What are the impacts of chemical pesticides? They have offered advances in agriculture and minimization of disease, but there are also serious problems from which the world may never recover. There are three main areas affected: the Environment, Humanity and the Future Food Supply.
The environment
Chemical pesticides damage, destroy and kill with an emphasis on ‘kill’. I no longer live. The pathway for this destruction is often at the cellular level affecting normal biological processes. To kill an insect, pesticides affect the nervous system, reproduction, respiratory or digestive system, etc. To kill a weed, chemicals hinder the processes of photosynthesis, growth, nutrient exchange, etc. It is in the building blocks of life that chemical pesticides do their damage.
These poisons bioaccumulate up the food chain since they can’t be expelled from an animal’s body, like plastic in the landfill that will never go away. If a bird eats an insect that has been sprayed with a pesticide, the bird now ingests the poison and becomes part of the bird. The bird is then eaten by a predator that has now ingested all the toxins the bird has eaten for life.
The environment is where we are all intertwined with other species through our living conditions, the food we eat, the products we buy and the places we go. If a chemical or pesticide is sprayed to kill mosquitoes that breed in your city, then they are sprayed on all creatures within the same footprint. You can kill a mosquito, but also a hive of bees. If RoundUp is used to kill weeds on farmland, the excess RoundUp will wash into the drainage water and become part of the rainwater cycle that puts RoundUp in every corner of the world.
It is not difficult to see how the application of chemical toxins will infiltrate all aspects of the environment and cause damage. DDT was once hailed as a miracle and within two decades, the species was extinct.
Humanity
Remember that chemical pesticides bioaccumulate in the food chain. Well, humans are the top of the food chain! Every time you eat meat, you are eating all the pesticides the animal ate plus those absorbed during the farming operations. The cultivated plants that we eat in the United States are sprayed with billions of tons of chemical pesticides each year in the process of growing. What do we eat?
What happens when a body receives too many toxic chemicals? Neurological problems. Have you noticed an increase in autism in recent decades? How about an increase in cases of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ADHD, allergies, asthma, etc.? All of these progressive diseases (and many more) are directly related to exposure to chemical pesticides.
future food supply
This is where it gets really scary.
Repeated use of RoundUp has been proven to kill microorganisms in the soil that are critical to sustaining growth. There are huge swaths of previously healthy farmland that are now ‘dead’. It is not a question of water, nutrients or climate: it is repeatedly treated soil that can no longer support crops.
And remember how chemical pesticides kill bees? About one in three mouthfuls of food consumed by Americans came from bee-pollinated crops. But bees are dying by the millions. If we lose bees, we lose our food supply. Period.
Impacts of chemical pesticides? Food for thought…