Why It’s Okay to be Pro-Herbicide
Life is all about proportions— you might have heard it said that “too much of anything is bad.” This simple statement encompasses a lot of the theory behind chemical control on weeds. Many things are healthy in small amounts, and grow to be more unhealthy as the consumer increases the proportion. An example might be eating an apple a day to keep the doctor away, but if someone eats a hundred apples a day, they are going to have excess fructose, and consequently, higher chances of heart disease, diabetes, etc.
The same is true with the chemicals that applicators use to kill weeds. When used as directed by the label and the EPA, it can be safe. When used carelessly, and in larger than legal amounts, you could be creating a more toxic environment than when you started.
I’ve heard so many people aggressively worried about using “chemicals”, and when I ask what they believe a chemical is, I’m consistently disappointed by their lack of knowledge on the subject. Now, I am not a chemist, but I do always try to point out that a simple definition of a chemical substance is just to have a definite chemical composition. Chemistry is a science of defining matter. Everything you see, touch, or sense in general is made up of chemicals. Water is a chemical…H2O is its chemical name as I’m sure you know.
So once this base knowledge is established, it seems that the following questions in most of these conversations tend to point in the same general direction: manufactured & artificial chemicals vs. natural ones. Most peoples’ worries seem to fall in to the field of using substances foreign to the habitat in question. This is very open ended, in that infinite variables could be added or taken away to either create or resolve an issue, so it all comes back to the statement I started with… “Life is all about proportions.”
The manufactured herbicides that applicators use on weeds, are a lot of the time selective to certain properties of that species. Some of them are replicating certain hormones that the plant kingdom use (auxins, cytokinins, ABA, ethylenes) that regulate growth or stress in that plant. As you might guess, since mammals don’t regulate a lot of these hormones like plants do, the chemical doesn’t really affect us if used in labeled proportions. Not saying you should drink it though! :)
