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Using gene drives to eliminate the few insect species that cause most of the harm to agriculture, will allow to drastically reduce the amount of pesticide we have to use now.

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A myopic solution. We have no idea what role these problematic insects and weeds play in the grand scheme of things. Killing them is one thing. Elimination of species is a totally different game.

I agree. We pretend we know what we are doing, but we have no clue. It really sucks that insects eat our crops, but insects need to eat something, or they die. If they die, then whatever eats them will also die. No matter how you slice it, humans need to consume every ounce of available resources to fuel not only just our population growth, but our economic growth too. We do this by vast ecosystem destruction, replacing complex food webs with our own industrialized agriculture and production needs. Whether we use chemical pesticides or turn their homes asunder and starve them to death, or "snipe" them to death with gene drive fantasies, the result is the same: we're eliminating everything that does not participate in the cartoon food web of our own creation. This will not end well.

While i agree that loss of biodiversity especially in tropical forests, is a catastrophe, i don't think that keeping a few more insects and birds in our fields helps. In fact it forces us to use more space for agriculture and destroy more of valuable forests.

Also most of the plants we cultivate are invasive species, and their main pests are invasive as well, so we have plenty of opportunities to experiment on this invasive species before before we kill native species in their original habitats.

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