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Comment by clord | Hacker News Reader

It is so incredibly stupid on so many levels to be spraying antifungals into the environment. Not least because of the resistance problem. There are many ways that fungus interacts with plants and animals. Destabilizing the base of some critical food chain to get 10% better crop yields seems like a bad idea for us to do.

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Don't worry too much, the spraying is imperfect and is creating an environment conducive to creating fungicide resistance. The fungi will bounce back.

We, on the other hand, will pay for our collective misdeeds.

That's what I think when I hear people say, "save the planet." The planet will be fine. It's humans that need saving.

Generally they're referring to the thin veneer of blue and green on the surface of the planet. Things would have to get pretty heinous for humans to go extinct, but many species are already threatened.

Lots of species will survive no matter what we do, but humans are among the delicate majority.

I realize this is subjective, but to me, biodiversity is obviously far and away the greatest thing in the known universe. It's astounding we (humans in the aggregate) care so little for it.

We're well past threatened. We're already in the midst of one of the major extinctions.

Hardly, our population is still growing at an exorbitant rate.

Are they always? My partner was nearly loosing her marbles because someone threw a ball into a thermal vent in NZ (I agree it's unsightly and lame). Or that science show was throwing bag of soap every day to trigger a geyser in Rotorua.

It's like mostly poisonous gas and water, chill down!

We? More probably some random person totally unrelated to the antibiotic/antifungal abuse.

> Destabilizing the base of some critical food chain to get 10% better crop yields seems like a bad idea for us to do.

Easy to say when you only spend 10% of your income on food. Try to convince the people who have to spend between 30% and 50%.

Those people still pay the same as always.

The food companies pocket the extra margins -- and the seed/pesticide companies ensure a constant market for their wares (which they also patent)...

(Add to that that untold tons of perfectly good produce are destroyed every year to keep prices high when production quota are exceeded).

Besides, it's not because of lack of money going around the globe that people have to spend between 30% and 50% of their income for food. It's because of lack of distribution of money (i.e. income inequality).

Competition brings prices down.

Most of produce never gets collected in first place for lack of labourers, not destroyed.

Throwing money into fields isn't going to magically produce more food.

Also, fungi are the world champions of biological warfare. They're where we got the idea of antibiotics from in the first place. Mycotoxins are nasty business too. This is not a battle we're going to win by brute force.

And which we might not win by smarts either.

Several billion years of evolution can trump some experts trying to come with a clever solution in a short time. Same way we haven't eradicated the common flu, cancer and tons of other things that still get billions in research every year either after a century of trying...

A "spanish flu" like situation can lead to hundreds of millions dead in this much more interconnected era (cheap flights etc) compared to 1910s...

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