1) use neonicotinoid pesticides and killing off the bees
2) use DDT and kill off birds + danger to mammals
3) revert back to more traditional agriculture, and risk not being able to feed people
Basically, we're choosing between different evils :/
No danger to mammals, kill some birds (the hawk/eagle shell thinning was a lie[1], does kill some songbirds in high doses but I guess so does Teflon stoves), kills far less helpful insects.
It's the only one out of the three options where you don't risk killing hundreds of millions of people with disease and/or famine.
The issue has been pretty extensively studied and while you can cherry-pick individual studies the broad consensus is that DDT was one of the contributing factors.
The raptor population was bouncing back right as we started to introduce DDT. It's a funny thing that happens when you stop incentivizing shooting of the birds (wasn't until the early 40's they got federal protection, and it takes time for populations to recover). If you'd have read the sources I've linked (and the any of the citations in those sources) you'd see you're wrong.
'But my father', anecdotes are nice when they come along with data. Stringing together multiple studies is the best way to disprove an established narrative... but unfortunately the amount of time it takes to disprove well applied bullshit greatly outweighs the time it took to apply it.
EDIT: Also while I'm at it. Ever think to consider that thin shells might have been caused by greatly increased mercury and lead levels of the time? We banned TEL and reduced coal consumption since then. Look at nearly every study that concluded DDT had to be to blame for thin shells and you'll find they noted increased lead, mercury, and aluminum levels along with... but never put it into their conclusion.
It's not really a choice.
There's an awful lot of debatable thinking hidden in those 5 words.
On the other hand, it is a problem that keeps getting bigger.
It feels a bit like the elephant in the room. Either because of the aforementioned "solutions" that come up initially[1] or because "science will fix it" since it has been shown that once people have it well they stop having a lot of kids.
Still, every five days there's 1 million more people on this earth and it doesn't look like most of these people will have it good in the near future. And meanwhile everything else just has to make room for more of us. It just doesn't seem sustainable.
[1] And who am I to stop people from having kids? I've got two myself.
The only thing that's still causing the population to increase is the inconvenient decrease in untimely death.
Given that the average American watches TV for something like 8 hours per day, I'd say there's roughly zero risk of not being able to feed people.