It's time for my occasional reminder that balloons don't fly up to grandma up in heaven. They go up about five miles, burst, and fall back down. What lands is a translucent scrap of latex with a ribbon attached, floating on water, stuck on land, looking almost exactly like a jellyfish. Sea turtles, seabirds and fish eat them. Balloons are the deadliest piece of plastic a seabird can ingest, something like 32 times more likely to kill than a hard fragment, because soft latex folds and blocks the gut instead of passing through. The ribbon stays intact for years, and it wraps around necks, wings and flippers long after the balloon itself is gone. The biodegradable balloons don't fix the problem. University of Tasmania researchers buried latex balloons in industrial compost, the fastest breakdown environment that exists, and dug them up 16 weeks later fully intact. Louisiana made intentional releases a finable offense this year. Most of Europe has banned them. If you want to mark something: plant a tree, light a candle, blow bubbles, ring a bell. Whatever you're releasing it for, it isn't going where you want it to go.

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers. When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it. They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long. In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it. The flowers attract a standing army to our fields. We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.