From my understanding:
– pests don’t have perfect tolerance to pesticides, it’s just that some members of the species happen to be somewhat better at metabolizing the active substance found in the pesticide
– the active substance is only a small percentage of the pesticide, most of the pesticide is some kind of carrier oil and other inactive substances.
So, what prevents the manufacture of pesticides with much higher concentrations, much higher than any member of the pest species could ever metabolise? I understand that in open-air crops there might be considerations about collateral damage to bees etc, but this doesn’t explain why such high-concentration pesticides aren’t a thing in greenhouses.
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There’s nothing special about pesticides that make them only kill ‘pests’; after all, that’s an arbitrary definition we put on things we don’t like, just like weeds. Pesticide is basically a poison that’s just at a low enough potency/concentration that it’ll only *really* hurt insects, but if you up the potency suddenly it starts harming other animals like birds, native wildlife, or even us. This was the issue with DDT: sure it killed the hell out of bugs, but it fucked up birds exposed to it (or that ate bugs poisoned by DDT) and caused birth defects.
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