This post focuses on historical data, human health implications and ecological impacts pertaining to the systemic biocide called Glyphosate while also providing viable detox/remediation solutions
Hi Gavin, great newsletter. I feel very much the same way about glyphosate as I do about single use plastics. It’s their overuse that’s the problem, rather than their existence. I attended a soil health conference a few years ago and learned that most agricultural weeds are a symptom of unhealthy soil—and most can be controlled by rectifying the underlying problem: chemistry, structure, biology. Check out the work of Nicole Masters—she awesome! Physical treatments like plows can also get rid of weeds, meaning that chemical herbicides aren’t needed most of the time.
However, where invasive weeds enter sensitive ecological systems, I really don’t see a practical option other than using some sort of chemical herbicide. I’ve used a lot of glyphosate for this purpose and have experimented with organic herbicides (e.g. vinegar based), covering plants with black plastic to try and “cook” them etc. with little success. Sometimes weeds come in shrub/tree form, meaning “pulling them out” isn’t an option. It’s complicated.
Thank you for your kind words about my newsletter.
I used to think as you do (when I managed a vineyard in the Okangan of BC) but after I took a course in soil microscopy and began looking at before and after samples of soil it became clear to me that glyphosate is to biodiversity what agent orange was to the jungles of Vietnam. The corporate PR and bought and paid for (or ignorant ) academics will tell you fairy tales about how the compound has a short half life and does not last and promote “responsible use” but once you are able to look at soil and water samples under a scope it becomes clear that they are lying or do not know what they are talking about.
Using glyphosate in an attempt to remove “invasives” to provide habitat for native species is like napalming an entire neighborhood to get rid of some gangsters so they will not bother the families living in that neighborhood. You cripple soil ecology at a foundational level, that cripples the ability for what ever natives you plant there after you kill everything to thrive, and you start a viscous cycle where they will inevitably be outcompeted by other plants that are becoming resistant to chemical warfare. Instead of fighting biology , I advocate teaming up with it.
Now, along with being an author in the field of regenerative agriculture, gardening and soil science, I work in the field of ecological restoration and endangered species conservation. I deal with “invasive” plants and find ways to either mitigate their presence or learn to use their gifts to my advantage (and the advantage of the soil and broader biodiversity of the ecosystem) without using herbicides of any kind.
Regarding so called “weeds”, you mention methods intended to perpetuate the imposition of monoculture farming practices into a landscape that obviously wants to produce a polyculture of plants.
Why do you suggest fighting nature to impose fragile non-native crops onto a land that has abundant native food plants and trees? Chemicals or no chemicals, that is just a really inefficient way to grow food.
This backwards thinking of conventional agriculture and the anthropocentric academic views that promote a war on nature mentality in how we farm for food is an expression of the cultural immaturity of modern industrial civilization.
Have you ever contemplated the fact that in pre-colonial place based cultures there was no word for “weed”?
This was not due to their lack of farming (as many pre-statist indigenous cultures actively managed the landscape on a large scale via seed saving, cultivation, controlled burns, composting, copping and more) so why this lack of a term describing some plants as “problems” and others as “good approved crop plants”?
I’ll tell you why, the term “weed” itself is a linguistic artifact that expresses the general worldview of the dominant mentality within modern western civilization.
Within the context of modern agriculture, many so called “weeds” are in fact edible and medical themselves, some being “native” and some not. So Ask your self this, if many of them grow without human assistance and provide for pollinators and countless other beings, Why would we degrade such a magnificent, resilient, generous and graceful beings with the insult of being called a “weed”?
Here in Ontario “milkweed” and cattails are a couple examples that fit that description, I am sure you have many over there.
We live in a exploitative colonizing imperialistic statist cultures that seek to impose uniformity onto the natural world (while it simultaneously preaches about how "sustainably" it will turn forests, rivers, lakes, meadows and marshlands into strip malls, mines, factory farms and smart cities).
Thus, the linguistics we have been raised to use to refer to the more than human world (especially the wild, untamable, rebellious and resilient aspects of the more than human world) reflect this psychotic, immature and lost way of perceiving.
