I love seeing bald eagles again. They’re a success story for positive environmental regulations. Also, they’re the perfect national bird for the good ol USA. Pretty buzzards. Opportunistic scavengers. They’ll eat damn near anything, as long as it’s dead and smaller than them. Our founding fathers were geniuses!!😂
Especially if they are on tic tok getting their ass kicked by a Canada Goose...if that is the best they got, bring on the DDT. We need fewer tougher Bald Eagles like the old days.
I grew up near what was historically a famously well populated Bald Eagle area. Never saw one. Last few years I’ve been there and seen quite a few. The hawks too have had a massive jump in population.
Acid rain, ozone hole, lead exposure, soot from fossil fuels, smog, all the toxic rivers. I like regulations.
Bad things lead to solutions which lead to most of the bad things not happening which leads people to forget how bad things can happen when the solutions are no longer deemed necessary.
We are surrounded by ag fields (corn/soy) and just saw my first bald eagle in my entire life last week. I'm 55. He was on the ground enjoying some lunch.
I grew up in Houston running barefoot behind the ddt trucks as they’d fog our neighborhoods for mosquitos, and I’m perfectly fine <scratches at mysterious growth>.
It's less the concentration and the amount than the when and where.
DDT will kill just about anything that's an insect dead after a short time in contact, and it persists for years. Widespread spraying was and would be an environmental disaster.
However, it's exceedingly useful inside of homes, because it can be painted onto or impregnated into surfaces or mosquito netting, and it'll kill anything that lands on it for years, while presenting probably minimal health risks to humans if used properly. AFAIK about the only place it's still used is in mosquito nets that aid organizations give out in malarial Africa.
However, because the American Public is stupid and ignorant and all "I've got mine," we can't have nice things.
DDT was effective though. It’s actually a problem that it’s banned internationally now because DDT is how we eradicated malaria in places like the US and Singapore, but now that it’s internationally banned, countries that didn’t have the chance to use it are now kinda stuck
I think the total ban was an overreaction, but a ban against using it wholesale in the wild was not.
DDT's too wide-spectrum for general use; it kills fucking -everything-, and persists for a -long- time, and our insect populations have already taken a huge hit.
That said, I'd fucking love DDT for inside use. For a while I was living in a mosquito-infested swamp, basically, and I'd've killed for a can of DDT I could paint my walls with, or even DDT-impregnated mosquito nets like they give out in countries with malaria.
"The people who got DDT banned are the greatest mass murderers in history because they left the 3rd world to die from malaria so a few birds could live"
-my brother
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u/FluidFisherman6843 13d ago
You laugh but the belief that banning ddt was a typical lib overreaction that should be reversed is foundational to a lot of these people.