Quotes About Chemical pesticides

The Green Revolution was criticised by social activists on the ground that the high-yield technology involving the use of mineral fertilizers and chemical pesticides is environmentally harmful.

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.

When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine. In

Carson's thesis that we were subjecting ourselves to slow poisoning by the misuse of chemical pesticides that polluted the environment may seem like common currency now, but in 1962 Silent Spring contained the kernel of social revolution.