Why Are Pesticides So Efficient They Kill The Environment

Pesticides: So Efficient, They Kill the Environment Too. Pesticides may as well be classified as the single most common seasoning on our food today. Most of the food we eat is marinated with over one-billion tons of pesticides annually by farmers across the world (Alavanja). Their special blend helps kill or repel insects from eating crops, which preserves a ton of crops that would have died otherwise. The benefit of savings these crops are great in number: there is more food to go around, farmers can sell more crops, and the surplus of food drives down prices. Pesticides are beneficial to humans, yet they come with an infamously well-known cost – human health. Pesticides are considered a toxin, and consuming toxic coated food leads to negative

A middle school teen in his or her biology class can confidently tell you that our ecosystem is interconnected by an intricate web of species. A different student in an earth science class can tell you that our planet is interconnected by a web just as intricate and just as delicate as ecology. One could imagine the devastating effects these pesticides may have on bio cultures, but one will never fully grasp just how much damage they can do. Removing just a single type of organism out of an area is risky; that would result in less food for predators and less regulation for prey. The ripple of just one lost animal could potentially affect the entire ecosystem. This is where the real unimaginable cost of pesticides come in. So what if we lost some salmon in a random lake? What could possibly go wrong? The entire ecosystem will need to readjust itself, which will inevitably result in loss of other species and introductions of new ones. This does not take into consideration how other communities may be effected by this change. It is a very complex and puzzling issue, and the only thing a pesticide needs to do to cause all of this is to simply touch

Pesticides are used on a global scale, and the Earth seems to be chugging along just fine. This may lead one to conclude that the demonization of pesticides is just a knee jerk reaction to new scientific breakthroughs. In fact, many naysayers argue that pesticides are not nearly as toxic as one would think, per the official counterargument at Infobase. And even if pesticides may be toxic to some degree, the United States government must have agencies to monitor what pesticides are being used. Whatever pesticides we introduce to the environment must be relatively safe. Well, greet the sceptic with the good news before the bad: the government does place regulations on pesticides, the problem is that these regulations are not as strictly followed as one may hope. Do not start worrying too much; these regulations do prevent highly toxic pesticides from entering the market. However, there is a distressing loop hole in the system which allows some very dangerous concoctions a pass into our environment. Pesticides that fail safety regulations can still make it to market if their benefits are deemed “greater than the risks”, reports the Toxics Action Center. Pesticides are not judged based off a strict guideline; they are judged off a series of suggestions. Of the billion tons of pesticides dropped on our food each year, some of it may be deemed unsafe by well researched biologists. Unfortunately for our