From The Anchorage Daily News:
As the New Year approaches, many will be making resolutions. What of the gardeners?
My wish is that each and every one of us will resolve to turn our backs on the use of chemicals.
It isn’t very hard to build a case that no gardener should use chemical fertilizers, insecticides and the like. In fact, it isn’t very hard to build the case that no gardener should be ALLOWED to use them. Gardening, after all, is just a hobby.
It is undeniable, for example, that nitrates and phosphates from modern agriculture — and, yes, horticulture — have leached into the aquifers, streams, rivers and waterways of our land in excessive amounts with incredibly deleterious impacts to the health of humans as well as Nature (as if the two can be separated). Chemicals with unpronounceable names, bearing labels carrying dire health warnings, have become such a mainstay of our hobby that some of us deem their use one of our “rights as Americans.”
No matter that the poison you spray on your lawn drifts up to 75 miles when there is even just the slightest breeze, impacting the innocent child playing in the yard in the next town or the moose in the forests you may hunt and consume as much as it impacts the dandelion which is its target.
Continue reading: Gardeners: Go chemical-free in 2011