impoverishing the earth.
“One might dream that on the only green planet we know, life would have a special value of its own, just as books and works of art do in our culture,” Woodwell writes. “And if the interest in life per se were not sufficient to protect it, one might hope that simple, selfish interest in human comfort and sustenance might confer a special status on living systems and force their conservation. Unfortunately, neither occurs. The stacks are open in the world’s great library of life and we advertise to the vandals.” 2
Here are some numbers you aren’t likely to hear broadcast by the pesticide industry. In 1954, insects destroyed about 10 percent of America’s food crops. In 1980—more than twenty-five years and untold tons of pesticides later—insects and disease destroyed nearly four times as much food—some 37 percent, worth about $85 billion. Without even raising the harrowing questions of environmental and human health, it seems reasonable to ask a simple question:
Has it been worth it?
If farmers grew food entirely without using pesticides, they would lose about 41 percent of their crops, according to David Pimentel, Cornell’s renowned professor of entomology. This would lead to a rise in the price of food of about 5 to 10 percent. Yet when we consider the significant damage done by fully armed chemical farmers, growers, and ranchers, this seems a modest price to pay. In 2003, Pimentel calculated the “environmental and societal damages” from the legal use of pesticides to be about $12 billion per year. 3
Pimentel is one of the few scientists swimming against the agrochemical stream. For several decades, Pimentel has been asking questions about the energy, economic, and social costs of America’s agriculture and the industry’s ways of dealing with insects, weeds, and crop and animal diseases. Pesticides may be necessary sometimes, Pimentel says, but the costs we pay for them are far too great to justify agribusiness’s increasingly unsafe practices.
Pimentel chronicles the hugely inefficient—and dangerous—consequences of chemical trespass. Only minute amounts of sprayed pesticides actually reach their target pest insects and plant pathogens. For example, about 0.003 percent of the 1 kilogram per hectare of insecticide sprayed on a field of collard greens actually hits the cabbage white butterfly caterpillar. In bean fields, no more than 0.03 percent of the sprayed insecticide hits aphids. On cotton farms, the heliothis caterpillars are hit by an absurd 0.0000001 percent of the spray; the rest ends up elsewhere—in other insects, birds, and fish, as the poisons seep into soils, wash down rivers, and blow in the wind. This is true for the vast bulk of agricultural poisons, which (as we have seen) collectively total hundreds of millions of pounds. 4
“It is nearly impossible to control insects and mite pests on crops by applying the spray insecticide directly to the target pests,” Pimentel has concluded. 5 His writing, full of numbers and results of scientific studies, raises important questions: Is industrialized agriculture as benign—or even as effective—as its industrial patrons seem to think? Or is it just a con game, a successor to the nineteenth-century patent medicine hustle? Another way of asking this question: Have we been duped?
When I came across Pimentel’s early work, I became intrigued. I distributed some of his articles to my EPA colleagues and invited Pimentel to come to the EPA to present his ideas. 6 One November morning, Pimentel showed up in my office, a small corner of an immense room in the second floor of Crystal Square #4 in Crystal City, Virginia. This was eight months after the election of Ronald Reagan, and the EPA was already in critical condition.
A senior EPA official and I spent two hours with our distinguished guest. Our meeting began with the official presenting the boilerplate overview of the work he supervised, replete with
“One might dream that on the only green planet we know, life would have a special value of its own, just as books and works of art do in our culture,” Woodwell writes. “And if the interest in life per se were not sufficient to protect it, one might hope that simple, selfish interest in human comfort and sustenance might confer a special status on living systems and force their conservation. Unfortunately, neither occurs. The stacks are open in the world’s great library of life and we advertise to the vandals.” 2
Here are some numbers you aren’t likely to hear broadcast by the pesticide industry. In 1954, insects destroyed about 10 percent of America’s food crops. In 1980—more than twenty-five years and untold tons of pesticides later—insects and disease destroyed nearly four times as much food—some 37 percent, worth about $85 billion. Without even raising the harrowing questions of environmental and human health, it seems reasonable to ask a simple question:
Has it been worth it?
If farmers grew food entirely without using pesticides, they would lose about 41 percent of their crops, according to David Pimentel, Cornell’s renowned professor of entomology. This would lead to a rise in the price of food of about 5 to 10 percent. Yet when we consider the significant damage done by fully armed chemical farmers, growers, and ranchers, this seems a modest price to pay. In 2003, Pimentel calculated the “environmental and societal damages” from the legal use of pesticides to be about $12 billion per year. 3
Pimentel is one of the few scientists swimming against the agrochemical stream. For several decades, Pimentel has been asking questions about the energy, economic, and social costs of America’s agriculture and the industry’s ways of dealing with insects, weeds, and crop and animal diseases. Pesticides may be necessary sometimes, Pimentel says, but the costs we pay for them are far too great to justify agribusiness’s increasingly unsafe practices.
Pimentel chronicles the hugely inefficient—and dangerous—consequences of chemical trespass. Only minute amounts of sprayed pesticides actually reach their target pest insects and plant pathogens. For example, about 0.003 percent of the 1 kilogram per hectare of insecticide sprayed on a field of collard greens actually hits the cabbage white butterfly caterpillar. In bean fields, no more than 0.03 percent of the sprayed insecticide hits aphids. On cotton farms, the heliothis caterpillars are hit by an absurd 0.0000001 percent of the spray; the rest ends up elsewhere—in other insects, birds, and fish, as the poisons seep into soils, wash down rivers, and blow in the wind. This is true for the vast bulk of agricultural poisons, which (as we have seen) collectively total hundreds of millions of pounds. 4
“It is nearly impossible to control insects and mite pests on crops by applying the spray insecticide directly to the target pests,” Pimentel has concluded. 5 His writing, full of numbers and results of scientific studies, raises important questions: Is industrialized agriculture as benign—or even as effective—as its industrial patrons seem to think? Or is it just a con game, a successor to the nineteenth-century patent medicine hustle? Another way of asking this question: Have we been duped?
When I came across Pimentel’s early work, I became intrigued. I distributed some of his articles to my EPA colleagues and invited Pimentel to come to the EPA to present his ideas. 6 One November morning, Pimentel showed up in my office, a small corner of an immense room in the second floor of Crystal Square #4 in Crystal City, Virginia. This was eight months after the election of Ronald Reagan, and the EPA was already in critical condition.
A senior EPA official and I spent two hours with our distinguished guest. Our meeting began with the official presenting the boilerplate overview of the work he supervised, replete with
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