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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Why do you think plants that produce pesticides are not an environmental problem of their own?

Bees are dying from neonics getting into the pollen. You willing to bet the biosphere that you’re right, and nothing bad will happen?

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> Why do you think plants that produce pesticides are not an environmental problem of their own?

All plants that, in the nature, tend to get eaten by insects, naturally produce pesticides against their pests. Humans have bred super-edible, non-pesticide plants for cultivation, and insects are happy to attack these. Now we are bringing back into crop plants some of the natural defenses that wild plants have always had against the insects.

insect populations are declining rapidly and are also in need of protection. we're probably going to have to start eating bugs for survival when all the animals are dead, since bugs are one of the most efficient sources of protein, so i'd personally be wary of telling the bugs to fuck off just so we can save the crops.

If insect populations are dwindling and in need of protection, why would we suggest people eat them? Wouldn’t that accelerate their demise?

Also, most folks are not protein deficient, but they are not getting enough fiber. https://www.vox.com/2019/3/20/18214505/fiber-diet-weight-los...

i didn't say that we should eat bugs because insect populations are declining. i said we are going to have to start eating bugs anyway (e.g. there are no more wild fish), and also that insect populations are declining.

Understood. I think most people would start eating plants for protein before they resort to insects unless the insects are processed beyond recognition and relabelled. :)

If we start eating insects, we will start farming them. But most of the insects we’re talking about as food sources are not primary pollinators.

And that’s the important distinction that your question raises. Increasing the total biomass of insects won’t help with the pollination problem if we’re only boosting non-pollinator species. It will not help the situation with insecticides and plants.

We'll have the same problem that salmon farms and honeybee wranglers have now: so many parasites that they transfer to the wild populations.

I mean, I still think we should farm insects, but as a more natural substitute for corn for our omnivore meat sources.

Yeah, I haven’t looked into that but there’s no reason to expect otherwise. Speaking broadly, farming optimizes for output and disregards the ecosystems that the farms are a part of. For each farmer, this is okay; it works for them for now. Taken as a whole, it is not okay and contributes to bigger problems later (sometimes for earlier values of later).

A greater understanding of farming trade-offs when it comes to ecosystems would likely obviate the need for farming insects in the first place. High up on the list is eliminating factory farms, and IMO all livestock farms and massive monoculture plant farms will have to be deeply scrutinized.

A bunch of organic and permaculture people are discovering that you can feed food waste to chickens. They get a little veg, and then as the rest breaks down the food slowly turns into bugs and worms.

It's morally similar to pre-consumer paper recycling - you're sourcing materials from food services. As long and you can keep the carbon footprint of transportation down, it's something you can use to offset feed corn, which has a large footprint. One place corn wins out is the low moisture content. You're not trucking water back and forth. But the corn doesn't win out on nutrition or quality of life for the animals, nor from a host of environmental concerns.

Surely it's better to replace indiscriminate spraying of substances known to be harmful with GMO crops carefully bred to have the smallest changes possible?

Genes do not stay put.

Genes do not know how to stay put. Their whole purpose is to spread. The difference between weed and crop is very narrow in many cases. Brassicas especially. Any gene you put into them you’re going to deal with in a weed very soon.

>One example of hybridization between GM crops and wild species has been documented in creeping bentgrass commonly used on golf courses. Scotts Miracle-Gro genetically engineered this grass to contain a gene that confers resistance to a common herbicide so that the golf course can be sprayed to kill weeds without harm to the grass. Because this grass is wind-pollinated, a perennial, and highly capable of outcrossing with related wild species, researchers decided to investigate wild grass in close proximity for the presence of the herbicide resistance gene. The researchers collected seeds from wild plants at varied distances from the origin of the grass farm and used herbicides to detect tolerant plants. They confirmed the presence of the herbicide resistant gene in wild grass up to 9 miles from its origin only one year after the grass was planted [2,3,4]. This distance is very surprising because most hybridization events have been reported between plants that are less than a mile apart. It is clear from this study that genetic modifications can be transferred to wild species through hybridization; however, future investigations will need to be performed in order to differentiate whether the genetic modification increases the fitness of wild species or if these hybridizations are a natural result of planting a large grass farm in close proximity to wild species.

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/challenging-evolutio...

In 'Gathering Moss', RWK talks about how moss spores hitchhike on squirrels, increasing their effective range by over one or two orders of magnitude.

Recently it came out that birds can and sometimes do transport live fish eggs to new bodies of water, miles away. And I learned today that birds that don't eat the seeds they get from the bird feeder? They take them and hide them, for instance in the chinks in tree bark. For the species this man knew about, most of those seeds end up in a 50 meter radius of the source, but there are other transport systems like digestive tracts (see also birds and pepper seeds)

Animals that keep transporting viable germlines around with them create a selective advantage for their entire species. Squirrels, humans, pollinators, etc. If our ancestors hadn't literally and figuratively squirreled seeds away we'd probably not be here to have this conversation.

Those are not the only alternatives available. There are farming practices that give good yield, use none or a minimum of pesticides and herbicides, and don't use any GMOs.

I saw a video that I wish I had bookmarked about a US farmer using alley cropping with no pesticides, and indeed almost no management other than the first planting and yearly harvesting.

Their setup is to grow asparagus for income in the alleys between nut trees (which take 7+ years to start producing), leave a bunch of asparagus to go to seed instead of harvesting it all, and time their field mowing to support asparagus growth. When the trees start producing, they will reforest the fields between them. Low-effort and low-cost by working with native species and using long-established techniques.

Is it going to yield as much as highly-managed farmland? No. But it also takes a fraction of the effort, so they can pursue other things in the meantime. It ain’t quite passive income, but it ain’t real active either, and they’re rehabilitating the flora and fauna while they do it.

Lots of permaculture ideas share similarities with this and are more geared towards higher yields.

I'm willing to bet it's less bad than the status quo.

Sure, bad things will happen with a few GM crops, but worse things will probably happen from existing non-GM farming practices. I think most experts would also agree with that assesment.

That is a false dichotomy. It is perfectly possible to get good yields with farming practices that use neither pesticides nor GM.

Exactly. This reminds me the interview where a Monsanto rep was asking an activist whether she’d prefer to provide people with genetically engineered rice or have them suffer from vitamin deficiency.

What a made up false dichotomy.

It isn't as much of a false dichotomy as you make out.

At any point in the decision making chain, in general, the decision is "should be do this new thing, so should we not".

So it really is a dichotomy, at least as far as the decision maker is concerned.

It is certainly a false dichotomy, because you paint it as a decision between GMO and conventional non-GMO farming. But as in all false dichotomies, there are more alternatives.

And no, that is not how decisions are made. You don't stand stupidly and consider if you should drive your car to work this morning or not, without at the same time taking into account the alternatives and their consequences. How long would it take to walk, how is the path, the weather? Are public transport available, how much does it cost, how long would it take?

So there is no dichotomy for the decision maker either.

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