Subject: (none)
From: [email-masked] (Larry London)
Date: 19 May 1994 00:20:27 -0400
Newsgroups: alt.sustainable.agriculture

From: [email-masked] (Mark Williams)
Date: Tue, 17 May 1994 16:59:32 GMT
Subject: Re: Articles About Killing Things
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Cupertino
Path: bigblue.oit.unc.edu!concert!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!col.hp.com!news.dtc.hp.com!hplextra!hpcss01!markw
Newsgroups: rec.gardens
References: <[email-masked]>
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My daughter works in the greenhouse at an agricultural college (UC Davis).
They are moving more and more to insect predators for control of pests.  The 
reason is that insecticides wipe out the beneficial insects just as they
do the the harmful ones, and (guess what) the harmful ones come back 
more quickly, so you need more insecticides, and so on.  (And the paperwork
required to apply the hazardous materials is just too much effort.)  The 
truth is that the pesticides just don't work as well as maintaining a
balanced population of insects, and using predators as controls.  

The guy in charge of raising the predators has an interesting problem:  he
has to maintain a zoo of food insects for them, the very pests the insects
are meant to control.  It is an awful sight for a gardener to view.  

There is an odd parallel here between the overuse of insecticides and the
overuse of antibiotics in medical treatment.  It seems that more and more
diseases are mutating to become resistant to the latest antibiotics, partly
because of overuse of antibiotics by doctors.  New strains of terrible 
diseases are emerging, which are resistant to all known drugs.  There is 
no quick chemical fix in sight...