The love affair with poison.

Every so often, there are news stories about environmental damage done by unscrupulous use of some dangerous substance. For now let's just focus on substances that are DESIGNED to kill things. DDT is a famous example that everyone knows about. Agent orange too. But I still see news stories about antibiotic resistant bacteria, roundup-resistant "superweeds", bee hive die-offs, and so on, which proves beyond any argument that we learned virtually nothing from those especially famous disasters.

Banning DDT was a necessary step and the story resonated with a lot of people, but it's next to useless to ban the indiscriminate use of one poison at a time. Insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, and antibiotics targeted at mere bacteria have ALL proved to have far-reaching consequences for us despite being naively targeted at what were supposed to be vastly different life forms.

The moral of the story is people have to get as mad as they were about DDT for anything to be changed, and the thing that needs changed is the whole line of thinking that led us to where we are today. We can't just sterilize the earth, it doesn't work. Pretty much every attempt at this has backfired and/or done more collateral damage than it's done to the intended target. Bee colony collapse and MRSA and superweeds are not unrelated phenomenons in this sense.

Poisons are dangerous and need to be reserved for emergencies, if they're even used at all. If they're used rarely enough, there's no selective pressure among the intended targets to build up any defense to the substance, which keeps it effective. Hate to sound like a broken record, but once again Scandinavian countries "get it" and the US doesn't even want to hear about it.