Another Earth Day has come and gone, and with it our yearly reminder of our impacts and footprints, of how and what we’ve been using. Indeed, examining our personal patterns of use can become an all-consuming task. But understanding our own behavior is not always enough to find the greenest solution.

Take pest control.

Whether you’re in an outer-ring suburb, a one room apartment, or a sprawling farmstead, you and bugs will cross paths. With the largest biomass of all terrestrial animals and an estimated 30 million species, bugs are probably the most diverse and consequential things we observe in our daily lives[1]. Whether we like it or not, we share our space and resources with these mysterious little animals.

In the current pest control paradigm, high science has replaced the input of the lay observer. A century of miracle cures has conditioned us to meet our expectations by bending nature to our whim. Even our all-natural treatments usually consist of spraying on a layer of some faraway expert’s special concoction. We need not accept this “spray it” philosophy. Anyone can create low cost, low impact pest control solutions by following a few simple guidelines:
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