Effects of Insecticides

World opinion has been awakening to a variety of man-made environmental problems during the past few years, and few of these have received more public debate than ‘the pesticide problem’. Strong emotions are evoked in people when they get the idea that they or other animals are being poisoned, regardless of whether the threat is real or imagined. ‘The pesticide problem5 is by no means a single problem, but instead consists of a host of individual and highly diverse problems depending on the pesticide and circumstances involved. In considering the effects of pesticides on nontarget organisms, I propose to organize my remarks into several categories, touching only on those aspects of pesticides that seem more important, and omitting much that in my view appears less critical.