“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.’”The cost to everyone's lives is NOT worth total aesthetic control over the environment.
– Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
In the same way we know that fire burns, we should know pesticides disrupt and destroy bodies. Pesticides sicken and kill everyone, starting with the people who have the least agency to leave or stop whoever is flooding their homes with poison. Animal people, plant people, fungi people, lichen people, any kind of people.
There is no amount you can apply to beautify/homogenize your lawn or home which is "small enough" to not matter. That poison will travel and kill beyond your targets. You won't just eliminate the ants, the bees, the termites, the moss, the birds and mammals you consider "nuisance" for eating food or seeking shelter. You'll sicken everyone else nearby, sicken the people whose food source you've contaminated. The destruction of one type of lifeform in isolation will never be just that. It will never not have knock-on effects.
It should be widely acknowledged that pesticides move through the environment.
The rate at which humans produce for-profit poisons massively outpaces the rate at which any processes, natural or human-made, could metabolize or neutralize them. There is nowhere for it to go. It shouldn't have existed in the first place. It circulates and deposits in deathly concentrations. We don't need distinction between types of poisons, their half-lives, or their mechanisms of action. Cumulatively, at the scale and ubquity they are propagated, with the frivolousness and lack of thought they are applied, pesticide use is ruinous and serves coercive power structures.
Industrial mass-produced commercially available pesticides only exist because of entitlement to decide who lives and dies, as well as entitlement to act upon the world as one pleases without experiencing the inevitable consequences. This is not an inherently human cognitive distortion. This is a function of power to avoid (immediate) consequences and coerce others. Business owners, land owners, lawmakers, etc. all get to compel workers to apply pesticides on their behalf. HOAs, landlords, bylaw enforcement, and domineering people in your own household can impose ultimatums about yards: either "control" the lawn on their terms or you lose your living arrangement. Sometimes, it's individuals choosing to wield power to make their environment conform to their precious expectations of uniformity and control, things that require constant removal and killing of life to maintain.
It is also true that there are cases where pesticides are the only thing that will save a human life, or many human lives, or avert a crisis of immense suffering. Such emergencies where only an extremely resource-intensive and deleterious input can solve the situation are likely caused by industrial mass-production as well. In a better world, it would not have been a horrible non-choice between saving a life and inflicting more life-wrecking pollution on the world.
What about pesticides for crops that feed the world? We need that or we starve.
Industrial agriculture does not "feed the world" and there is no "humanity" or "we" that is equitably benefitted. This is obvious because many humans remain deprived of food and are already starving. Food instead is held hostage for money to ensure not everyone gets it. It is also overproduced to the point of leaving massive quantities to rot (eaten by mould and scavenger animals). This much should also be common knowledge because it is objectively happening.
Other inputs to pesticide-dependent food production include:
Birds are fucked for our attempts to "control" insects.
See what happens to people who live near golf courses.
Human infant mortality is tied directly to the targeted poisoning of bats:
"Fungal disease killed bats, bats stopped eating enough insects, farmers applied more pesticide to maximize profit and keep food plentiful and cheap, the extra pesticide use led to more babies dying."
Here is an article about pesticides being the most popular suicide method in "developing countries" i.e.: countries which are colonized, relentlessly extracted from and dominated by imperialist nations. "A Continuing Tragedy", says the author, who also took care to note the economic burden of suicide attempts on healthcare systems. To say that "the costs of self-harm should be balanced against agricultural benefits of pesticides" is some measured bootlicking. An attempt at compassion that wasn't.
See this article (a PDF) about how pesticide-resistant seed grifters create coercive, inescapable economic traps which drive many Indian farmers to suicide by pesticide.
Most of us will drink pesticides another way.
Amounts in any one place depends on distance from sources and how much power a population has to avoid the worst consequences. This is a function of whiteness and money. This is environmental racism. However, ambient poisoning reaches even those who can insulate and distance themselves from the toxicity that industrial living generates.