Impact of Chemical Pesticides

What are the impacts of chemical pesticides? They have offered advances in agriculture and the minimization of disease, but there are also serious problems that the world may never recuperate from. There are three main areas affected: the Environment, Mankind and the Future Food Supply.

The Environment

Chemical pesticides damage, destroy and kill with the emphasis on ‘kill’. No longer alive. The pathway for this destruction is often at a cellular level that affects normal, biological processes. To kill a bug, pesticides affect the nervous system, reproduction, respiratory or digestive system, etc. To kill a weed, chemicals hamper the processes of photosynthesis, growth, the exchange of nutrients, etc. At the basic building blocks of life is where chemical pesticides do their damage.

These poisons bio-accumulate up the food chain as they cannot be expelled from an animal’s body – like plastic in the landfill that will never go away. If a bird eats a bug that has been sprayed with a pesticide, the bird now ingests the poison and it becomes a part of the bird. Then the bird is eaten by a predator who now has ingested all the toxins that bird has eaten for life.

The environment is where we are all entwined with other species via our living conditions, the food we consume, the products we purchase, and the places we go. If a chemical pesticide is sprayed or to kill the mosquitoes breeding in your town, then they are being sprayed on every creature within the same footprint. A mosquito may be killed but so will a honeybee hive. If RoundUp is used to kill weeds in the farmland, the excess RoundUp will be washed into drain water and become a part of the water cycle of rain which places RoundUp in every corner of the globe.

It is not hard to see how applying chemical toxins will infiltrate every aspect of the environment and cause damage. DDT was once hailed as a miracle and within two decades, species were extinct.

Mankind

Remember chemical pesticides bio-accumulate up the food chain. Well, humans are the top of the food chain! Every time you eat meat, you are eating all the pesticides that animal ate plus those absorbed during the farming operations. The farmed plants we eat in the United States are sprayed with billions of tons of chemical pesticides each year in the growing process. What are we eating?

What happens when a body gets too many toxic chemicals? Neurological issues. Notice an uptick in Autism in the last several decades? How about increased instances of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ADHD, Allergies, Asthma, etc.? All these progressive diseases (and many more) are tied directly to exposure to chemical pesticides.

Future Food Supply

Here is where it gets really scary.

Repeated use of RoundUp is proven to kill the micro-organisms in soil that are paramount to sustaining growth. There are huge swaths of formerly healthy farmland that is now ‘dead’. It is not an issue of water, nutrients, or climate – it is soil treated repeatedly that can no longer support crops.

And remember how honeybees are killed by chemical pesticides? Roughly one of every three bites of food eaten by Americans came from crops pollinated by honeybees. But the honeybees are dying by the millions. If we lose honeybees, we lose our food supply. Period.

Impacts of chemical pesticides? Food for thought…