No, really.
And the Denver Post doesn’t seem to have any answers. In a 760-word article about the problem, insecticides, the one thing that actually killed the bugs, are dismissed because the bugs seem to have mutated around them. And we are told, “get over it,” rather than invent new pesticides.
Bedbugs are easy. The bite, cause welts, and they hurt. But they don’t actually carry disease. Mosquitoes carry disease, and millions have died because we won’t spray them in Africa, either.
They’re also more invasive and troubling than coyotes, another old-new urban pest that the local authorities tell us we can’t do anything about, although we did something about them for decades.
Silent Spring has been thoroughly discredited, but its effects in the public imagination live on, to our detriment.
The point of civilization is to civilize, not to live in a higher-tech, but all-too-literal, state of nature.
