I don't get it. Who cares if there's bugs in your grass?

I used to play with bugs in the yard as a kid.

My step-father has this weird obsession with keeping a perfectly flat green lawn as a front yard. Any time an ant-hill springs up it's out with the pesticide. Any weeds that pop up are immediately exterminated. It's this sort of stupidity on a global scale that's causing the problem. For a lot of middle-class America, a sterile grass mono-culture is the ideal for a front yard, environmental health be damned.

Right, if you're that obsessed with perfection, just pave over the damn thing. I only kill ants if they're building nests that threaten something else, like a tree. Usually though, that's a good indication the tree is already sick. I'm nursing one back to health, hopefully, now that had an ant colony at it's base.

I let moss, and local vegetation that grows fairly small thrive in my yard. In some ways, I prefer the moss to my grass.

I do fog my yard, so guilty, but I live in area densely populated with mosquitos which are a problem and they have plenty of wooded areas nearby to thrive if they want. But yeah, if there was some way to be selective, I'd be all for it, but it's not worth 20 mosquito bites when I go outside for 30 minutes to keep bees around.

Maybe if I could hire a service to do this: http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/07/health/zika-virus-sterile-mosq...

Granted I imagine that's not something I could do without having to get EPA or fish and wildlife approval.

Well, ticks like grass (or at least breed in lawns) and some tickborne diseases are pretty bad.

By that logic we should steralize the planet of all mamalian life, since rats carry some pretty bad disease.

"Some people don't like ticks on their lawn so they use pesticides"

"By that logic we should steralize the planet of all mamalian life, since rats carry some pretty bad disease."

Uhhh, what happened here...? I've heard some atrocious analogies before but this almost seems like a joke.

No, by that logic, I understand why some people use pesticides to get rid of disease-carrying ticks from the lawn where their children and pets play daily.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25280366

https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/index.html

>use pesticides to get rid of disease-carrying ticks

Unfortunately this solution is a bit like using a nuclear bomb to get rid of gang violence. It does indeed do that, but at the expense of destroying the entire beneficial insect community as well.

Generally pest species recover faster after catastrophe than beneficial species, so by eliminating all of the pest's competitors pesticides are sewing the seeds of future infestations.

A much better, less toxic, and longer-lasting solution would be to provide pest-eating insect predators with habitats. In nature balance is achieved by predator/prey interactions instead of razing the beneficial soil ecosystem[1] with poison.

To take just one example, ticks are naturally eaten by birds (eg chickens), and if productive bird species can be used this has the side effect of producing delicious chicken (vs surface water/aquifer pollution, soil degradation which necessitates fertilizers, and a proliferation of plastic "keep children and pets off this lawn for X hours" signs).

People's instinct to protect themselves from disease-carrying pest species is a good one. The solutions handed to them by the post-war chemical industry are not. Who coulda thunk that redirecting all our WWII chemical weapons output to fighting nature wasn't such a good idea after all?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag

By your response it looks like you assumed I thought using pesticides were a good idea. I only said I understood why people might choose to. It wasn't an endorsement.

Great point. Thanks for clarifying.

We have some nasty bugs here in Texas. Fire ants, scorpions, asps, and many other pain inducing critters. My wife, from Kansas City, had no idea when we moved here...

Because bugs play an important role in keeping ecosystems healthy.

I believe he was questioning why people feel the need to eliminate bugs from their grass. Not why anyone should care if there are no bugs in their grass.

That's an interesting fact, but is there any scientific studies showing that retail pesticide use is why the insect population has declined so much?

We all love to feel guilty about our consumerism and personal choices but this study showing a 75% decline was done entirely in Germany and controlled for habitats.

Well this study hasn't definitively isolated pesticides as a cause, but it did successfully eliminate a large number of alternative explanations, making agricultural pesticides a likely contributor. Whether consumer pesticides contribute is also an open question, but it makes a lot of sense. They're designed to kill these insects, so widespread application is a reasonable hypothesis for the decline in insect populations. It's functionally habitat loss, which is well established as a cause of population decline in other animal populations. The theory especially makes sense when you consider the particular areas covered by this study.

The authors looked at flying insect populations in various protected areas in Germany, where pesticides are not applied directly and thus are not impacting populations locally. But since those populations are so mobile, the surrounding areas' pesticide levels certainly could be. Many of Germany's protected areas are surrounded by developed land, doubly so for those covered in this study. Most of the data collection occurred in Nordrhein-Westfalen, which is landlocked and surrounded by one of the most heavily industrialized and intensively farmed regions in the world. The rest took place in Brandenburg, which is similar. They're also not wide open plains like much of the American agricultural heartland, where insects can blow through more rapidly.

So, maybe we would see less decline in America, where there are much wider swathes of undeveloped land. That wouldn't disprove the pesticide hypothesis, it could merely indicate that the blocks of pesticide-free land in Germany are too small to form a sustainable habitat for flying insects. That would mean we need to create larger blocks of pesticide free land.

Maybe that doesn't mean we need to stop using pesticides, but does mean we need to reconsider the scope of their use. Deprioritizing non-essential uses such as lawn maintenance, for example.

Per acre doesn't seem like the right metric.

This article (http://scienceline.org/2011/07/lawns-vs-crops-in-the-contine...) is about water usage, but it states that there is more lawn acreage in the US than the 8 top irrigated crops combined.

(Discussed here: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lawn-largest-crop-ameri...) (original here: http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf)

This article seems very misleading, at least for California.

If you look at aggregate water usage for California agriculture uses 4X "urban" and "urban" includes industrial, golf courses, parks, etc.

So even if lawns are using more area they are much less water intensive than agriculture.

http://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/

the majority of usage goes towards power generation (https://water.usgs.gov/edu/wateruse-total.html). urban areas consume the power, but they dont produce it. they hide their water usage in the rural areas.

Looking at that data it appears that a majority of California's water for power generation is coming from salinated sources, so at least for California the largest user of fresh water sources is still irrigation (agriculture).

Either way, the point that agriculture takes a lot more water than people watering their lawns still stands.

The right metric would be per hectare, indeed :-)

Some EU countries banned agro chemicals for general public. Now it's only for license bearers - farmers mostly.