The deep ecology of mosquitos
The deeper I get into deep ecology, the more I think twice about killing
anything, even pesky insects like mosquitos. I think twice, but I do kill
mosquitos, especially when they buzz in my ears. And I kill ants in my
kitchen if they don't leave voluntarily, and also flies--though if a bee
gets in, I try to capture it and release it outside.
However, I do not believe it is wrong to protect oneself and one's family,
including garden and nurtured plants, from insect pests--but there are ways
to do that short of hauling out the heavy artillery of toxic sprays and
repellents. Killing grasshoppers that are making a lunch out of one's green
beans is a much better way of dealing with them than spraying them to
Kingdom Come, and any organic gardener knows how often one has to pick
worms, aphids, beetles and other crop-destroying bugs off the plants, one
by one (that is, if one wants to have crops). Sometimes, I almost blush to
admit (as a deep ecologist, I mean), I experience upwellings of glee at
snagging nasty little potato bugs and crushing them underfoot, or slicing
tiny cutworms in half before they've had a chance to girdle my tomato
plants. I haven't forgotten the year I loosed my housecat on the garden,
hoping he would kill a rabbit or two after they nibbled *all* my broccoli
seedlings *right* down to the soil. (Of course, he never caught any.)
The pathological fear of being bitten even once by a bug, or letting a
single one munch a leaf of one's garden, and using barrages of toxic
chemicals to prevent it, is a sign of how far we've come from feeling
ourselves part of the natural world, and even bespeaks something akin to
the repression of the shadow side of human nature--the idea that we can, by
force if necessary, maintain the fiction that we are not subject to nature,
that we are not both predator and prey and are outside of the endless cycle
of birth-death-rebirth.
Take, once again, the mosquito, to whom we are prey. Here in Minnesota, we
have a lot of them in summer. People spend tremendous amounts of money on
insect sprays, some of them highly toxic and much more harmful to the human
being than a bug bite. They slather these on their tiny children, to
prevent even one mosquito bite. This complete lack of acquiescence in our
position as prey for the mosquito reveals a profound and pitiful lack of
awareness of our place in the biosphere, as well as a sad lack of
appreciation for the simple but exquisite way in which we and the mosquito
have co-evolved: When one lets a couple of mosquitos bite, the bites itch
like crazy for a while, but right away, the body begins to make antibodies
to the venom. Later bites don't itch nearly as much, if one allows the
first few.
Insistence that we can arrange our lives so we needn't be bothered ever
again by insects denies our embeddedness in the same world they are in and
denies the basic commonalities we have with them--yes, even with mosquitos
we share much. There are a lot of them, and they are very small and quite
pestiferous, but they are made of the same stuff we are, by the same force,
and they have as much desire to live and fulfill their own natures as we
do.
Betsy Barnum