GEOG 130 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Pesticide Resistance, Oil Refinery, Pest Control
Cheialized Agriulture February ,
• Use of pesticides
o In the US, 1 billion pounds per year
o Idaho, Washington, Florida, and CA use pesticides in the greatest quantity
o Use of fertilizers is the heaviest in the corn belt
• Exposure of toxic chemicals
o CDC says that everyone carries pesticides in their body through food and water residue
o Life itself has been a vast expository of contamination (Romero)
• Consolidation of the market for seed pesticide and biotech industries
o Monsanto, Dow, BASF, Bayer, and 2 others
• Pesticide treadmill
o Ecological treadmill and competition
o If you use a chemical to control pests in a field, you will kill most of them (not all). Those who
survived, will get some slightly greater tolerance to that poison
o Generational repopulation is very rapid, which has a greater immunological tolerance to the
chemicals
o Pesticide resistance is increasing – farers are reported feelig that pest aageet is a
eer edig tehology treadill
• When and how did this get started? (Romero)
o Intense boom in the growth of citrus in CA – acres and acres of just trees, nothing else (ie:
Wolfskill Grove)
o The insect develops a type of momentum in these acres and have evolved/adapted to it
o Gas chamber contraption: canvas tent that they drop over individual citrus trees and pump
fill of cyanide gas
▪ Did this because the trees were being attacked by Asian insects that spread like
wildfire over the crops
▪ Every insect was killed with the cyanide – plants evolved to resist cyanide. However,
you can only treat one tree at a time, so the insects still survived
• Oil refinery waste as the raw material as a different variety of agricultural chemicals
o The toxic waste is a burden for the oil companies
o They used chemistry to turn the waste into something valuable that they can sell - farmland
in CA as the testing ground for transmutation (use value for farmers)
o Differentiates agricultural – using something toxic to create value; need something toxic to
kill insecticides
o Pump the gas into the soil to kill the insects or larvae of the pests – sterilizing the soil of the
pests
• Interconnections between the industry, agriculture, and the military
o WWII accelerated and drove the innovations
o Farmers had to buy the chemicals every year to maintain agricultural homeostasis
o Shell knew that you would need new chemicals to kill the pest – will always be a market
o Place to get rid of waste: from the air and back into the soil
o Started because we needed to find a way to get rid of the chemical waste, not to stimulate
farming initially
• Chemurgy article – chemical and industrial use of chemicals
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
