High Elevation Gardening Web Log "Blog"

The desire to remain young assumes that maturity is an affliction, that a line here and wrinkle there instead of adding character diminishes beauty. History is full of nations and individuals poisoning the enemies and their lands, such as Genghis Khan and his Mongol warriors salting the fields of the people they vanquished, but never their own lands. The Romans allegedly salted the wheat fields of Carthage after their victory in Third Punic War in 146 B.C. Carthage's wheat fields were the Romans' breadbasket and would've been lost to them if they'd salted them. Most historians believe the Romans were too smart to poison Carthage's fields. Not nearly as smart, we're turning our corn into fuel in the face of food shortages and poisoning our soil with herbicides and pesticides in an horticultural intoxication.

In addition to poisoning the soil, pesticides kill beneficial insects, such as lady bugs and green lacewings, the natural predators of destructive insects. The military has a euphemism for it, "collateral damage," which means killing innocent people as in "destroying a village to save it."

The use of narcotics and alcohol to avoid the demands and disappointments of life is a slow suicide. Some pesticides and herbicides loose their power to kill in time, but some don't and accumulate in a slow form of agricultural suicide. In fact, some agricultural fields have already been lost because of accumulated toxins. Botox is safe as long as the toxin doesn't migrate to the rest of the body.

Several years ago an acquaintance of mine used a lethal systemic
pesticide on his roses, wanting to rid them of aphids, but he found that the pesticide had leached into a field near his orange trees. No more fresh oranges. He didn't want to take the time and effort to use non- lethal methods for knocking off the aphids, such as insecticidal soap or washing them off with the hose, both of which need to be repeated. He wanted a quick fix, a short cut, with a poison which migrated to his oranges.

The late Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., the longtime president and then chairman of General Motors was once asked the secret to his success. He said, "Word hard. There are no short cuts." So it is with gardening. Pesticides and herbicides are shortcuts.

Botox offers the promise of perpetual living through poison in the illusion an arrested adolescence. Narcotics and alcohol offer a flight from reality at the cost of a gradual suicide. Pesticides and herbicides promise a healthy garden at the price of toxicity as though poison were an aid to health. Gardeners who pesticide and herbicide their gardens are unique in history in that they poison their own soil in an environmental insult.

Rachel Carson wrote: "Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called 'insecticides' but 'biocides'."

Dana Prom Smith is a Master Gardener volunteer and the coordinating editor for the Master Gardener Column. He can be contacted at stpauls@npgcable.com. For more information, call Hattie Braun at 774-1868, Ext. 17, or visit highelevationgardening.arizona.edu.