Pesticides Are Killing the World’s Soils - Scientific American
▻https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pesticides-are-killing-the-worlds-soils/#click=https://t.co/viDIqBeia9
The ongoing escalation of pesticide-intensive #agriculture and #pollution are major driving factors in the precipitous decline of many soil organisms, like ground beetles and ground-nesting bees. They have been identified as the most significant driver of soil biodiversity loss in the last decade.
Yet pesticide companies and our #pesticide regulators have ignored that research.
The #EPA, which is responsible for pesticide oversight in the U.S., openly acknowledges that somewhere between 50 percent to 100 percent of all agriculturally applied #pesticides end up on the soil. Yet to assess pesticides’ harms to soil species, the agency still uses a single test species—one that spends its entire life above ground in artificial boxes to estimate risk to all soil organisms—the European honeybee.
Source : Pesticides and Soil Invertebrates: A Hazard Assessment
▻https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2021.643847/full
