The situation in the United States regarding pesticides and plastics is frightening. Neither product is sufficiently tested, studied, nor regulated. The general public is severely under-informed about the situation, most not realizing their risks at all or the severity and prevalence of their contact with these substances. Federal and state law and regulation, as well as the institutions designed to implement and enforce environmental regulation, are not equipped to handle the severity of the threat pesticides and plastics pose. However, there are institutions in place, which could be empowered, streamlined, and better funded in order to address the dangers of these materials.
Pesticides are chemical substances designed specifically to destroy life. For a great part of the 20th century they were applied liberally and excessively, with no understanding of their permanence in the environment or their effects on non-target species. The standard by which they were measured were their lethality and the length with which they were effective—the exact factors that make them more harmful to the environment, and eventually to human health. They allowed the rise of the great American farm monoculture, and create a paradigm shift away from farming productivity as a function of skill and towards productivity based on the amount of chemical inputs, of both pesticides and fertilizers.
The plastic industry bloomed later, but has made great inroads since the 1950’s . Plastic products are now commonplace in all facets of the human landscape. They protect our food, bottle our beverages, are implanted in our bodies, and are incorporated into many of the products we come into contact with daily, including components of our own homes. Their healt...
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...example action would be to dismantle the corn-based subsidy system explained by Pollan and incentivize polyculture and organic farming to shift away from pesticides. Finally, economic factors would be divorced from safety considerations and companies would not be refunded for lost revenue due to the banning of hazardous substances.
Works Cited
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Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
Wargo, John. Green Intelligence: Creating Environments That Protect Human Health. New Haven, Ct.: Yale UP, 2006. Print.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma In the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan challenges his readers to examine their food and question themselves about the things they consume. Have we ever considered where our food comes from or stopped to think about the process that goes into the food that we purchase to eat every day? Do we know whether our meat and vegetables picked out were raised in our local farms or transported from another country? Michael pollen addresses the reality of what really goes beyond the food we intake and how our lives are affected.
Pollan, M. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York. Random. 2006. Print
Gardner, Christopher. Notes from the Doc Talks. Stanford University. Web. April 10, 2014. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York:
Have you ever stopped and asked yourself: am I really eating healthy? Recently, I’ve come to the realization of what I’m eating on a daily basis isn’t entirely healthy for me. Michael Pollan, who is author of the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has opened my mind. While reading the first couple of chapters of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’ve realized that I don’t know much about the food that I am eating. For example, I didn’t know that farmers not only feed their animals, corn but they also feed them antibiotics (Walsh 34). In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan makes a strange statement, “You are what what you eat eats, too” (Pollan 84). Pollan continuously emphasizes this remark through various examples, and he’s right because strangely enough the food
National Center for Manufacturing Sciences. (2004, August 11). Environmental Roadmapping Initiative. Retrieved October 14, 2011, from Plastics Impacts, Risks and Regulations: http://ecm.ncms.org/ERI/new/IRRPlastics.htm
...ortation of plants, fruits, vegetables, and animals. Indiscriminate pesticide use kills the good with the bad. Long term and wide spread pesticide use poisons underground water sources, which, in turn, poison plants, animals, and humans. And, finally, by our uninformed actions, new super races of pests continue to evolve and create even greater dangers than the original.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma opens with Michael Pollan posing the question: “What should we have for dinner?”(1) He uses this question to demonstrate his belief that Americans are no longer able to make that decision for themselves. Instead, they must turn to experts to tell them what the best option is and journalists to uncover where it came from.
There is also debate on how much better biodegradable plastics are in the first place. This is because as biodegradable plastics break down, they break up into smaller and smaller pieces, but never quite disappear. This leaves the potential that the plastic would continue entering the food chain. But although biodegradable plastics aren’t perfect, they are still much safer than standard plastic and present a much lower risk. In addition, by making the shift to ban single use plastics, research towards better plastic alternatives will speed up and better solutions will become available. Over time, these new alternatives to plastics may spread to other items that aren’t single use, making an even greater impact on the health of humans and the
“What should we have for dinner?” (Pollan 1). Michael Pollan, in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals shows how omnivores, humans, are faced with a wide variety of food choices, therefore resulting in a dilemma. Pollan shows how with new technology and food advancement the choice has become harder because all these foods are available at all times of the year. Pollan portrays to his audience this problem by following food from the food chain, to industrial food, organic food, and food we forage ourselves; from the source to a final meal and, lastly he critiques the American way of eating. Non-fiction books should meet certain criterions in order to be successful. In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan is able to craft an ineffective piece of non-argumentative non-fiction due to a lack of a clear purpose stated at the outset of the book, as well as an inability to engage the reader in the book due to the over-excessive use of technical jargon as well as bombarding the reader with facts.
"Pesticides." Issues & Controversies On File: n. pag. Issues & Controversies. Facts On File News Services, 18 July 2005. Web. 20 May 2011. .
The. Pollan, Michael. A. The Omnivore's Dilemma. N. p. : Penguin Books, 2006.
... converting plastic waste into useful products are being affected by pollution; this contamination is found within containers where plastics are collected. But the same risk of pollution carries downside consequences in which workers and people responsible for cleaning and disinfecting the plastic materials are not doing the best to eliminate plastic waste, and to disinfect the infected bacteria and microorganisms from the atmosphere and environment. Organizations from China and India are the largest in the world, they collect and purchase used plastic from United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America (Minguez 2013). These companies do not bother to sanitize the products before the recycling process; for this reason the planet earth is getting a worse environmental condition, and it is destroying lives of living beings, and natural resources as well (Uddin 2014).
As time has progressed, there has always been an overarching need for high amounts of crop production throughout the world. With the rapid rate of population growth, the need for crops and other sources of nutrients is only increasing. In order to meet these high demands and increase yields, farmers and other agriculturalists have started implementing the use of pesticides. These chemical mixtures are being used in order to prevent, destroy, repel or mitigate any pests from destroying growing crops. However, using pesticides on crops can create massive amounts of pollution, negatively affect an individual’s health, and can spark biodiversity loss within an ecosystem. According to Michael C.R. Alavanja, “Over 1 billion pounds of pesticides are used within the United States (US) each year and approximately 5.6 billion pounds are used worldwide”. With all this in mind, it is clear that pesticides should not be made available to farmers and agriculturalists, and should
There are 2.5 billion pounds of pesticides being applied to agricultural products each year in the United States. This is ten times more than was applied forty years ago. It is still unknown as to what type of exact effects these chemicals may have on individuals. Some farmers that have been using pesticides in their fields and developed leukemia are finding that the cause of their disease is from inhaling pesticides. These chemicals are still in use today and most of them have never been tested for the short or long-term effects that they may have on humans.
...ates have more than fourteen distinct Federal Acts control the manufacture, registration, distribution, use, consumption and disposal of pesticides, EPA or other department cannot remove all of pesticides residues from our food, air and water. Therefore, Consumers cannot risk their own life to allow farmers and manufacturers do whatever they want to. The best way to have massive reduction for using pesticide is collecting taxes from farmers and manufacturers that overuse and mixing multiple chemicals. “The direct cost of applying a pesticide is only a small fraction of the actual cost. What remains unaccounted for are human illnesses due to pesticide exposures”(disrupting). Because farmers and manufactures react to tax incentives, pesticide will have a significant decline of use and produce pesticide.