When you look deeper and find that 114 plant names in the English language containing the word “weed” in the common name (with many of those plants being important food and medicine crops for indigenous pre-colonial cultures (and/or providing for pollinators, protecting soil and cleaning water) a picture begins to emerge that illuminates how some aspects of the english language are strong indicators of a culturally adolescent (ecologically illiterate, superficial, exploitative and anthropocentric) civilization.
Another example is a plant commonly known as Cattail in English. That plant is seen as a “weed” by the control freak conventional ornomental pond maintenance people of modern western civilization. Those “professionals” suggest spraying that native plant with systemic herbicides (like roundup) to maintain the sterile lifeless ornamental ponds they install. So they poison the water beings the water itself, and go to war with a food and medicine plant needlessly, why? Because their obsession with uniformity, domination, sterility and their ecological illiteracy is an expression of their cultural adolescence and their spiritual impoverishment, that is why.
In Potawatomi, the word for cattail, bewiieskwinuk, translates to “we wrap the baby in it” and in the Mohawk language, cattail (Osháhrhe) translates to “the cattail wraps humans in her gifts” as if we were her babies.
Robin Wall Kimmerer comments on this in her book Braiding Sweetgrass by saying
“In that one word, we are carried in the cradleboard of Mother Earth.”
What a beautiful and apt description of this plant, Cattails do indeed offer to lovingly envelop humanity with her many gifts, providing both our ancestors and us with loving support and nourishment to be able to survive and thrive in challenging situations. The academics and Big Ag “professionals” of modern industrial civilization look upon this plant with distain, and yet cultures that are more mature, ecologically literate and spiritually wealthy instead recognize her many gifts.
The English language is structured to re-enforce anthropocentric delusions of grandeur, relegating all our non-human relations on earth to the demeaning status of being an “it” and using demeaning terms like “weeds” to refer to plants that stand in the way of corporate agriculture.
Older languages with an animistic ethos of deep belonging to place do not have a word for “weeds” and refer to the trees, or the birds, or the fish, or the river or the mountain as an “it”, they refer to those beings as kin.
These variations in language in how we refer to the beings we share this world with may seem inconsequential to the indoctrinated self-important statist that trusts “The Science”, but ask yourself this, how much easier is it to train human beings to be willing to poison a river, or carve into a mountain for lithium or clear cut an ancient forest for profit when you raise them describing those beings as inanimate objects, rather than referring to them in the same way you would refer to a sister or a grandfather?
And that brings me to another pathway I found to be really empowering when I'm stewarding ancestral knowledge as well as endangered plants or rare heirloom plants in a garden space.
And that is to embrace the ancient worldview of the animistic worldview to see plants as our relations, as our relatives, and to let go of the idea of this “invasive” plants idea.
While there are plants that can out-compete some native plants, When we look at plants, if we see them through the lens as the gifts that they can offer rather than seeing them in an adversarial way, we can see that there might be a potential for that plant that's now naturalized in an area to provide gifts to the project we're working on while giving a space for the plants that we do want to grow there.
One example would be the Phragmites. Here in Ontario, they're seen as invasives and people go to war with them with chemicals and machines. It is a futile effort because their strong rhizomes come right back but you can use the plant material, the stalks grinded up instead of hay or straw to grow oyster mushrooms so you can use them as a substrate for growing oyster mushrooms ( for more info read: https://open.substack.com/pub/gavinmounsey/p/designing-bio-cultural-refugia?selection=1be8a23c-089d-4cc0-a5f7-7472040082f1&r=q2yay&utm_medium=ios ) turn those things into food as long as you're getting them from a clean area because they do hyper accumulate specific toxins from polluted waterways and you can also use the stalks that are dried as supports for your young plants like you would bamboo if you get the bottom like three feet of the really tall ones you could use those like bamboo instead of importing bamboo from overseas and then additionally the seed heads you can use in a similar way that cattails would have traditionally been used to make insulation for things like pillows.
Many of our indigenous ancestors (yes we all have them) knew how to cultivate food while leaving ecology intact (sometimes enhancing it while growing food via regenerative agroforestry practices). No they were not all “hunter gatherers” and no it was not only possible due to lower populations of past populations. Regenerative agroforestry and regenerative ocean gardening produces far more food per acre than monoculture intensive farming.
