying the earth in a bigger and more catastrophic was than anyone has ever imagined. "I mean I've seen a lot of the world the only world we have. There are so many awesome beautiful tings in it. Waterfalls and mountains thermal pools surrounded by sand like white sugar. Field and field of wildflowers. Places where the ocean crashes up against a mountainside like it's done for hundreds of thousands of years. "I've also seen concrete cities with hardly any green. And rivers whose pretty rainbow surfaces came from an oil leak upstream. Animals are becoming extinct right now in my lifetime. Just recently I went through one of the worst hurricanes ever recorded. It was a whole lot worse because of huge worldwide climatic changes caused by... us. We the people." .... "A more perfect union While huge corporations do whatever they want to whoever they want and other people live in subway tunnels Where's the justice of that Kids right here in America go to be hungry every night while other people get four-hundred-dollar haircuts. Promote the general welfare Where's the General welfare in strip-mining toxic pesticides industrial solvents being dumped into rivers killing everything Domestic Tranquility Ever sleep in a forest that's being clear-cut You'd be hearing chain saws in your head for weeks. The blessings of liberty Yes. I'm using one of the blessings of liberty right now my freedom of speech to tell you guys who make the laws that the very ground you stand on the house you live in the children you tuck in at night are all in immediate catastrophic danger.

An apple a day might have kept the doctor away prior to the industrialization of food growing and preparation. But, according to research compiled by the United States Drug Administration (USDA) today’s apple contains residue of eleven different neurotoxins—azinphos, methyl chloripyrifos, diazinon, dimethoate, ethion, omthoate, parathion, parathion methyl, phosalone, and phosmet — and the USDA was testing for only one category of chemicals known as organophosphate insecticides. That doesn’t sound too appetizing does it? The average apple is sprayed with pesticides seventeen times before it is harvested.

By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic--large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination--is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc. Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it.

We are dealing, then, with an absurdity that is not a quirk or an accident, but is fundamental to our character as people. The split between what we think and what we do is profound. It is not just possible, it is altogether to be expected, that our society would produce conservationists who invest in strip-mining companies, just as it must inevitably produce asthmatic executives whose industries pollute the air and vice-presidents of pesticide corporations whose children are dying of cancer. And these people will tell you that this is the way the "real world" works. The will pride themselves on their sacrifices for "our standard of living." They will call themselves "practical men" and "hardheaded realists." And they will have their justifications in abundance from intellectuals, college professors, clergymen, politicians. The viciousness of a mentality that can look complacently upon disease as "part of the cost" would be obvious to any child. But this is the "realism" of millions of modern adults. There is no use pretending that the contradiction between what we think or say and what we do is a limited phenomenon. There is no group of the extra-intelligent or extra-concerned or extra-virtuous that is exempt. I cannot think of any American whom I know or have heard of, who is not contributing in some way to destruction. The reason is simple: to live undestructively in an economy that is overwhelmingly destructive would require of any one of us, or of any small group of us, a great deal more work than we have yet been able to do. How could we divorce ourselves completely and yet responsibly from the technologies and powers that are destroying our planet? The answer is not yet thinkable, and it will not be thinkable for some time -- even though there are now groups and families and persons everywhere in the country who have begun the labor of thinking it. And so we are by no means divided, or readily divisible, into environmental saints and sinners. But there are legitimate distinctions that need to be made. These are distinctions of degree and of consciousness. Some people are less destructive than others, and some are more conscious of their destructiveness than others. For some, their involvement in pollution, soil depletion, strip-mining, deforestation, industrial and commercial waste is simply a "practical" compromise, a necessary "reality," the price of modern comfort and convenience. For others, this list of involvements is an agenda for thought and work that will produce remedies. People who thus set their lives against destruction have necessarily confronted in themselves the absurdity that they have recognized in their society. They have first observed the tendency of modern organizations to perform in opposition to their stated purposes. They have seen governments that exploit and oppress the people they are sworn to serve and protect, medical procedures that produce ill health, schools that preserve ignorance, methods of transportation that, as Ivan Illich says, have 'created more distances than they... bridge.' And they have seen that these public absurdities are, and can be, no more than the aggregate result of private absurdities; the corruption of community has its source in the corruption of character. This realization has become the typical moral crisis of our time. Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an achievement that much of the Republican Party has been trying to undo over the past several decades. Richard Nixon signed into law four landmark federal bills: the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Environmental Pesticide Control Act, and the Endangered Species Act. He established the Environmental Protection Agency, and made many strong environmental appointments in his administration. As we saw in Section 2.2, it was when the Reagan administration came to power in 1980 that environmental concern began to become a partisan issue.

