When companies like TruGreen, Top Lawn, Mosquito Joe and whatever other chemical spraying companies come to your home and tell you that they're “caring for your lawn” or “taking care of your property” - getting rid of the bugs or the weeds - that is not actually CARE at all!
It is poison that they're marketing to you as something good for you or your house or your property or even the planet! It is a lie.
Even the companies that say that they use organic products… they're not not harmful! They are broad-spectrum pesticides (herbicides, insecticides) that kill everything. It's just that the grass, for example, is such an invasive, mono-cropped, genetically modified species that they can get rid of the other life forms that have deeper roots and are seemingly undesirable because they make your perfectly spiked lawn have other little shapes in it! You can hardly even notice if you're looking at it from afar. But people have been brainwashed to think that that's not okay.
They don't want flowers in their grass. They just want fucking empty, lifeless, straight, short blades of grass. They can't handle having clovers and dandelions and chickweed and speedwells and fleabanes and anything else that might try and pop up… or even long grass! People can't handle it.
We're so intolerant to nature and to life itself anymore. We have shattered our connection to the planet, and that's why people are still going around murdering each other. That's why we still have wars.
That's also why everybody is sick. We've traded natural medicine and healing for petrochemicals and sterility. We have chronically ill human beings across the globe, yet even (especially!) in our modern, advanced first-world countries, people are not well overall.
And it's because of our disconnection from nature and the fact that we have to spray chemicals all over our homes (outside and in!) because there's a few beings that exist that somebody told us we don't want, and we just accepted it. We believe it.
It's just so infuriating that these chemical-spraying companies market so much and so well, and they literally lie to people, telling you that they're going to care for your home, when really all they're doing is poisoning you, your family, your pets, your yard, the planet, everyone's drinking water, all the air, and the soil.
Everything is harmed by these pollutants that they just mass spray across anywhere people let them. So stop letting them spray poisons, at least in places that you can control!
These companies don't need to exist. They're decimating the landscape, the ecosystems, the biodiversity that is trying to survive everywhere. And it takes so much effort to get it back in a healthy and responsible way because of all of the different types of invasive species that have found their way here, and because of all of the damage that the chemicals have already done.
Because of the history of extermination, there's not a lot of native wildlife remaining, which used to be able to mitigate these things. Sure, life is always going to evolve over time, but we've just introduced so many things so quickly and recently, through global travel and trade.
But the solution to the creatures & vegetation that we don't want is slowly killing us all or making us all sick for the entirety of our lives. There is, of course, a spectrum of the dis-ease we each experience from the chemical assaults we are doused with. But either way, it's so backwards, and it's so messed up that CORPORATIONS, with the approval of government agencies, are just allowed to pollute the planet and poison us all.
And many of these companies have people soliciting locally. I had three people from different companies knock on my door this spring and summer, who were offering spraying services of some kind. And they're like, “Oh, well, your neighbors are doing it. Don't you want to be like your neighbors? You can get a discount!” Unfortunately, Kevin, my partner, always answered those knocks, I just overheard parts of the conversation, and he was way too kind. But for the last one, I was in the back of the house (not dressed), so I was yelling out, “You're just selling poison. We don't allow those on our property.” I have a sign in my front yard describing how pesticides are a poison, so Kevin said, “Yeah, you should go read our sign.” The young man did look at our sign on his way off of my property, and he took a picture of it.
We’ll never know what he ever did with that - if he showed his boss, or just thought I was crazy! But he claimed that his service was organic, and even the “organic pesticides” still kill indiscriminately. So we shouldn't be hiring people to spray on a large scale with these products at all!
There is a time and place for isolated pesticide usage. We just shouldn't be routinely spraying poisons that kill/injure/disable all of the creatures and all of the life forms that we do have around. Our natural wildlife populations have been completely obliterated, which is why our pest populations have only risen since we've started using these sprays.
These human practices are extremely toxic to life itself. We've known this for so long, and these companies are still growing. There's more and more of them all the time, because people keep buying their services. They are certainly misinformed, but it's still mind-blowing how many people are convinced to sign up for this chemical assault.
Really, we need to boycott all of these chemical companies. We can survive without them… I do it every year! There are definitely places that I could do better around my home, but even my toilet bowl cleaner is supposedly non-toxic. If we all just thought about what these chemicals all actually are… life killers! … then we would be more selective in our usage of them.
I don't spray pesticides in my yard, and I didn't even have a bug (aphid) problem this year, and I grew the most luscious yard, with a dominance of native species. I understand this is one little anecdote, but it's an example that if you do things for long enough, the ecosystem will balance out, and with enough biodiversity, the environment will take care of itself.
But people are just too brainwashed into wanting neat and tidy, manicured lawns. Straight lines. Sterile environments.
Life isn't fucking sterile. Life isn't free from danger. Life isn't safe from obstacles and inconveniences.
We are solicited for consumption, and propagandized into believing what corporations want, in order to get us to purchase. It's all about purchasing these companies’ products. We've just become so far removed from nature that we've gotten it backwards.
Life itself cannot exist in sterility and emptiness. Life is beings and creatures and sunlight and coexisting. You can't just kill everything and expect yourself to be happy and healthy.
That is not how we heal the world. We have to go back to letting other things exist if we want any chance of recovery from all of the damage that we've imposed, at least since the industrial era.
We have a lot of great advancements in some areas. We have safe shelters, we have electricity, we have running water. We don't have the discomforts of the elements anymore, and that's a beautiful thing. We have computers and the internet and interconnection across the globe, and that is wonderful. And we can still have these things and take care, actual care, of the land that we live on.
That means not poisoning it, and instead, supporting wildlife. That means not being afraid of bugs and weeds. And we need to open our minds and our hearts, and expand our aesthetic pleasures.
Life on this planet is suffering because of all of the anti-life activity that we've been consuming and perpetuating. And we all play a part in this.
Some of us can do better by not hiring the companies to come out and poison your yard (multiple times) every year!!! The rest of us can spread the word.