Comment by mathiaspoint
17 hours ago
Maybe you're new here or spent most of your life in the city but at least in the mid Atlantic ticks have always been a problem.
I don't like pesticide but the ticks mean it isn't optional.
17 hours ago
Maybe you're new here or spent most of your life in the city but at least in the mid Atlantic ticks have always been a problem.
I don't like pesticide but the ticks mean it isn't optional.
I have flanking neighbors who nuke their lawns every month with permethrin. They leave little business signs on the front lawn as spam. I have 14 apple trees and haven't grown an apple in years. It's fine, they are free to do anything and everything they like with their lawns. I just think it would be really neat to grow an apple again. You know, I'm not even a biologist and its probably a fluke I dont appreciate.
Lyme disease is no joke man. You don't mess around with ticks.
If only we had a vaccine for it. Oh wait.
5 replies →
Do ticks even hang out in mowed lawns?
> they are free to do anything and everything they like with their lawns
In this case, what they're doing is clearly going beyond their lawn and negatively impacting you.
It's weird to suggest that "spraying poison on your neighbors" is deemed acceptable, as long as you're standing on your own property when you do it. If they were standing on their lawn throwing rocks at your apple trees, or shooting a gun at your apples, we wouldn't say they're free to do whatever they like. Heck, we don't even let people play loud music if it disturbs their neighbors.
We really need to update our mental models of harm and violence to account for modern possibilities. We should treat harm from pollution exactly as seriously as we treat harm from projectiles. Dying from cancer from your neighbors incidental pollution is just as bad as dying from a bullet from your neighbors errant gunshot.
In the earlier post about apple trees, I'm assuming what they mean is that the neighbors have decimated the local pollinators so their trees are not fruiting. It is still frustrating, even if they are not having direct exposure to the poison.
I'm actually back in the same California neighborhood I grew up in, which has adjoining open space. In the 50 years of cumulative time my parents or I have been there, we've never needed exterminators. At most, a can of ant spray from the supermarket was sufficient to treat around a door or window in a problematic season. I'm talking about such events once every 5-10 years. Meanwhile, exterminator vans are seen in the neighborhood quite frequently. I think some folks just see a bug, absolutely freak out, and want to nuke it all from orbit.
I think it's nearly a mental illness, how people want to detach from the natural world. As if their self-image is not that of a complex animal but of some sort of sterile abstraction.