Many had been raped and most of these rape victims had fallen prey to male members of their own family, usually their own fathers. Unmarried women who became pregnant as a result of these rapes were murdered as soon as their condition was discovered to wash away the disgrace and keep the scandal hidden. In some cases the murderer was the rapist himself. Some victims were deliberately poisoned with the pesticides that were used to spray the apple trees in that region famous for its apple production. The death certificate would read: “Death from natural causes.” No doctor was required to obtain a death certificate for these women. Witnesses were sufficient.

(“We live in a world in which relatively few people—maybe 500 or 1,000—make the important decisions”—Philip B. Heymann of Harvard Law School, quoted by Anthony Lewis, New York Times, April 21, 1995.) Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and so forth. Most individuals are not in a position to secure themselves against these threats to more [than] a very limited extent.

About 74 percent of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, and 93.2 percent have metabolic dysfunction. These numbers sound high until you realize how many levers of modern society are stacked against our mitochondria and metabolism: too much sugar, too much stress, too much sitting, too much pollution, too many pills, too many pesticides, too many screens, too little sleep, and too little micronutrients. These trends—with trillions of dollars behind them—are causing epidemic levels of mitochondrial dysfunction and underpowered, sick, inflamed bodies.

At any rate, so monsters produced eggs, huh? I wondered if Armored Warriors had offspring as well. I pictured a mini version of them as big as a felt doll, carrying a toy sword and waddling around. I imagined their armored mommy and armored daddy watching over them happily. Then, suddenly, footsteps—an intruder. The armored mommy and daddy instruct their son to hide as they step out onto the battlefield. Paul appears before them, his face like that of a demon. He brutally murders the parents with a shortsword that is especially efficient at ripping through their armor—not unlike pesticide against insects. The child witnesses this and learns that humans are the enemy. He grows up and morphs into a beast that attacks humans on sight. Yeah, okay, that was a ridiculous thought.

[from an entry by her daughter Camille] If nobody is spritzing chemicals on the predators, all a plant can do is toughen up by manufacturing its own disease/pest-fighting compounds. That's why organic produce shows significantly higher levels of antioxidants than conventional--these nutritious compounds evolved in the plant not for our health, but for the plant's. Several studies, including research done by Allison Byrum of the American Chemical Society, have shown fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides and herbicides to contain 50 to 60 percent more antioxidants than their sprayed counterparts. The same antioxidants that fight diseases and pests in the plant leaf work similar magic in the human body, protecting us ... against various diseases, cell aging, and tumor growth.

It is said that the mineral that exists within a plant is what helps the plant fight off pests that can destroy it. That is why conventional farming methods require pesticides—the lack of mineral in those crops has rendered them helpless against invaders.

The reasons for weaponizing division are not mysterious. Racial fear prevents Americans from building community with one another and community is the lifeblood of a functioning democratic society. Throughout our history, racist language has been used to turn American against American in order to benefit the wealthy elite. Every time Mr. Trump attacks refugees is a time that could be spent discussing the president's unwillingness to raise the federal minimum wage for up to 33 million Americans. Every racist attack on four members of Congress is a moment he doesn't have to address why his choice for labor secretary has spent his career defending Wall Street banks and Walmart at the expense of workers. When he is launching attacks on the free press, he isn't talking about why his Environmental Protection Agency just refused to ban a pesticide linked to brain damage in children. (7/25/2019 in the New York Times)

Not unlike the herbicide-spraying campaigns in Asia, Central Europe was also flown over by helicopters spraying chemicals intended to wipe out the deciduous forests, which had gone out of fashion. Beech and oak trees held very little value at that time; low oil prices meant that no one was interested in firewood. The scales were tilted in favour of spruce – sought after by the timber industry and safe from being devoured by the high game populations. Over 5,000 square kilometres of deciduous woodlands was cleared just in my local region of Eifel and Hunsrück, through this merciless method of dropping death from the air. The carrier for the substance, sold under the trade name Tormona, was diesel oil. Elements of this mixture may still lurk in the soil of our forests today; the rusty diesel drums are certainly still lying around in some places. Have things improved now? Not completely, because chemical sprays are still used, even if they’re not directed at the trees themselves. The target of the helicopters and trucks with their atomising nozzles is the insects that feed on the trees and wood. Because the drab spruce and pine monocultures give free rein to bark beetles and butterfly caterpillars, these are then bumped off with contact insecticides. The pesticides, with names like Karate, are so lethal for three months that mere contact spells the end for any unfortunate insects. Parts of a forest that have been sprayed with pesticide are usually marked and fenced off for a while, but wood piles at the side of the track are often not considered dangerous. I would therefore advise against sitting on them when you’re ready for a rest stop and look out for a mossy stump instead, which is guaranteed to be harmless. This is quite apart from the fact that freshly harvested softwood is often very resinous. The stains don’t come out in the normal wash; you need to attack it with a special stain remover. Stacked wood carries another danger: the whole pile is liable to come crashing down. When you know that a single trunk can weigh hundreds of kilograms, you tend to stay away from a precariously stacked pile. It’s not for nothing that the German name for a wood stack is Polter, as in the crashing and banging of a poltergeist. Back to the poison. In areas sprayed by helicopter I wouldn’t pick berries or mushrooms for the rest of the summer. Otherwise, the forest is low in harmful substances compared to industrial agriculture.

