Medfly vs. Macho : Spraying: The high command of pest control is hooked on the pesticide equivalent of saturation bombing. The result is failure and ecological ruin.

It’s been called “Smash-Mouth Pest Control,” after the style of football in which you throw out all finesse, smash your opponent in the mouth and stomp his body into the sod. Gather your bombers, fill their tanks and spray your enemy into oblivion through brute, military-industrial might.

Too bad about the birds and fish. A pity about the pets and the beneficial insects like bees and predators. Sorry about those poor slobs and their children who have to be sprayed too. Sorry about that, because this is a war. The only way to win a war is to mass your troops and pound your enemy into the dirt. Smash-Mouth Pest Control is the strategy of choice throughout the Westernized world.

I believe it is an artifact, of the male mind--or rather, it is an artifact of a particular kind of male mind. Wherever you travel in developed countries, you will find men occupying all the top positions of pest-control politics, almost without exception. (This is true of organizations in general, but more pronounced in pest control). Go to a board meeting and you will see it in graphic detail: the husky men in their late 50s and early 60s, the gray, barbered hair, the sagging jowls cinched off by neckties, the deep, coarse voices, the cold, steady gazes, the deep creases of experience and yes, of courage, toughness, endurance etched into their faces--the scars and medals of many wars.

This is the portrait of a warrior--a dominant warrior. In the study of animal behavior this would be called an alpha male. His primary mission in life is to get power. Power, be it physical or political, means the ability to make others do things your way, to make them submit. Anyone who consistently seeks high political office is a person who feeds on the exercise of dominance.

So the high command of pest control is used to battle and used to winning. In the human world they have vanquished many political foes, and in their illusion of life they have whipped many legions of insects. And when they are challenged they revert to those fundamental traits of the quintessential male--size, strength, intimidation. If that fails, they resort instinctively to physical force.

Now a fly has invaded their territory, challenged the warrior’s dominance and threatened his deepest levels of being. He responds the only way that such a mind can be expected to respond. From the roots of his soul surges a burning and uncontainable urge to spray.

His mind fades into fiction, the motors throb, the rotor chops, the malathion gurgles. The copter swings and sways through the night. A universe of light glitters against the vast black infinity of Los Angeles below. He reaches for military-industrial technology and wraps his hand around the pesticide lever. He squeezes the grip, feels the surface worn smooth by uncountable blows against the multitudes, and he pulls.

A number of notions follow from this military approach. A dead insect is a good insect. To control insects, kill insects. To equate killing with control is one of the great illusions of the 20th Century. In the most advanced programs of control you actually want the pests to survive at low levels, because they are food for their enemies: The enemies hold the pests at levels that cannot cause economic damage.

The smash-mouth approach leads to the opposite extreme, to exploding populations and ecologic ruination. Pests develop pesticidal immunity and the residues soak into the environment. The first spray upsets the system and with their predators gone, insects that were not pests previously are released from natural control and become secondary pests. Each spraying requires yet another. Today the American farmer uses 125 million pounds of pesticide against insects and loses 13% of his crop. In 1948, as the Age of Pesticides began, that same farmer was spraying 15 million pounds and losing just 7% of his crop. We are using 10 times more pesticide and losing twice the percentage of yield as a direct result.

This is not to condemn outright the use of the pesticidal fist. But the fist should be controlled by the rational mind and its philosophy, not the jerking of some subconscious urge. When properly used, pesticides are an invaluable tool, the environmental equivalent of a drug. Like a drug, they should be urged only as a last resort and prescribed by a practitioner licensed in the art and science of ecology.

There is a school of pest control that sees the Medfly, and all pests, as pieces of a larger system. The men and women who think this way have no political power, of course, for dominating others is not their primary goal in life. But they maintain that if you study the life cycle of the pest and how it fits with its peers, you will find that every species has points where it is vulnerable to attack.

To illustrate the point, consider the case of the cotton bollworm (Heliothis zea) . Heliothis was a formidable pest of cotton in the San Joaquin Valley, and by the early 1960s the pesticidal fist was pounding away from 12 to 15 times each season.

Then a group of insect ecologists came, and studied, and discovered that the adult bollworms, which are moths, flew and mated under the full moon. All you had to do was wait three days, spray once, and you caught all the little bollworms as they hatched. They had no time to burrow into the bolls where pesticides could not reach them. The result was a mere two or three applications per season.

The same approach will work with the Medfly, or any living thing. It is not used because the warriors of pest control are simply not constituted to think in multi-step, non-dominating ways. Manipulation and persuasion do not appeal to the alpha male. You can only wonder what would happen if women other than the Margaret Thatchers of the world were in charge of pest control. In general, women seem less inclined to use force and more inclined to manipulate with skill and guile. That’s exactly the ticket in dealing with Mother Nature, who responds not to the pulverizing blow, but to the intelligent stroke.