The history of life on Earth has been the history of the interaction of organisms and their surroundings. To a large extent, the natural forms and habits of plants and animals on Earth are caused by the environment. As far as the entire phase of Earth time is concerned, the reaction of life to transform the environment has actually been relatively small. It was only after the emergence of a new species of life, human beings, that life acquired the anomalous ability to transform the nature around it.
Over the past quarter-century, this power has not only grown quantitatively to the point of generating harassment, but has also undergone a qualitative change. Of all the human attacks on the environment, the most alarming is that the air, land, rivers and oceans are polluted by dangerous, even deadly substances. This pollution is largely difficult to recover, and it has entered not only the world on which life depends, but also the interior of biological tissues. This chain of evil is largely irreversible. In the current widespread pollution of this environment, chemicals play a harmful role in changing the nature of nature and its life, and they can at least be compared with radioactive hazards. Strontium-90, released in a nuclear explosion, will rush to the ground with rain and dust, stay in the soil, and then enter the growing weeds, grains or wheat, and continue to enter the bones of the human being, and remain there until it completely decays. Similarly, chemicals scattered into farmland, forests, and vegetable gardens are stored in the soil for a long time, then enter the tissues of living organisms and are constantly transported in a chain that causes poisoning and death. Sometimes they mysteriously move with the flow of groundwater, and when they reappear, they combine under the action of air and sunlight into new forms, a new substance that can kill plants and livestock, and cause unwitting harm to those who have been drinking well water for a long time. As Albert Schweitzer said, "It is precisely difficult for people to discern the devil they have created." ”
Millions of years have passed since life now inhabited the earth from scratch. During this time, evolving, evolving, and evolving life reaches a state of harmony and balance with its surroundings. In an environment that strictly shapes and dominates life, it contains elements that are harmful and beneficial to life. Some rocks emit dangerous rays, and even the sunlight from which all life derives energy contains damaging short-wave rays. The time it takes for life to adjust its original equilibrium is not measured in years but in millennia. Time is a fundamental factor, but the world is changing too fast today.
The speed with which new situations arise and change reflects the fact that people's intense and rash pace trumps the calm gait of nature. Radiation existed in the basic radiation of rocks, cosmic ray explosions, and the sun's ultraviolet rays long before there was any life on Earth; radioactivity is now artificially created when people intervene in atoms. The chemicals that life encounters in its own adjustment are no longer more than calcium, silicon, copper, and other inorganic substances washed out of rocks and carried by rivers to the sea; they are synthetics created in laboratories by developed minds that have no counterpart in nature.
In the scope of nature, it takes a long time to adapt to these chemicals; it takes not only a person's life, but also many generations. Even if this adaptation were made possible by some miracle, it would not help, for new chemicals were constantly pouring out of our laboratories like a trickle; in the United States alone, almost five hundred chemical compounds are put into practice every year. These numbers are staggering, and their future implications are difficult to predict. It is conceivable that the human and animal bodies have to do everything possible to adapt to five hundred such chemicals every year, and these chemicals are completely unexperienced by living beings.
Many of these chemicals have been applied to man's struggle against nature. Since the mid-1940s, more than two hundred basic chemicals have been created to kill insects, weeds, rodents, and other creatures called "pests" in modern everyday parlance. These chemicals are sold under thousands of different trade names.
These sprays, powders and aerosols are now used almost everywhere on farms, gardens, forests and dwellings, and these unselected chemicals have the power to kill every "good" and "bad" insect, they make the birds sing and the fish churning in the river waters to rest, and the leaves are covered with a deadly film and remain in the soil for a long time — all for the original purpose of eliminating only a few weeds and insects. Who can believe that the casting of toxic smoke screens on the surface of the earth can not bring harm to all life? They should not be called "pesticides", but "pesticides".
The whole process of using the drug seems to be an endless spiraling upward movement. Ever since DDT could be used by the public, a process of escalation has begun as more toxic substances have been invented. Because of this great discovery of Darwin's survival of the fittest, insects can evolve to higher levels and gain resistance to certain insecticides. After that, people had to invent another lethal drug, and the insects adapted, so they invented a new and more poisonous medicine. This also occurs for the reasons described later, with pests often "retaliating" or resurrecting; Therefore, the battle of chemicals will never be won, and all lives are killed in this powerful exchange of fire.
Along with the possibility of humanity being destroyed by nuclear war, there is also a central problem, that is, the entire human environment has been polluted by incredibly potentially harmful substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals, and even enter the germ cells, so that they destroy or change the genetic material that determines the future form.
Some designers who call themselves the future of our humanity have excitedly expected that one day they will be able to design the protoplasm of human cells at will, but now we can easily do this due to negligence, because many chemicals, such as radiation, can cause genetic changes. It is a great irony for humanity to think that such trivial things as the choice of insecticides can determine people's future.
It's all risky – for what? Future historians may be amazed at the low judgment we display in weighing the pros and cons. How can rational people try to control unwanted species in such a way that both pollute the entire environment and pose a threat of disease and death to themselves? However, this is exactly what we have done. In addition, we do this because even if we check out the cause, it is useless. We've heard that the widespread and massive use of pesticides is needed to sustain farm production, but isn't our real problem with overproduction?
All this does not mean that there is no pest problem and no need for control. I'm saying that control must be based on reality, not on mythical assumptions, and that the methods used must not destroy us along with insects.
Trying to solve a problem, but then bringing with it a series of disasters, is an accompaniment to our modern way of life. Long before the advent of humans, insects inhabited the earth – a very diverse and harmonious group of creatures. In the period since the advent of humans, a small fraction of the more than half a million species of insects has clashed with human welfare in two main ways: by competing with humans for things and by becoming the spreaders of human diseases.
