Watching the small-minded men of the California Department of Food and Agriculture declare that they will ‘eradicate’ the light brown apple moth has been rather like watching a small boy take it into his head that he will move Africa 200 miles to the left. The Light Brown Apple Moth public health scandal has shone a bright light on the superfluousness and inappropriateness of the existence of an agency like the CDFA which makes its money by running around the state declaring emergencies trying to exterminate things it can’t exterminate.
Over the past 35 years, CDFA has made 247 failed attempts at eradication with 0 ‘successes’. The bugs are still with us, and what has come to light is an amazing billion-dollar bureaucracy which keeps people employed pretending to do the un-doable. The LBAM fiasco is only the latest evidence of this agency’s well-funded, ill-founded business plan.
Why is eradication of insect species futile? Welcome to planet Earth.
Our planet is an insect planet. Over 95% of the species inhabiting this planet are insects. Over 95%! There are so many species, no human has ever been able to count them all, but entomologists estimate there may be as many as 10 million. I hate to break it to you, Secretary Kawamura, but you’re outnumbered.
And is it being outnumbered that drives the CDFA, the USDA and the Orkin Man to barrel forward, spraying poisons willy-nilly, hoping somehow to even up the odds? Can they not stand to think that this isn’t a human-centric world, but is, in fact, a domain of bugs? It’s a useless fight. And what would they win, if they could win?
A vacant earth, devoid of all life. Without the insects – the pre-eminent citizens of our globe – there would be nothing for any of us. How hard is it to understand that if 95% of earthling species are bug species, they must hold the majority of the honor for making our earth a green, abundant, diverse planet? You only need to watch one nature program about all of the work bugs do in the Amazon Rainforest to get it that they are essential to that gorgeous green canopy existing. Remove just one species, and the whole system might collapse.
We know about the interconnectedness of life. Poets, prophets, philosophers and scientists have all tried to depict the web of life in such a way that we would stop the senseless killing, that we would move beyond a state of perpetual, unobservant ignorance regarding the workings of the planet we inhabit. No one likes feeling powerless, but by refusing to give up control, by refusing to admit that we cannot control everything on the Earth, we are ruining our own habitat and creating problems where none existed before.
We have all grown very weary of listening to CDFA’s fear-mongering regarding the light brown apple moth which this agency has falsely depicted as a big threat. There is no big threat, and we need only return to the words echoed across the state by organic farmers who have shrugged their shoulders, saying, “a moth, so what?” In point of fact, independent scientists have pointed out that some of the species most responsible for keeping this insect at a decent population are, in fact, other insects. Just think of it, we’ve got 10 million species of bugs on our side, all of them working amongst themselves to ensure that no one species takes over. We can sit back. We don’t have to do anything but farm in a responsible way and there will be plenty of greenery for us and all the bugs to eat. Basically, we just need to get out of the way.
What we really don’t need, in our strivings for an educated view of our amazing world, is government-employed agencies like the CDFA tearing about the place declaring that the earth is really flat. These men are generations behind their neighbors in their understanding of our place in the world and it’s rather pathetic watching them try to keep their jobs by insisting they must kill things to protect us all. They’ve gotten so out of hand, they are now threatening to sicken and kill us with their poisons in order to…protect us all?
The merry-go-round logic here that never stops in a sensible place is just shameful and any other business being run this way would have been shut down long ago.
Yet, there is still a place for the CDFA, if they are willing to learn new skills. California’s chemical-dependent conventional farmers are in desperate need of help, education and training. They need aid in breaking the Monsanto stranglehold. The damage done to California soil needs to be addressed, if that’s even possible and conventional farmers need real assistance in turning their backs on a shameful history of producing poisonous food for human consumption. If CDFA could only become the CDOFA (the California Department of Organic Food and Agriculture) and make it their mission to put an end to the evil of conventional agriculture, there would be more than enough work for them to do and it would be work we’d all gladly fund.
But, if CDFA is going to stick to their dinosaur of a business model, insisting that 10 million species of bugs are bad and that we can and must control them, they have outlived their usefulness as an agency. The time has come to admit that insects are vital, that Earth is a glorious bug planet, and that we’re all in debt to the bugs for all they do to make life good for us. Anyone who isn’t prepared to admit this is on the wrong planet. I hear real estate is going real cheap on the moon.
8 users commented in " Earth – The Insect Planet "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackbackthey would ruin the moon and they don’t deserve it.
this article is real funny in places, in a very unfunny situation.
