Some things can only be saved with insecticide in a remote island. That there are “millions” of other threatened species scattered across the globe with all sorts of micro/macro solutions (or lack thereof), is a nonsequiter.

All you seem to be doing is nitpicking a specific small action despite its clearly defined goal and success, when you can’t even be bothered to propose a concrete alternative action that would do better with the same resources. Just vagaries and platitudes like “insecticide bad in general”.

> Some things can only be saved with insecticide

So you can say, with absolute confidence, that no other conceivable solution could ever have been effective? I don't know if I'm that confident about anything.

I don't agree with the defined goal or the method; it's more than just a nitpick. My concrete alternative would probably be to do nothing. Or try to mitigate climate change. And insecticides ~are~ bad in general.

I think of it like chemo: sometimes you have to use poison to achieve a goal. Apparently this summer they declared victory over the ants.

> I don't feel picking a few, coincidentally aesthetically pleasing species as winners really moves the needle in terms of the health of the global ecosystem.

You have a point. I hate the feel good videos of people rescuing individual koalas from the Australian bush fires and putting ointment on their burns. We've fucked up their entire ecosystem and now we pick one of them and treat it to assuage the sad feelings of millions of humans? Give me a break.

It matters to this one.

> Human activity currently puts about a million species at risk of extinction [1]. I don't feel picking a few, coincidentally aesthetically pleasing species as winners really moves the needle in terms of the health of the global ecosystem.

False dichotomy.

We need grass-roots intervention and macro political intervention. One does not detract from the other.