Chemophobia

[SkepticLance]

In another thread we started discussing the impact of agri-chemicals on human health and the environment. This is a subject that needs its own thread. I have titled it 'chemophobia' after the often irrational fears many parts of society have of chemicals.

 

There are several questions here.

1. Are agri-chemicals a net benefit or detrement?

2. Are they over used?

3. Is organic farming any better?

4. What about chemicals in industry and in the home?

5. What about chemicals of a more 'natural' source?

6. Where is the main benefit and where is the main harm from chemicals?

7. What changes should be made?

8. Should we be afraid?

 

Comments?

[Rev Blair]

Thanks for starting this, SkepticLance.

 

1. Are agri-chemicals a net benefit or detrement?

2. Are they over used?

3. Is organic farming any better?

4. What about chemicals in industry and in the home?

5. What about chemicals of a more 'natural' source?

6. Where is the main benefit and where is the main harm from chemicals?

7. What changes should be made?

8. Should we be afraid?

 

Yes. Yes. Maybe. Uh huh. Yes. Everywhere. Lots. You bet.

 

I see chemicals kind of like nuclear energy...they aren't inherently good or bad, but we're kind of stupid as a species.

 

I worked in photography and photo labs for years, I spent a lot of time on the farm as a kid. I worked construction, mostly building decks, fences and sun rooms and mostly out of pressure-treated lumber. I've been around chemicals forever. Something I would say is that the chemicals have become a lot more benign over the years. They've also become a lot more pervasive.

 

If you look around your house, you'll find that almost everything is held together with formaldehyde glue. That pressure treated lumber that's all over the place is coated in chromium arsenic. That "new car smell" is chemical off-gassing.

 

At the same time, we have less fresh air. Our houses are sealed up. Our cars are sealed up. We spend less time outside.

 

It's a big topic...with way too many implications.

 

I was talking about farming in the other thread. When I was a kid, the tractors didn't have cabs and the chemicals we used were a lot harsher. Now the tractors are sealed and air conditioned, so you breath in the off-gassing of chemicals in the cab, but are ostensibly protected from the chemicals you are spraying. Except that you still mix them, still crawl around equipment coated in them, still walk through fields covered in them, etc. Then you go back to your house, wash in well water that has high levels of pretty much everything in it, and watch TV in your sealed up house.

 

Because of the nature of modern farming, you are just as likely as your urban friends to eat prepared food, and you aren't getting exercise the way farmers did in the past because of mechanization and specialization.

 

So there are lots of factors that have little or nothing to do with farm chemicals that are also affecting you.

 

We can't just turn off the chemical tap either. Again using farming as an example, we can't grown enough food without the chemicals and even if we could, the old methods weren't exactly environmentally sound either. Tillage leads to erosion and soil depletion. Natural fertilization still pollutes waterways and e coli becomes a concern. Proper crop rotation requires leaving fields fallow and tilling them, but we can't afford to leave fields fallow either financially for the farmers or production-wise because we are short of food.

 

So what's the answer? I don't think there really is one, short of getting rid of a few billion people. Reduce the world's population to a billion and we can go back to tilling the hell out of everything using horses. Of course anybody who has worked with horses doesn't like that and you can't just make 5 or 6 billion people disappear.

 

Something that gives me hope is that farmers who have been following proper zero-tillage, constant cropping methods are now able to reduce chemical usage. They still need to fertilize, mostly with chemical fertilizers, but they need fewer herbicides because the weeds can't get a foothold if something else is already growing there. Crop rotation also reduces the amount of fertilizer needed, since different plants play different roles in the carbon and nitrogen cycles.

 

What fills me with a sense of impending doom is the number of farmers who have taken the worst of the old and the worst of the new methods and mixed them. They still till the land every year, but just once, so they use a ton more chemicals to control weeds. They base their crop rotations on prices or subsidies instead of what's best for the land, so they need more chemical fertilizers. It's bad farming, but a lot of them have been put in that position by economic realities...they want to move to the new methods, but can't afford the five years of reduced profits or losses.

 

I think the solution to that is to change the subsidy regimes, especially in the US...it's about the worst in the world.

 

After that, and this is going to be really unpopular with farmers, is regulate the hell out of everything. Tell them what crops they are planting and what methods they will use according to the science.

 

The final thing is that I would force chemical and agribusiness out of the farming end of things. Cargill, Monsanto, Dupont, and all the rest have no business owning land to grow crops on. It distorts the market and encourages small farmers to follow bad practices in an attempt to compete.

