08/24/2026
They're dousing national forests in Roundup, and the government helped Monsanto rig the science that says it's safe. A yearlong investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting, aired on PBS News, found glyphosate use in California's forests has quadrupled over the past two decades.
In 2023 alone, crews put roughly 266,000 pounds of it onto forestland, close to five times what was used twenty years earlier.
Why poison the woods? Not to protect the trees you love. To grow the trees a lumber company can sell.
Glyphosate kills the native brush and hardwoods that compete with young conifers, making it the go-to tool for replanting land scarred by logging and fire. Wildflowers, shrubs, and the bees and birds that live in them get wiped out so profitable pines grow straight and fast for harvest.
This spring, workers with backpack sprayers are set to hike 10,000 acres of Lassen National Forest and apply up to eight pounds of the chemical per acre. A family with a two-month-old lives right in that spray zone. Near Lake Tahoe, the agency wants to hit up to 75,000 burned acres above some of the cleanest drinking water in the country.
The Pacific Crest Trail runs straight through the most heavily sprayed forestland in the state.
The World Health Organization's cancer agency labeled glyphosate probably carcinogenic to humans back in 2015. Bayer, which owns Monsanto, has already paid out more than $12 billion to people who say Roundup gave them cancer.
And the safety study the Forest Service leans on? Investigators found it rested heavily on research Monsanto secretly ghostwrote. One of its most cited "independent" papers was retracted last year for hiding the company's involvement. Monsanto scientists talked openly about paying outsiders to stand up and shout that glyphosate is harmless.
So the agency poisoning our forests is quoting the poisoner's homework.
Then stack on last week's news. The Trump administration just moved to strip protections from 45 million acres of roadless national forest, roughly one-third of the entire system, opening it to loggers and road builders. Last year, 99 percent of more than 625,000 public comments opposed the rollback.
This is the whole machine in one frame. Soak the wild places in chemicals, rig the science, hand the keys to timber.
These forests are ours. The water reaches millions of us. And they're turning it into a chemical tree farm while telling us to trust them.
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