Hi Donna,
Sometimes, tongue-in-cheek gets the better of me, I confess!
But seriously, I am so bewildered by these people with their only response to life seeming to be, ‘kill it’. We’ve got the CDFA trying to kill bugs. We’ve the the National and State park employees killing millions of animals every year because they’re ‘non-native’.
The whole concept of ‘invasive’ animals, bugs and plants is ludicrous. How can anything that lives on the earth be considered an invader? These creatures aren’t a shipload of bloodthirsty vikings, or Martians landing from outer space.
Most of what we see, including all of the human beings, came from someplace else at one time. Sand comes down from the rocks, goes into the sea and then comes back onto the land again. There is always, always movement. Only a fool would try to control this.
Thanks for your comment!
Mim
Great idea, Mim! Agriculture should thrive on the moon without all those pesty bugs eating all the crops!
Nature has checks and balances, and the way our Constitution was written, we’re supposed to have them too…
I love your suggestion that the CDFA become the CDOFA. I’m sure they are concerned about their own job security and putting food on the table for their families (even if it is laced with poison that kills them softly over the years). But, why do they have to have these emergency eradication programs in place to get their funding (one bug after another)??? We’re always going to be at threat level orange or red with a specific terrorist bug to vilify as long as the “O” for organic is missing from their name and mission statement.
If they change their mission to truly promote healthy and sustainable agriculture, I would gladly fund their efforts and support them! The farmers deserve to make a good living for providing us healthy food. And the CDFA staff should deserve to put that healthy food on the table for their families.
I just think they might be surprised to find it even harder to grow crops on the moon, despite the lack of bugs…
Do you remember hearing that cockroaches would survive us during a nuclear war? It actually turns out that insect researchers did research this and it turns out it is true!
http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/hortnews/1996/12-13-1996/bomb.html
The ridiculous part is that our tax dollars paid for this research.
So, in the end the insects will win this eradication battle. It’s just a matter of which battle the USDA/CDFA will wage.
My concerns are that there are some nasty insects that decimate trees (gypsy moth) and cause health problems (mosquitos – West Nile virus, malaria, etc.), which this bug war has no end in sight.
Bad moon rising . . .
this story is so good that i wish the whole world could read it. it’s paints the correct picture of the cfda, usda, and the hysterical situation they have created, which is very funny when your’e in the right mood.
oops! cnn are reporting on growing vegs on mars. here is a chance for kawamura!
Last week in L.A., in the San Fernando Valley, I was out walking with my son and we saw a beautiful sight, bees flowing in and out of a hive in a tree, way down low, a foot off the ground. Instinctively, I felt I should go talk with the people living there, to give them support for not doing anything to harm the bees.
I talked with a teenaged boy, and another boy, maybe 12. I told them we were delighted to see this and that I was concerned that neighbors might push them to “get rid of the bees”, which often happens via pesticides.
We had a great talk, and I told them about the fact of bees being endangered worldwide, told them I work with this group which has worked for years to get out that information, and told them that if neighbors come at their family to “get rid of” the bees, that they could remind these people first that these bees won’t bother people unless threatened, and that by allowing the bees to do their work people in the neighborhood with fruit trees would have a chance at having fruit.
They seemed in awe of some of the information, and as I walked away, I thought about how probably all the kids in the neighborhood had been raised on Winnie the Pooh stories, and I wondered whether any of them made the connection, that what is played up in story form in books and movies they could see in their own neighborhood, and how grand!
When I told my sister about the hive, she said that, oh, yes, there have been a lot of hives in those trees on that street and people usually plug them.
I was sickened.
About West Nile Virus and Gypsy Moth programs. First, please go to our website to get info on WNV and how the “cure” (the pesticides) cause some of the most extreme of the symptoms caused by WNV. Most people who contract WNV are unaware. Please read up on the REAL statistics on sickness and deaths. We have to help others “get” that we must not let ourselves fall prey to taking what CDFA, USDA, APHIS, EPA or local Agricultural Departments tell us.
While at the moment we do not have a Gypsy Moth section on our site, we have known that that is likely to be the next major “pest” program in line for us in CA. Trapping is already underway, Kawamura, Sec’y of Ag. for the state has several times invoked it over this year at LBAM events as another “pest of concern”, and yes it does eat leaves. Eating leaves does not mean that there will be deforestation. We need not to use pesticides which will kill off its predators. That’s key.
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