An Environmental Article from All-Creatures.org



Pesticides: Existential Danger

From Evaggelos Vallianatos, CounterPunch.org
September 2024


In our culture there are no Greek gods, but hubris is the king. We have this manufactured illusion we know better than our ancient ancestors. So, industrialized farmers and fossil fuel billionaires see nothing wrong in poisoning the Earth and the very food we eat.

Pesticides are the guts of giant mechanized agriculture. They are the pillars of one-crop farming. They kill visible and invisible insects and other organisms around the seeds in the soil and around the growing crop. In fact, the genetically engineered seeds give rise to a pesticide-crop. In other words, the farmer uses pesticides and grows pesticides.


Corrupt Legislation. Mural by Elihu Vedder, 1896. Lobby, Reading Room, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Public Domain. A beautiful woman dressed in red represents Congress. On her right, a young woman is offering a modest gift, but, at the same time, on the left side of the woman-Congress, a rich man dressed like an ancient Roman is offering a gift of money certain to outweigh the grapes of the young woman-people. Thus, we see the mechanism of corruption and Congressional corrupt legislation in favor of the privileged rich.

When I started working for the Pesticides Program of the US Environmental Protection Agency in May 1979, I never imagined that pesticides were so pervasive and disruptive in both society and nature. But my college education in zoology and history quickly bridged the gap. As an “analyst,” I worked closely with toxicologists, biologists, ecologists and economists. I listened to their discussions and read their memos. I attended meetings between industry lobbyists and senior EPA officials and scientists. I realized outsiders – mostly lobbyists — were trying to influence, indeed, impose their ideas on what EPA scientists thought of the hazardous materials they regulated.

It did not take me long to figure out I was in the midst of a scientific community under attack from within and without. The multi-billion dollars pesticide industry was determined to have its way, no matter who run Congress and the White House. Elihu Vedder’s Corrupt Legislation had triumphed. But before explaining the consequences of corruption, some historical background helps.

From Nature to petrochemicals

Pesticides are the guts of giant mechanized agriculture. They are the pillars of one-crop farming. They kill visible and invisible insects and other organisms around the seeds in the soil and around the growing crop. In fact, the genetically engineered seeds give rise to a pesticide-crop. In other words, the farmer uses pesticides and grows pesticides.

However, before chemical pesticides appeared in the growing of food, a new civilization emerged in Europe. That civilization was made up of mechanical view of nature, which were supported by a plethora of machines to do what farm animals and humans did in the growing of food. This emerging factory prepared the road to giant agriculture – and pesticides. This mechanical universe was a result of the ethical failure of our age.

The eras of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, and that of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century absorbed the scientific and technological remnants of Greek civilization but ignored its ethical background. The Greeks thought of the Earth, the natural world, and, particularly, agriculture as sacred, an idea wholly alien to the Christians and other monotheists of Europe.

The Europeans kept the Roman legacy of slave-powered large farms. The result was industrialized farming. It started in late nineteenth century. Machines replaced animals in the cultivation of the land and the irrigation and harvesting of crops. The size of the farms expanded without limits. Stone and wooden fences between farms became obsolete. The new mechanized farm surpassed the slave-run plantation of medieval Europe.

Almost nothing could stand on its way, least of all animals. In 2020, the Grace Communications Foundation rightly concluded that Big Ag has been addicted to petroleum. Farmers burn vast quantities of petroleum for running their large tractors and other machines. They burn even more petroleum in the “inputs” they use, huge quantities of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, without which they are dead in the water.

Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE, including:

  • From Nature to petrochemicals
  • Climate chaos
  • Nemesis
  • DDT - a chemical and political weapon
  • DDT wars
  • Forever DDT?
  • The politics of dumping DDT
  • Oleum / SOO sludge
  • Metaphysics of the DDT pollution and crime
  • Wildlife and humans in a sea of poisons and toxic wastes
  • Pesticides cause ecocide and disease
  • Cleaning the ocean

spraying DDT 1953
German farmers spraying DDT, 15 August 1953. German Federal Archive. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-20820-0001 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 Photo: Krueger. Wikipedia Commons.


Posted on All-Creatures.org: September 18, 2024
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