‘Inert’ ingredients in pesticides may be more toxic to bees than thought
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
We can't just casually sever links in the food chain, then wonder why ecosystems are collapsing.
The “inert” label is a colloquial misnomer, though. As the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency notes, inerts aren’t
necessarily inactive or even nontoxic. In fact, pesticide
users sometimes know very little about how inerts function
in a pesticide formula. That’s partly because they are
regulated very differently than active ingredients.It's insane to me that such actors are let off the hook regarding the millions or billions of damages they are liable for.
Frankly, I understand why China executes white collar criminals--
I wish more scientists responsible for developing toxic chemicals, and the businesspeople who pay them-- were prosecuted and handed capital sentences for their crimes against wildlife & humanity.
Perhaps then-- by holding them responsible and making examples of them-- their future ilk would be responsible actors.
The entire system is broken and part of what is missing, perhaps the most important part, is accountability and meaningful consequences.
Obviously, companies who were genuinely unaware that their products were harmful and who immediately recalled and ceased production of those products after finding out aren't the biggest problem, but they still show that the product safety testing practices of both the company and the FDA are inadequate.
If a company has a list of buyers of their product, they should be able to hand that to healthcare providers and have those healthcare providers check medical records to see if, for example, everyone who uses this brand of toilet cleaner ends up getting arthritis 10 years later.
It seems like everyone's go to example of this is the oil industry and global warming and tobacco and cancer.
It’s about time the burden of proof falls on chemical companies to show their products don’t do such tremendous damage, instead of leaving it to be discovered and reported in already obliterated ecosystems.
https://youtu.be/i5uSbp0YDhc (this whole video is a gem, but ~13:30 is the relevant bit)
All that means to say -- "harmful" is very well studied. The design of the product on the market is not the same.
People have blocked or regulated all kinds of new chemical products over centuries.. Product liability is a "third rail" of commerce politics. There are huge incentives to bury publications, news items, science studies and other things, that might bring financial liability to the makers of products on the market. Its a systemic property. Incentives of reward to discover, produce, distribute and market products is also a systemic property.
There are multiple serious, moving works of popular science writing that do cross that third rail - Silent Spring by Rachel Carson is often cited.. there are more.
Still doesn't address how adults can genuinely believe pesticides wouldn't be harmful to insects.
Is it your assertion that there are zero pesticides that don't harm all insects?
(Carefully crafted) Studies will confirm that.
And the government tacitly endorses the claims (by the EPA approving its sale).
What is the customer supposed to do? Doubt everything the manufacturer, scientists, and the government say? Ok, some doubt is healthy. But then then what?
Should the customer test the chemical on all classes of insects himself? And what if the effects aren't immediately obvious (as is the case here)?
I guess you're arguing for pesticide-free farming here, which is unsustainable for almost all farms.
Presumably you could use techniques for discouraging pests we (the public) understand better. You can do this for any class of substance, though this isn't always possible (e.g. good luck replacing cancer medications with something over the counter). We've been farming for thousands of years; it's a little ridiculous to suggest there's no alternative to a chemical developed in the last century.
Hell, just off the top of my head you can spray the plants with narrowly-targeted substances that are known to be human safe specifically tested against pollinators (e.g. you might use capsacin to discourage mammal consumption). You could also use natural predators to groom the crops. This is a well-documented and ancient technique, although I'm sure it's much more difficult to scale and has a lot of externalities. I.e. lean into the existing ecological web rather than trying to make our own emaciated one which evidently isn't self sufficient. And maybe we just use too many pesticides—we certainly produce far more food than we consume, even if we're not great at distributing it, perhaps taking some loss in the short term will prevent a catastrophic loss in the long term (I know, literally unimaginable to quarterly-oriented individuals).
Ultimately, without some known alternative there's not much you can do aside from calling your representative to complain that we need our agencies to be more skeptical and to mandate making the production process public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
It's shocking and really disturbing how big the decline is, and there is some evidence that this decline at least partially effects other parts of the ecosystem, as freshwater fish populations have great declined too.
> The new study exposed honeybees to two treatments: the isolated active ingredients in the fungicide Pristine, which is used to control fungal diseases in almonds and other crops, and the whole Pristine formulation, including inert ingredients. The results were quite surprising: The whole formulation impaired honeybees’ memory, while the active ingredients alone did not.