I don't get it. Who cares if there's bugs in your grass?
I used to play with bugs in the yard as a kid.
I used to play with bugs in the yard as a kid.
I let moss, and local vegetation that grows fairly small thrive in my yard. In some ways, I prefer the moss to my grass.
I do fog my yard, so guilty, but I live in area densely populated with mosquitos which are a problem and they have plenty of wooded areas nearby to thrive if they want. But yeah, if there was some way to be selective, I'd be all for it, but it's not worth 20 mosquito bites when I go outside for 30 minutes to keep bees around.
Maybe if I could hire a service to do this: http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/07/health/zika-virus-sterile-mosq...
Granted I imagine that's not something I could do without having to get EPA or fish and wildlife approval.
Unfortunately this solution is a bit like using a nuclear bomb to get rid of gang violence. It does indeed do that, but at the expense of destroying the entire beneficial insect community as well.
Generally pest species recover faster after catastrophe than beneficial species, so by eliminating all of the pest's competitors pesticides are sewing the seeds of future infestations.
A much better, less toxic, and longer-lasting solution would be to provide pest-eating insect predators with habitats. In nature balance is achieved by predator/prey interactions instead of razing the beneficial soil ecosystem[1] with poison.
To take just one example, ticks are naturally eaten by birds (eg chickens), and if productive bird species can be used this has the side effect of producing delicious chicken (vs surface water/aquifer pollution, soil degradation which necessitates fertilizers, and a proliferation of plastic "keep children and pets off this lawn for X hours" signs).
People's instinct to protect themselves from disease-carrying pest species is a good one. The solutions handed to them by the post-war chemical industry are not. Who coulda thunk that redirecting all our WWII chemical weapons output to fighting nature wasn't such a good idea after all?
"By that logic we should steralize the planet of all mamalian life, since rats carry some pretty bad disease."
Uhhh, what happened here...? I've heard some atrocious analogies before but this almost seems like a joke.