Glyphosate Forests – Engineered to Burn

Presently, as smoke from more than 900 wildfires drifts across the continent and Americans gasp as they breathe it in sitting on their front porches, it is important to understand that our own government has helped make these fires worse by using glyphosate-based herbicides on our nation’s forests year after year, often from the air. These toxic applications, at the expense of the communities and wildlife that depend on the land for clean water and healthy food, make the fires more uniform and more flammable.

In a nation blessed with beautiful trees, a healthy forest is a mix of many species. The leafy, deciduous trees, such as aspen, birch, and poplar, hold moisture and keep flames low to the ground. They essentially act as a natural firebreak. The evergreen conifers, including pines and firs, are full of resin and burn fast and hot. Timber companies and the US Forest Service want the conifers because conifers are the timber that gets cut and sold. The fire-resistant leafy trees are simply viewed as competition, so they are poisoned to clear the way. In other words, they have sprayed glyphosate, the weedkiller sold for decades as Roundup, to kill off everything else. The conifers survive because their waxy needles shrug off the toxic chemical. Sadly, the fire-resistant leafy trees and shrubs die.

Essentially, what has been created by these actions is a forest engineered to burn. Uniform rows of the most flammable species of trees, with the natural firebreaks carelessly stripped out and dead, dry vegetation left behind as fuel. And, for those wondering, when those evergreen forests burn, they release more than twice the carbon of the deciduous forests that were poisoned to make room for them. Make no mistake, we are not failing to prevent these fires. In a very real sense, we are instead cultivating them.

The operation behind this travesty is not a small program. A yearlong investigation by Mother Jones, which analyzed more than 5 million pesticide records, found that California sprayed 266,000 pounds of glyphosate on its forests in 2023. That is nearly five times the amount it sprayed just two decades ago, and it makes forest spraying the fastest-growing use of the toxin in the state. And much of it is sprayed on public land where families hike, hunt, and forage for berries and mushrooms, meaning people unknowingly eat food dusted with a chemical known to be a carcinogen. Even the suspect World Health Organization says so. Mother Jones also discovered that the Forest Service leaned on a safety study that was later retracted over evidence that it had been ghostwritten by Monsanto. Again, the company that invented glyphosate.

But this is not just a story about bad forestry. No indeed. Many argue that it is also a tale about who the US Government actually works for. On June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Bayer, which now owns Monsanto. The Court held that because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has never required a cancer warning on glyphosate, the company cannot be sued under state law for failing to warn the public. In one stroke, roughly 65,000 pending cases from individuals who insist on Roundup use, left them debilitated with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, were swept under the rug. The courthouse door was slammed shut.

And it gets worse. Remember back in February, President Trump signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to secure American production of elemental phosphorus and the glyphosate made from it. The order warns that America has only a single domestic producer of phosphorus, imports millions of kilograms from overseas, and risks handing its supply chain over to hostile foreign actors. Keeping critical production on American soil is important, but right along with that, glyphosate gained immunity. A toxin that causes cancer is now designated critical to the national defense, with the Secretary of Agriculture ordered to keep it flowing and ensure that the government does nothing to put its producers’ “corporate viability” at risk. Lucky for Bayer, right? Thus, the sound goal of ” Made in America” ended up draping a wartime shield over a chemical that jury after jury has declared deserved a cancer warning.

So here we are. The Make America Healthy Again (MAGA) movement immediately said it “felt betrayed by the administration’s embrace of glyphosate.” And, to be clear, don’t for a minute believe that Bayer is on the side of the American farmer. A mere five days after farm groups helped Bayer win at the Supreme Court, Bayer petitioned for tariffs of up to 446 percent on imported glyphosate, a move that the National Corn Growers Association and the American Soybean Association warned would spike the costs of the very farmers who had just defended Bayer. The story is all too familiar. Big Ag is not loyal to the men who grow our food. The players are loyal to their bottom line. Period.

But hold on. None of these toxins are necessary. Quebec banned glyphosate in its public forests in 2001 and has successfully managed them without it ever since. Instead of spraying poisons, crews clear brush by hand and machine and plant the sturdier young trees that can hold their own. Yes, it costs more and requires more people, which is precisely the point. This method trades a cheap and destructive chemical shortcut for real work, while keeping poison out of the water and off of the wild foods. No, glyphosate doesn’t cause forest fires, but spraying it makes forests more flammable at the margins by stripping out deciduous firebreaks. Twenty-five years later, Quebec’s forestry still bans glyphosate and does the hard work instead.

Why can’t we do that here?