For details, I suggest reading books like Dirth: The Erosion of Civilizations, 1491, The Dark Emu, Regenerative Soil : Science and Solutions , The Dawn of Everything, The Largest Estate On Earth, Tending the Wild and dissertations such as Lyla June’s Architects of Abundance: Indigenous Regenerative Food and Land Management Systems and the Excavation of Hidden History ( https://www.proquest.com/openview/17597a179528716e1a9e8515ca76ec77/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y )
The poisoning of New Zealand written by Meriel Watts - 1994 covers: How pesticides are contaminating our food and water, detoxification from them, legal challenge.
Sadly nothing has changed since this book was written despite the Homeopathic protocol mentioned in this book used to detoxify chemicals from the body developed by Dr Matt Tizzard treating at least 200 hundred thousand folk , still being used successfully by his student Michael Balmer of New Era Homeopathy. Plenty of folk are aware of it.
Accordingly Dr Tizzard attempted to stop chemical use in NZ using his wealth of knowledge and took the government to court, apparently the judicial system changed legislation to override the case because it would have created a phenomenal insurance claim against the Government.
Also used in massive doses in New Zealand (they are about to drop in an area of 45 thousand hectares in Aspiring National Park;) Compound 1080, also known as sodium monofluoroacetate or sodium fluoroacetate, is an organofluorine chemical compound with the chemical formula FCH₂CO₂Na.
It is a white, fluffy, odorless, and tasteless powder that is highly toxic to most mammals and insects.
The compound functions as a metabolic poison by inhibiting the citric acid cycle through the formation of 2-fluorocitrate, which binds tightly to the enzyme aconitase, halting cellular respiration and leading to energy depletion in cells.
It is used extensively in Australia and New Zealand to control pest animals such as foxes, rabbits, wallabies, feral pigs, and brushtail possums, often through baiting programs.
While it occurs naturally in about 40 plant species in Australia, Brazil, and Africa, including Gastrolobium and Dichapetalum species, its synthetic form is primarily used for pest management.
Dropped through pristine forests it "kills everything" animals suffer horrendously when ingensted it will kill humans also and i do wonder if it is killing the forests microbiome, as some areas look sick as it slowly becomes like a homeopathic formula when it seeps into the water and soil.
There used to be requirements of notification, etc... I highly suspect these requirements were minimally provided, let alone overspray and conditions that prevent specific spray times... speculating here...
Narwhal put out an amazing map of the glyphosate spraying in BC here:
The general population is exposed to glyphosate through their diet, domestic application, direct skin contact, or inhalation during pesticide application.[1,2] Glyphosate mists can contaminate air and soil as they are applied and transported into neighboring residential areas by the wind.[3,4]
CAREX Canada estimates that over 2 million people in Canada live in areas where the potential for exposure to glyphosate is higher than other areas in the country, which amounts to about 6% of the Canadian population. Since people residing near agricultural land may have higher pesticide exposures than those who live in non-agricultural areas due to the geographical proximity to areas with high pesticide usage, these estimates focus on community exposure related to agricultural pesticide use.[5,6] In addition, data availability for other routes of exposure (e.g. diet, domestic application) are limited."
My province of New Brunswick feels free to poison its inhabitants (humans, moose, deer, etc.) every year. Wild game and blueberries are not safe to eat here. And all the waterways have glyphosate in them.
