Quotes About Insecticides

I pounded through the houses, staggering down the hallways, falling down the steps. It was a hot streaky dawn full of insecticides, exhaust, flowers that could make you sick or fall in love. My battered Impala was still parked there on the side of the road and I wanted to lie down on the shredded seats and sleep and sleep. But I thought of the bones; I could hear them singing. They needed me to write their song.

And the entire world was just as bad; it was perishing of pollution, drowning and suffocating in chemical and atomic poisons, detergents and insecticides, industrial effluvia, smog, the stench of sulfuric acid, the quantities of steel, cement, aluminum ever bright, eternal plastics, omnipresent paper, gas and electron floods - electro-mephitic city-stuff indeed!

it was not that plants treated with insecticides had as many eggs, nymphs, and insects on them as untreated plants—they had more! Indeed, insecticide treatment caused up to an 800-fold increase in insect density. This meant that insecticides weren't preventing hopperburn, they were largely responsible for causing it. How the hell could that happen?

The first of these toxic chemicals to achieve wide notice were insecticides, pesticides, and herbicides, whose effects on birds, fish, and other animals were publicized by Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring.

Alkaloids are natural fungicides, insecticides, and pesticides. It has been estimated that, on average, each of us ingests about a gram and a half of natural pesticide every day, from the plants and plant products in our diet. The estimate for residues from synthetic pesticides is around 0.15 milligrams daily—about ten thousand times less than the natural dose!

It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge.

The question of chemical residues on the food we eat is a hotly debated issue. The existence of such residues is either played down by the industry as unimportant or is flatly denied. Simultaneously, there is a strong tendency to brand as fanatics or cultists all who are so perverse as to demand that their food be free of insect poisons. In all this cloud of controversy, what are the actual facts?

What sets the new synthetic insecticides is their enormous biological potency.

The chemists' ingenuity in devising insecticides has long ago outrun biological knowledge of the way these poisons affect the living organism.

Let's be clear about the real-world impact of this activism however. Aubergine farmers in both India and the Philippines have sprayed millions of pounds of additional insecticides thanks to the activities of Greenpeace, Vandana Shiva and other anti-GMO campaigners and groups in denying them the opportunity to grow Bt brinjal.