It's worth checking if Lincoln sprays their parks with poison in the hopes of decreasing the insect population. You could be eating those poisons.

Yeah, that is a possiblity. The area I went to looked pretty much out of the mainstay (i.e. outside the main grassy area), so it seems less likely, but still worth considering.

(That's the main reason it's generally a bad idea to eat dandylions from residential lawns. The plant itself is very edible, but the chemicals that our destructive culture tells people to put in the ground and on the plants aren't.)

It was quite shocking to see the difference when I came to a place where no insectacide had been applied. The house my uncle bought and has been fixing up is in more of the run down part of town, with really old houses. My grandma took me to see it, and when we stepped out of the car, there were swarms, just hundreds and hundreds of all kinds of different bugs, most the size of a mosquito or less (if you were starving, they wouldn't be much of a food source, unless you're the size of a bat).

Then it hit me, this is what it's like when they don't spray for insects. This is what all the lawns in Lincoln would be like if it weren't for insect spray. While I'm pretty opposed to spraying poisons into the environment to target any kind of life, I found it rather trying to stand in the midst of all those insects. Maybe I'd just have to get used to it, but my few minutes of exposure left me rather less well disposed to insect kind.

The problem with such poisons is that in most cases, they aren't just harmful to insects, but to humans (and probably animals) as well. Of course, the impact on bugs is far more severe (death) because of their small relative size, but they can also have less immediately obvious adverse effects on people too. Also, some people are more sensitive than others.

First-hand example: When I was a kid, the apartments our family was living in were beset by a seiges of little ants, so the management decided to have them sprayed with insecticides. It got rid of the ants alright, but it also caused my mom to get sick and suffer convulsions. The solution proved to be worse than the problem (for our family, at least).

It might also be worth asking what's attracting all those insects? Maybe in some areas, they are a natural part of the eco-system, but I bet that's not always the case. For example, last summer, I would often stop outside to read. Whenever I sat on a bench in one of the city parks, I was constantly being bothered by flies (in addition to buzzing around like a nuisance, they also had a rather nasty habit of biting). But when I tried some of the country trails immediately outside Lincoln (where pesticides are much less likely to be sprayed), I could sit on the ground beside the trail for hours and saw hardly any flies at all. (I did see a couple of rather large looking spiders crawl by, but they left me alone in peace.) I made the guess that the flies in the park were probably thriving off the human garbage in the trash containers. If my guess is true, then people (or the specific ways people choose to live) are responsible for the plague of flies.

Since I am not a biologist or an ecologist, and I don't know the specifics of your uncle's area, I can't speak about the cause of the bugs there. But I also wouldn't jump to the conclusion that just because there are a lot of insects somewhere that annoy us, we should immediately start spraying. Maybe there's another solution.

I had very serious problems when I was at Union because of the spraying for insects over winter break, they didn't let the air circulate, and I got very, well, a kind of sick. I lost most of my balance and had headaches for several weeks after I got back. I spent most of that time sitting down, moving around as little as possible because I just plain didn't have any balance. That was really bad.

However, it's quite possible that the swarms of tiny bugs I experienced were the result of some other attribute of the area, and not naturally caused simply by not spraying.

It could be a difference in climate, but I know Boulder never sprayed for insects until West Nile forced them to, and insects were never really much more than an infrequent annoyance here. (I don't think they've sprayed since, either.)

There are also healthier ways to deal with insects. They have natural predators, like birds and bats. Many species of bird are vulnerable to the same poisons insects are, so when you spay for insects, you also wipe out their natural predators.

For that matter, when I was on a trip to New Orleans (pre-Katrina), the giant bug spray vehicles rolled by in the muggy night air, and I thought about how miserable it would be if they weren't there.

To my knowledge, the only times Lincoln has sprayed for bugs is because of West Nile, and it was specifically anti-mosquito poison sprayed on some, not all sections of the city. I think they do that at least once a year. (I read about it in the local paper.)