Imagine being the person who developed endosulfan, a new and economical way to protect a wide variety of crops and plants, in the early 1950s, only to find out half century after it is destroying the environment and ecosystem. Not to mention, it has been widely used around the world for decades and is now even found in Sahara desert dust and Arctic ice samples. It is highly unlikely that endosulfan was applied to any crops in the middle of the Sahara Desert or the Arctic. Now, with a few decades of organochlorine pesticides to clean up and such a wide range of areas affected by it due to long-range atmospheric transport, how might such a process unfold? Is there a way to balance economic pest control and environmental pollution? The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has defined the term pesticide: “Any substance or mixture of substances intended to prevent, destroy or control any pest, including vectors of human disease or animal disease, unwanted species of plants or animals that cause damage or otherwise interfere with the production, processing, storage, transportation or marketing of food, agricultural products, wood and wood products or animal feed or substances that may be fed to animals for the control of insects, arachnids or other parasites in or on their bodies.” There are many subclasses of pesticides, two of which include insecticides and acaricides. These subclasses can be grouped into chemical families. Some of the most common chemical families of insecticides are organochlorines, organophosphates, and carbamates. (Vivekanandhan and Duraisamy 2012)Over 40 years ago, organochlorine pesticides were introduced. At the time they appeared to be gr... middle of paper... sipation, half-lives, and mass spectrometric identification of endosulfan isomers and the sulfate metabolite on three field-grown vegetables. Journal of Environmental Science & Health, Part B -- Pesticides, Food Contaminants and Agricultural Wastes 47(5):369-78. Mukherjee I and Kumar A. 2012. Phytoextraction of endosulfan, a remediation technique. Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 88(2):250-4.Vivekanandhan N and Duraisamy A. 2012. Ecological impact of pesticides, mainly organochlorine insecticide endosulfan: a review. Universal Journal of Environmental Research and Technology 2(5):369-76.Wade LG. Organic chemistry. 8th ed. Boston: Pearson; 2013. Wang B, Huang J, Lu Y, Arai S, Iino F, Morita M, Yu G. 2012. The pollution and ecological risk of endosulfan in soil of Huai'an city, China. Environmental monitoring and assessment 184(12):7093-101.