Excerpts from ‘We are Bombarding America’s Forests With Roundup’
by Nate Halverson, Mother Jones
… I steer my old Toyota Tacoma down a bumpy dirt road to where the Lassen National Forest gives way to private timberland. Lilly rides shotgun.
We’d come to this exact spot seven years ago. Lilly, my sharp-eyed border collie, had jumped out of the truck and chased a rabbit through a meadow of knee-high grass, returning covered in mud and burrs. The landscape was straight out of an L.L. Bean catalog…. The Lassen area is where I come to reset, forage for wild mushrooms, and let stress evaporate.
But today, I’m looking out over a barren, sun-bleached expanse that stretches across the former meadow and up the sides of denuded mountains as far as the eye can see…. It is eerily quiet—desolate. The Dixie Fire roared through here in July 2021, burning nearly 1 million acres. The Park Fire three years later took out another 430,000 acres nearby. But the fires aren’t directly responsible for what I’m seeing today. People did this.
Just a few minutes down the road, nature has crept back to life. There, I saw vibrant green mountain whitethorn bushes, rabbitbrush, and purple-tinged bull thistles, with energetic bees bopping from flower to flower. The towering trees were gone, but new saplings abounded—cedars, pines, firs, and more—scattered randomly amid the greenery, already a foot or two high. No such verdant revival is visible on the private timberland before me. No bees, no flowers—it’s a virtual dead zone where the only life consists of row upon row of manually planted, tightly packed conifer saplings, all less than a foot tall.
This is because, unbeknownst to most people, logging companies and the US Forest Service have been spraying massive amounts of herbicide in clear-cut and fire-ravaged forests of California—and throughout the nation. And not just any herbicide, but glyphosate, a potent and problematic weed killer best known by the brand name Roundup. (Continue reading at Mother Jones.)
Key Information
Nate Halverson’s year-long investigation of glyphosate use in forests revealed:
- Executives and bureaucrats are using chemicals to manage our national forests as tree farms.
- After wildfire glyphosate helps commercially attractive conifers rebound faster by killing deciduous trees, native shrubs, flowering plants, and anything else that might compete for water, nutrients, and sunlight.
- Recent studies have found that glyphosate-based herbicides cause “deleterious effects” on fish.
- Roundup producer Monsanto orchestrated several influential studies, including one published in 2000 listing Dr. Gary Williams as the lead author.
- The Forest Service’s 2011 risk assessment found glyphosate poses no significant threat and references Williams’ 2000 article 27 times.
- The Williams article was retracted after the publishing journal’s editors learned that the paper’s named authors, “were not solely responsible for writing its content” and had relied entirely on Monsanto data.
