Robert Van Den Bosch: Stop the Pesticide Conspiracy
(Page 2 of 12)
July/August 1979
By the Mother Earth News staff
PLOWBOY: Tell me a bit about the background of the man who inspired such vicious attacks.
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VAN DEN BOSCH: My mother was a Swiss farm girl who married a Dutch floriculturist. My parents operated flower shops—growing their own "merchandise"-in both Holland and England . . . before eventually settling in California. I was born and raised in the small San Francisco Bay area town of Martinez, and received my Ph.D. in entomology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950.
PLOWBOY: Would it be fair to assume that your small-town upbringing and your parents' work with plants had something to do with the fact that you eventually settled upon a career in insect pest management?
VAN DEN BOSCH: Yes, I think that would be an accurate statement. I've been interested in biology—especially as that science pertains to insects—since my early childhood bug-collecting days.
In fact, I've pursued the study of entomology for the greater part of my life. Until about a decade ago, my work was conducted on a strictly scientific level. Since that "turning point" in my career, however, my activities have become more and more political.
PLOWBOY: What was it that triggered your move from scholarly work to eco-activism?
VAN DEN BOSCH: It simply became clear to me that our current ideas about insect control were heading the world toward both ecological and economic disaster ... and that political action was the only way we were ever going to get off our global pesticide treadmill.
PLOWBOY: What do you mean by "pesticide treadmill"?
VAN DEN BOSCH: I'm referring to the situation that develops when farmers are forced to use more and more insecticides every year-end pay higher and higher prices for those substances—while the natural processes of species resurgence and immunity backlash actually build up insect populations rather than destroy them. This sort of "unwinnable war" is a result of our rather silly attempts to control the more than sextillion reproductively prolific creatures—among the world's million and a half insect species—with single-minded Buck Rogers methods. The pesticide treadmill is a long, expensive walk . . . which can never make any real progress.
PLOWBOY: And your studies led you to believe that there was a workable alternative to the commonly used technique of regular pesticide bombardment?
VAN DEN BOSCH: Yes, but that answer wasn't discovered overnight. You see, my specialty is biological regulation ... which is essentially the control of plant or animal populations through the use of natural predators. My colleagues and I knew, however, that it would be absolute insanity to try to make effective use of the beneficial predatory and parasitic insects in the face of a nationwide blizzard of pesticides. So those of us in Berkeley's Division of Biological Control began working toward an integrated, multifaceted insect management system ... simply because we felt that such a technique would be the only method that would allow us to show any significant progress with natural mortality agents.
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