The environmentalists, greeners and others are pushing Congress to outlaw so many pesticides that farmers are fearing for their crops.
Les Blumenthal of The Olympian reports that the Center for Biological Diversity reportedly is spearheading a lawsuit to ban nearly 400 pesticides, alleging that the Environmental Protection Agency has neglected to protect almost 900 species currently on the Endangered Species Act. But if these alarmists keep fomenting hysteria about cancers caused by chemicals and salmon dying in our streams, we’ll all soon be eating nothing but Soylent Green.
Remember Soylent Green, the 1973 movie starring Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson and Leigh-Taylor-Young? In an overpopulated futuristic Earth, a New York police detective was marked for murder because he was about to discover the true origin of a revolutionary and needed new foodstuff. “They're making our food out of people,” one of the characters claimed.
Author Michael Fumento, in an article titled Are Pesticides Really So Bad? pointed out that despite our fears, food is safer and more plentiful than ever before. He quoted Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues, as saying that organic gardening – the highly touted alternative to pesticides – couldn’t give us as much food yield as we needed to feed ourselves (not to mention half the world). It is reported that 20 percent to 40 percent of global crop production is lost each year because of weeds, pests and disease.
Bill Moyers rightly pointed out in one of his PBS Frontline shows, that farmers must constantly wage war against pests and insects; now they must also battle environmentalists who appear to totally ignore the benefits of pesticides.
God bless Rachel Carson for raising public awareness about the dangers of DDT in her book Silent Spring. But as so often happens, mass hysteria soon developed. DDT had performed wondrously in the war against malaria-carrying mosquitoes, but when Sri Lanka stopped spraying mosquitoes, malaria cases jumped back up from nearly zero to 2.5 million and 10,000 deaths before spraying resumed.
Many of our popular fruit crops simply could not survive without pesticides: strawberries, cherries, grapes, peaches, cantaloupe, apples and others. But of all the pesticides fruits and vegetables contain, 99.9 percent of it is naturally occurring. Many of these pesticides are produced by the fruits and veggies themselves to ward off rodents and other pests.
About 7 billion people live on the earth today. That’s up from 4 billion the year Soylent Green hit the theaters. There is no way on God’s green earth to feed all those people without pesticides.
Your morning cup of coffee probably contains 10 milligrams of natural carcinogens. Potatoes (French fries) contain solanine and chaconine, natural chemicals to ward off bad bugs. It is estimated that 99.9% of all pesticides by weight are natural. Even vitamins taken in large doses can be toxic.
This mass hysteria against pesticides reminds Sam and me of a lynch mob standing outside the sheriff’s office wanting to hang a man whether they’re sure he’s guilty or not. Let’s give the farmers a break already.
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