Thanks for this Gavin. Can’t help but relate it to the ‘logic’ I recently heard about forest fires—the problem is we’re not cutting down enough trees, apparently. 😖
Thank You for the plants/foods remedies sections, which are great, but the substantial info about glyphoste is NOT right. Even wiki will tell you that, quote:
Glyphosate was first synthesized in 1950 by Swiss chemist Henry Martin, who worked for the Swiss PHARMACEUTICAL company Cilag. The work was never published... Why pharmaceutical? Because glyphosate as N-phosphonomethylGLYCINE chemically mimicks the No1 HUMAN INHIBITING neurotransmitter GLYCINE... So for 20 years nobody discussed glyphosate, somehow, and suddenly it becase just a weedkiller.... The binding partner of glycine is NMDA receptor, which has to bind it in order to function properly.. There is SO much to the story that I should write one post on it, I guess.. The GMO plants are genetically MODIFIED in a lab cloning experiments where Agrotumefaciens gene T-DNA (stands for tumor DNA in plants, btw. eukaryotes, like we humans...) is fused with a VIRAL genetic promoter from for example CMV in order to express MANY copies of that MODIFIED EPSP enzyme, which binds GLYPHOSATE instead of natural ligand necessary for the production of AROMATIC AMINO ACIDS, which ONLY PLANTS CAN PRODUCE!!!!! Normal plants have juyst one copy of the EPSP, which once inhibited by the glyphosate, causes its death. The GMOs with multilp[e copies survive... So the plants of corn, soy, sugar beets, etc., etc. are no longer plants, but rather bacterial-viral-PLANT-HYBRIDS, which produce NEW EPSP enzyme in every of its cells,, which can and will have bound GLYPHOSATE... That also means, all precursors for the neurotranmsitters (Tyr,Trp,Phe in 3-letter code) produced by those enzymes, made of tyrosine, tryptophan, phenylalanine are being affected by that RANDOM GENETIC modification of the EPSP enzyme. One again HUMAN BODIES do not have EPSP and thus rely 100% on plants in that respect... Please note the UV absorption by those aromatic rings aminoa cids is equally important in human bodies.... Now, things changed. Production of EXACTY THOSE AMINO ACIDS WHICH ABSORB UV light, is affected!!! Consequences are: the entire world is chronically sick.
Stefanie Seneff and ANthony Samsel published LOT on this topic starting around 2015, BUT they never touched the GENETIC MODIOFICATIONS enough, in order to WARN humanity! One of the most essential books on the topic GLYPHOSATE is the 2015 book by Steven Drucker "Altered Genes Twisted Truth: How the Venture to Genetically Engineer Our Food Has Subverted Science, Corrupted Government, and Systematically Deceived the Public " In that book you can read how BILL CLINTON CRIMINALLY prohibited a research in UK showing that genetically modified potatoes are causing cancers in rats, not after 3 months, but 'just' few months later... French Prof Serallini repeated all the studies later on again and showed the cancers in multiple studies, which gave that decision about carcinogenic properties of glyphosate.... MONSANTO paid so far LOT of money to those injured... BUT ever since ~1996, thanks Bill Clinton, the agricultural world in US and worldwide started to deteriorate.
EXACTLY the same situation happened in 2020, where fraudulent 'science' pretends to rescue humans from 'covid' with injections 'they' call vaccines, but which in fact are GENE MODIFICTION TREATMENTS....The crime and murder committed by the scientists is just mindblowing.
With regards to the other info you shared would you say that other aspects of the article above are factually inaccurate, or rather that they just require additional context and specific info on the deleterious effects of glyphosate on human biology? In other words, is the info I found and added to the article above pertaining to the stated past and present uses, as well as damaging impacts on ecology and human biology just incomplete (as far as you see it) or are there flat out inaccuracies?
Thanks again for your time and thoughtful comment.
It may be a few days before I can respond again, been working on a community food forest installation and planning.
Visited Smokey Mountains National Park in June 2024. Park personnel was using the product for invasive plants along walking paths. I asked what product they were using, Glyphosate. Park personnel took no precautions to protect themselves or visitors.
My opposition to herbicides is what got me into investigating the "invasive plant" narrative. Yeah, we just gotta stop spraying them. The narrative is really just some cultural tropes masquerading as science. No need to be poisoning the environment.
Hi Gavin, great newsletter. I feel very much the same way about glyphosate as I do about single use plastics. It’s their overuse that’s the problem, rather than their existence. I attended a soil health conference a few years ago and learned that most agricultural weeds are a symptom of unhealthy soil—and most can be controlled by rectifying the underlying problem: chemistry, structure, biology. Check out the work of Nicole Masters—she awesome! Physical treatments like plows can also get rid of weeds, meaning that chemical herbicides aren’t needed most of the time.
However, where invasive weeds enter sensitive ecological systems, I really don’t see a practical option other than using some sort of chemical herbicide. I’ve used a lot of glyphosate for this purpose and have experimented with organic herbicides (e.g. vinegar based), covering plants with black plastic to try and “cook” them etc. with little success. Sometimes weeds come in shrub/tree form, meaning “pulling them out” isn’t an option. It’s complicated.
Greetings from southern Ontario.
Thank you for your kind words about my newsletter.
