The home gardener still has unlimited access to chemicals that professionals have to be licensed to use. In reducing and ending the use of these poisons, the most important steps to take are attitudinal. Although our society seems to base value on scarcity, we must learn to appreciate those plants that are easy to grow and are well adapted to survive in our region. The key is to retrain our eyes to see the beauty that is natural to California.

The most environmental action to take with the old-fashioned toxic garden chemicals now in your home is to use them as you ordinarily would, and then simply not replace them. No matter how they are disposed of, the inevitable result is pollution. The current thinking is that diffusion is a better method of disposal than concentration...Isn’t that scary?

If you can’t bring yourself to use these chemicals, call your county health department for advice. Your chemicals will eventually be dumped into the governmental toxic disposal place that none of us seems to know very much about. What do they do with that stuff anyway?