Sometimes, life is poetic in its demonstrations of simple lessons.

Every summer and winter, our home is visited by ants. They come in two varieties, for which we have common names.

1) Sugar ants - these are the larger, common ants you likely know best.
2) Oil ants - these are the tiny, tiny ants that may be less common where you live.

Here I was, today, thinking about the LBAM spray poisoning and how it will devastate our health and environment, and while my thoughts were thus occupied, a fair-sized swarm of oil ants came in my kitchen screen window above my sink. This is an experience we’ve gotten used to over the years, and my husband and I got right to work.

The oil ants need to be gotten out of the house for 2 reasons:

1) They would be injured and killed in the kitchen, falling into water, onto hot burners, etc. The house is not a proper environment for them - they belong outside.
2) Oil ants do bite people. Their bites are rather painful.

Why not reach for a can of Raid?
It’s true, like so many Americans, we could reach for a can of insecticide and blast away the oil ants, but in so doing, we would not only be killing innocent little critters who, after all, are just trying to go about their day, but we would also be poisoning our own home and ourselves. The fumes of the Raid would also drift out to our neighbors, possibly sickening them. The poisoned ants might stagger back outside and be eaten by birds or my neighbor’s kitty cat, thus poisoning further innocent bystanders.

Raid is the dangerous choice. It is also the lazy choice when, with a little work, it is possible to send the ants about their business without a drop of poison.

Today, we began by carefully sliding a piece of printer paper under the ants to pick them up and transport them outside. This works well with Sugar Ants, but I was having trouble with the miniscule oil ants so we switched tools. I got a remnant of porous linen from my fabric scrap box and very gently swished up the ants with it, taking care to be as soft in my movements as possible so as not to damage the ants’ tiny, fragile antennae and legs, which are so important to them. Once outside, they can go rejoin their colony again and start making other plans for finding a summer home.

In twenty minutes of relays from the sink to the kitchen door, my husband and I had transported the swarm outside. It is my observation that when ants stop returning to their home base, the ants at home realize something is wrong and pause in sending new ants. So, once you’ve got the ants outside, you can take step two.

With a clean sponge, carefully wipe down all of the areas where the ants were walking with vinegar and non-toxic liquid soap. We like Avalon Organics peppermint. We have observed that this appears to remove the ants’ scent trails and discourages them from thinking they’ve claimed the kitchen as belonging to them.

Lastly, locate the point of entry for the ants and make a barrier around it with non-toxic liquid soap. No new ants will be able to cross over it if you carefully surround the entry area. Thus, your little problem is solved.

If you’ve got the larger Sugar Ants, the solution is often even easier. If you can pound on the counter and wall where they are walking and speak in a low, loud voice, telling them to go away, they turn and run back to their entry point 9 times out of 10. They do not like that awesome, massive voice warning them and they don’t like the vibrations. You can also blow gently on them. They don’t seem to like the smell of human breath or the gust of wind.

If this doesn’t work, you can use the printer paper or soft cloth technique. Always follow up by washing away the scent trail and creating the barrier around the entry point.

What It Takes
What it takes is time. It took us about 25 minutes from start to finish to deal with this visitation of oil ants. Apart from the soap, which we already have on-hand as a household staple, this solution costs nothing. But the real savings is so much more far-reaching than that. We aren’t poisoning nature’s important creatures, we aren’t poisoning our neighbors and we aren’t poisoning ourselves. In today’s toxic world, you can’t overstate the value of that.

Insecticides and pesticides have been created and marketed to the laziness of people. The proposition made is that you can either put in a few minutes of your time or your can poison yourself. Amazingly, Americans so often choose poisoning themselves because they are obsessed with ’saving time’, or, sadly, because they don’t realize what their non-toxic options are for dealing with small inconveniences in daily life.

We Are Like The Ants
Agribusiness and CDFA are the epitome of the lazy approach to living in this world. Rather than working hard to create a good, and vibrant Earth with healthy ecosystems where good farming practices and diversity keep all populations in a correct balance, farmers have been marketed the lazy, ‘time-saving’ poison approach. Thousands of years of indigenous agriculture say that poly-culture (growing lots of kinds of plants together in the same place) keeps soils healthy and foods nutritious. But farmers have been sold the non-sustainable approach of growing vast acreages of a single crop (monoculture) and covering the land in poisons because the other organisms get so out of balance in so artificial a setting.

Rather than teaching farmers to grow abundant food with organic polyculture, CDFA intends to blanket 7 million human beings, all lands, all wildlife with carcinogenic, deadly poisons because of the presence of a single kind of bug. It would be like dropping a nuclear bomb on your house because you found a ladybug in your bathroom. It might be a quick way to get rid of the lady bug, but then, you’d end up with no place to live.

And that’s what Agribusiness and profit-driven, shamefully lazy entities like California Department of Food and Agriculture are doing. Blowing up the house because of a ladybug.

We are like the ants that visited my kitchen today. Innocent, hardworking beings, just trying to go about our business, meaning no harm to anyone. My respect for nature and myself made the scene in my home play out so that no toxins were inflicted on anyone, and the one chance to live life was honored for all beings. But CDFA claims that California is their house, and they refuse to deal with us respectfully. Their fingers are on the triggers of the vast pesticide bottles and they have no compunction about poisoning us all. Because they are allowed to neglect the wisdom and necessity of sustainable polyculture that makes NO insect a major threat when the environment is so diverse. Because they are after the instant answer and the easy money. Because they are so lazy.

Gandhi said you must be the change you want to see in the world. I want to see people finally reach the consciousness that a little ant’s life is as much to him as my life is to me. In vain, have countless people tried to win this recognition of our own value, our own hopes, dreams, lives, from CDFA so that they will realize the evil of poisoning us. I believe in doing unto others as we would be done by.

So, there is no Raid in my cabinet. There is no devilish Round-Up in my tool shed. And I can’t stop working until I am secure in the knowledge that there will be no deadly Checkmate in my body.

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