[SkepticLance]

To Rev

 

That is quite a comprehensive reply, with los of good material to ponder. I am going to shove my oar in with a few points also.

 

First : I believe that, while synthetic chemicals can cause harm if misused, so-called natural toxins do far more harm.

 

As a minor example : today's local newspaper was reporting on 22 people poisoned with a natural poison called tutin that came in honey.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10506819&ref=rss

 

The worst 'natural' chemicals of the lot are those that are found in smoke. Tobacco smoke is thought to kill 400,000 to 500,000 people per year in the USA alone, and more than that in China. World-wide, the death toll is in the millions. Yet smoke, from whatever source, has to be considered 'natural'. Incense smoke causes lung cancer, as does marijuana, and the smoke attached to smoked meat causes lip, throat and stomach cancer in those peoples who eat a lot of smoked meat. Icelandics are the worst affected.

http://www.purlife.com/Stomach.htm

 

You mentioned pressure treated wood. That is the process that uses cycles of pressure and vacuum to impregnate wood with copper sulfate, sodium dichromate, and arsenic pentoxide. The New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture some years ago carried out a test to see what would happen if CCA treated sawdust was mixed with soil, and vegetables grown in that soil. Sorry I do not have a reference for this, but the trial was done many years ago before reports were placed on the internet.

 

The end result was a slightly elevated level of arsenic in the tips of root vegetables. Apart from that, the vegetables were perfectly wholesome and fine to eat. It appears that the toxic salts are really hard to leach from the wood, and do not enter the food chain except to a very minor extent.

 

Final point is that, as chemical use increases, so does human life-span. In third world countries, the abuse of toxic agricultural chemicals is really bad, and this definitely harms people's health. In first world countries, I see little evidence of that happening.

[Mr Skeptic]

In another thread we started discussing the impact of agri-chemicals on human health and the environment. This is a subject that needs its own thread. I have titled it 'chemophobia' after the often irrational fears many parts of society have of chemicals.

 

These are some very important and relevant questions for today and the future. I will try to answer them. Chemicals do have vital benefits, but overuse and misuse can be dangerous as well.

 

There are several questions here.

1. Are agri-chemicals a net benefit or detrement?

 

Definitely a net benefit. If we were able to produce crops that are very resistant to pests and able to produce their own nitrogen, they would eventually become unnecessary IMO.

 

2. Are they over used?

 

Yes, especially the pesticides and herbicides.

 

3. Is organic farming any better?

 

To some extent... some chemicals are completely benign, whereas "natural" chemicals, which are no different from the equivalent "artificial" chemicals, can be pretty nasty. It does seem like a safe bet to reduce or eliminate the amount of synthetic chemicals we actually eat though.

 

4. What about chemicals in industry and in the home?

 

Definitely necessary, but again it is safest if they stay in place and don't end up leaching out of whatever they are in, or not used where they are not necessary.

 

5. What about chemicals of a more 'natural' source?

 

No distinction whether a chemical was made naturally or artificially. The same chemical is the same chemical whether made by man or nature, and anyone who says otherwise is crazy. On the other hand, we can produce different chemicals that are not produced naturally -- it is likely that they are more likely to be dangerous since we are not adapted to them.

 

6. Where is the main benefit and where is the main harm from chemicals?

 

Chemicals have all sorts of benefits. In terms of farming, they can keep pests and diseases and weeds from decimating your plants, and fertilizers can help you grow more crops than possible otherwise. All of these can leak into the environment, where the pesticides and herbicides can cause some damage to the environment, and the fertilizer can unbalance an ecosystem.

 

7. What changes should be made?

 

A bit of education. Some farmers misuse chemicals, and end up having to use far more than necessary to achieve the same effect, simply because of how they apply it.

 

Research will continue to make future chemicals less harmful and more effective.

 

8. Should we be afraid?

 

No, we should be rational. I'd like to minimize my exposure to chemicals, but the need for them still outweighs any harm that they may cause.

 

Comments?

 

Perhaps in the future we will be able to genetically engineer crops that are sufficiently resistant to pests, disease, and weeds, and able to produce their own nitrogen. But since that is not the case now, we still need chemicals to help with these problems. Some farming techniques can reduce the use of chemicals, and this may be a good idea. All in all, I'd say we have more important issues to worry about (for example, the costs of banning farming chemicals would be far greater than the benefit it would provide. A better use of that money would be to put it into medical research)