Disease-transmitting insects become an important problem in crowded places, especially in poor sanitation conditions, such as during natural disasters, or in situations of war, or in situations of extreme poverty and loss, so that the control of some insects becomes very necessary. This is a grim fact that we will soon see, that the method of controlling a large number of chemical drugs has achieved only a limited victory, but it poses a greater threat to the situation that is trying to improve.
In the primitive period of agriculture, farmers rarely encountered insect problems. These insect problems arose with the development of agriculture – the cultivation of only one grain on large areas of land provided favorable conditions for the sharp increase in the number of certain insects. The cultivation of a single crop does not conform to the laws of natural development, and this kind of agriculture is the agriculture imagined by engineers. Nature gives the landscape of the land a variety of things, yet people are keen to simplify it. In this way, people destroy the pattern and balance of nature, and nature relies on this pattern and balance to preserve its own biological species. An important natural pattern is a restriction on the suitable area of habitat for each organism. It is clear that a wheat-eating insect reproduces much faster in a field specializing in wheat than in a field mixed with wheat and other grains to which the insect is not suitable.
The same thing happens in other situations. A generation or more ago, the streets of America's great towns were lined with tall elm trees. Now, the beautiful scenery they had built with hope was threatened with total destruction, because a disease brought by beetles swept away the elms, and if they were mixed to make the elms coexist with other tree species, the possibility of the beetles reproducing and spreading would inevitably be limited.
Another factor in the modern insect problem is the need to examine the context of geological and human history: thousands of different species of organisms have spread and invaded from the land where they originally grew up and into new areas. British ecologist Charlie Aiden has studied and vividly described this world's migration in his most recent book, Invasion Ecology. During the Cretaceous period millions of years ago, the flooding sea cut off land bridges between many continents, allowing creatures to discover that they themselves had been confined to "vast, isolated natural reserves," as Aiden put it. There they were cut off from other partners of the same kind, and they developed many new species. About fifteen million years ago, when these land masses were reconnected, these species began to migrate to new areas – a movement that is still ongoing and is being greatly helped.
The importation of plants is the main cause of the spread of contemporary insect species, because animals migrate with plants almost permanently, and quarantine is only a relatively new but not fully effective measure. The U.S. Bureau of Plant Introduction alone has introduced nearly 200,000 plant species from around the world. In the United States, insect enemies of nearly ninety species of plants were brought in by accident from abroad, and most of them came on plants like people who often take other people's cars on hikes.
Plants or animals that are declining in number in their homeland, once in new areas, may flourish by fleeing their natural hostilities to its control. So it's no accident that the insects we hate the most are the incoming species.
These invasions, whether natural or with human help, seem to be proceeding endlessly. Quarantine and a lot of chemicals are just very expensive ways to win time. The question of life and death, as Dr. Aiden puts it, is "not just to find technical ways to suppress this plant or that animal," but to understand the basics of animal reproduction and their relationship to their surroundings, which in doing so will "promote the establishment of a stable equilibrium and block out the forces of insect infestations and new invasions."
Much of the required knowledge is now applicable, but we have not. We train ecologists in universities and even employ them in the organs of our government, but we rarely listen to their advice. We let the chemicals that kill us spray like rain, as if there were no other ways, in fact, there are many ways to do it, and our ingenuity can quickly discover more if given the opportunity.
Have we fallen into a state of inferiority and perniciousness that compels us to accept, losing the will and the ability to judge "what is good"? This kind of thinking, as the ecologist Paul Schpat put it: "Is it our ideal to live a little better than the permissible limits of environmental degradation in order to get out of trouble?" Why should we tolerate poisonous food? Why should we tolerate a family in a boring environment? Why should we tolerate going to war with something that is not completely hostile? Why do we tolerate motor noise while we care about preventing insanity? Who wants to live in a world that is just less miserable? ”
But such a world is approaching us. A crusade to create a chemically free world seems to have generated great enthusiasm among many experts and most of the so-called administrations. In many ways, it is clear that those who spray drugs employ a cruel force. Neel Turner, an entomologist in Connecticut, said: "The entomologists involved in the management are like prosecutors, judges and jurors, tax collectors, cashiers and governors carrying out their own orders." "The wanton misuse of pesticides is released without hindrance, both in the state and in federal government departments.
My opinion is not that chemical pesticides simply cannot be used. I would say that we have indiscriminately, massively, and completely handed over toxic and biologically effective chemicals to people, completely, without any knowledge of their potential harm. We bring large groups of people into contact with these poisons without their consent or even often without them knowing. If the Civil Rights Ordinance does not mention the right of a citizen to guarantee protection from the dangers of the spread of lethal poisons by private or public authorities, it is true that our forefathers were unable to conceive of such problems because they were limited by their wisdom and ability to foresee.
I would further like to emphasize that we have allowed these chemicals to be used, yet there has been little or no investigation into their effects on soil, water, wildlife and humans themselves. Our descendants may not be willing to forgive our faults in carefully protecting the perfection of nature, which bears all our lives.
Knowledge of threats to the natural world remains limited to this day. Now is the age of experts who are staring only at the problem before him, and it is not clear whether the big problem that is wrapped up in this small problem is narrow. Now is another era of industrial domination, in which the right to make money at any cost is rarely questioned. When the public protests in the face of some clear evidence of the harmful consequences of the use of pesticides, only a little half-truth and half-truth is offered as a tranquilizer. We desperately need to end these assurances of hypocrisy and sugar-coated wrapped around repulsive facts. It is the population that is being held to bear the risks posed by the insecticides. People should decide whether they want to continue on the path they are on now, or whether they will wait until they have enough facts to act. Jean Rostang said: "Since we have endured, we should have the right to know." ”