Have you ever thought of why its called ''two edge sword'' ? 1. It is the bread knife and normal knife 2. its the burglar proof in your house against thieves and the space you put in place to escape yourself when there is fire out break in your house. 3) Have you realize people trying to kill all the pest on the plant so much that they forget they will at the end eat it ? Trying to kill the mosquito in the room you spray so much pesticide you forget you will sleep in it later? When you preach Grace only to cover your nakedness, how do you expect people to take you seriously? WHEN THE TRUMPET gives an uncertain sound, How do the soldiers know when to prepare for war? God help me remember that in the Holiest of Hollies, THE MERCY SEAT WAS PLACED ON THE ARK WHERE IN THE WORD (SWORD) LAID.

One wonders whether Rachel Carson would have been as adamant against the use of genetically modified Bt crops as many environmentalists have been in more recent times. Moreover, given the book’s ambivalence over the use of chemical pesticides, it raises the question of how far she would have traveled on this branch of the Other Road that she herself pointed out.

Originally, all foods were “organic”—grown without synthetic pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers or hormones. Large-scale farming with chemicals began around World War II, around the same time that food processing exploded. Large-scale farming works against the natural cycles of the earth, relying on chemicals to produce big returns. This process has depleted much of the world’s soil of its minerals and nutrients. The resulting vegetable and animal foods are not only deficient in nutrients, but they are also full of pollutants and agrochemicals.

Arugula: Loaded with minerals and antioxidants. Delicious cruciferous vegetable that helps protect us against toxins, especially xenohormones (hormone disruptors in pesticides, plastics, pollution, etc.), and helps us detoxify. Protects us against cancer. Loaded with indole-3-carbinol. Tastes great raw or cooked. 10.

To grow the plants and animals that made up my meal, no pesticides found their way into any farmworker’s bloodstream, no nitrogen runoff or growth hormones seeped into the watershed, no soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were squandered, no subsidy checks were written. If the high price of my all-organic meal is weighed against the comparatively low price it exacted from the larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in karmic terms, like a real bargain.

You, too, can have your own little slice of paradise; all you have to do is destroy that paradise in the process. This kind of banal desire, and the greed that sold it, has been Florida’s true destruction. Developers pitted man versus nature, not as it had been before as a struggle for survival out in a harsh and remote wilderness, but as a struggle to uphold a false hierarchy of creation. Humans are more important than animals, they said. The soil is ours to scourge and conquer. Marketing has convinced us that trivial luxuries are more important than the natural world, as if we are not part of the natural world ourselves, as if our consumption is not a bid against our own interests, one in favor of concrete and routine against the unwieldy and awe-inspiring, monotony against biodiversity, pesticides against night music, the greed of a few against life itself on our planet. Dozens of species go extinct every day, with perhaps a million more under threat of extinction within our lifetime. Corporate greed tells us this doesn’t merit our attention. If you feel bad, cut back on your own, because it’s certainly not their fault. Such PR sleight of hand shifts the blame, feeds our guilt, inflames our anxiety, convinces us to consume more and more, until we give up caring, if we ever cared at all. Without thinking, we have become numb to the quiet collapse going on around us. Everything is connected. A species dying is a piece of our world dying. If the world dies, we die, too.

Dr. Offit vocally supports GMO foods93 and chemical pesticides and is an obstreperous foe of vitamins, nutrition, and integrative medicine.94 He warns against the fallacy of going “GMO free,” and takes the radical position that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) is harmless. He bitterly demonizes Rachel Carson for killing millions of people by hatching the plot against Monsanto’s DDT.95

In 2015, 92 percent of all corn, 94 percent of all cotton, and 94 percent of all soybeans grown in the United States were genetically engineered in this way. The altered crops offer considerable environmental and economic advantages. By planting crops that have enhanced abilities to protect themselves against pests, farmers can attain higher yields while reducing their reliance on harsh chemical pesticides and herbicides.

philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man,” she wrote.15 Herbicides and pesticides represented the very worst kind of “cave man” thinking—a club “hurled against the fabric of life.” The indiscriminate application of chemicals was, Carson warned, harming people, killing birds, and turning the country’s waterways into “rivers of death.” Instead of promoting pesticides and herbicides, government agencies ought to be eliminating them; “a truly extraordinary variety of alternatives” were available. An alternative Carson particularly recommended was setting one biological agent against another. For instance, a parasite could be imported to feed on an unwanted insect. “In that book the problem—the villain—was the broad, almost unrestricted use of chemicals, particularly the chlorinated hydrocarbons, like DDT,” Andrew Mitchell, a