I used to think as you do (when I managed a vineyard in the Okangan of BC) but after I took a course in soil microscopy and began looking at before and after samples of soil it became clear to me that glyphosate is to biodiversity what agent orange was to the jungles of Vietnam. The corporate PR and bought and paid for (or ignorant ) academics will tell you fairy tales about how the compound has a short half life and does not last and promote “responsible use” but once you are able to look at soil and water samples under a scope it becomes clear that they are lying or do not know what they are talking about.
Using glyphosate in an attempt to remove “invasives” to provide habitat for native species is like napalming an entire neighborhood to get rid of some gangsters so they will not bother the families living in that neighborhood. You cripple soil ecology at a foundational level, that cripples the ability for what ever natives you plant there after you kill everything to thrive, and you start a viscous cycle where they will inevitably be outcompeted by other plants that are becoming resistant to chemical warfare. Instead of fighting biology , I advocate teaming up with it.
Now, along with being an author in the field of regenerative agriculture, gardening and soil science, I work in the field of ecological restoration and endangered species conservation. I deal with “invasive” plants and find ways to either mitigate their presence or learn to use their gifts to my advantage (and the advantage of the soil and broader biodiversity of the ecosystem) without using herbicides of any kind.
Regarding so called “weeds”, you mention methods intended to perpetuate the imposition of monoculture farming practices into a landscape that obviously wants to produce a polyculture of plants.
Why do you suggest fighting nature to impose fragile non-native crops onto a land that has abundant native food plants and trees? Chemicals or no chemicals, that is just a really inefficient way to grow food.
This backwards thinking of conventional agriculture and the anthropocentric academic views that promote a war on nature mentality in how we farm for food is an expression of the cultural immaturity of modern industrial civilization.
For more on that, read:
https://open.substack.com/pub/gavinmounsey/p/tree-species-distribution-soil-depth?r=q2yay&utm_medium=ios
Have you ever contemplated the fact that in pre-colonial place based cultures there was no word for “weed”?
This was not due to their lack of farming (as many pre-statist indigenous cultures actively managed the landscape on a large scale via seed saving, cultivation, controlled burns, composting, copping and more) so why this lack of a term describing some plants as “problems” and others as “good approved crop plants”?
I’ll tell you why, the term “weed” itself is a linguistic artifact that expresses the general worldview of the dominant mentality within modern western civilization.
Within the context of modern agriculture, many so called “weeds” are in fact edible and medical themselves, some being “native” and some not. So Ask your self this, if many of them grow without human assistance and provide for pollinators and countless other beings, Why would we degrade such a magnificent, resilient, generous and graceful beings with the insult of being called a “weed”?
Here in Ontario “milkweed” and cattails are a couple examples that fit that description, I am sure you have many over there.
We live in a exploitative colonizing imperialistic statist cultures that seek to impose uniformity onto the natural world (while it simultaneously preaches about how "sustainably" it will turn forests, rivers, lakes, meadows and marshlands into strip malls, mines, factory farms and smart cities).
Thus, the linguistics we have been raised to use to refer to the more than human world (especially the wild, untamable, rebellious and resilient aspects of the more than human world) reflect this psychotic, immature and lost way of perceiving.
When you look deeper and find that 114 plant names in the English language containing the word “weed” in the common name (with many of those plants being important food and medicine crops for indigenous pre-colonial cultures (and/or providing for pollinators, protecting soil and cleaning water) a picture begins to emerge that illuminates how some aspects of the english language are strong indicators of a culturally adolescent (ecologically illiterate, superficial, exploitative and anthropocentric) civilization.
Another example is a plant commonly known as Cattail in English. That plant is seen as a “weed” by the control freak conventional ornomental pond maintenance people of modern western civilization. Those “professionals” suggest spraying that native plant with systemic herbicides (like roundup) to maintain the sterile lifeless ornamental ponds they install. So they poison the water beings the water itself, and go to war with a food and medicine plant needlessly, why? Because their obsession with uniformity, domination, sterility and their ecological illiteracy is an expression of their cultural adolescence and their spiritual impoverishment, that is why.
In Potawatomi, the word for cattail, bewiieskwinuk, translates to “we wrap the baby in it” and in the Mohawk language, cattail (Osháhrhe) translates to “the cattail wraps humans in her gifts” as if we were her babies.
Robin Wall Kimmerer comments on this in her book Braiding Sweetgrass by saying
“In that one word, we are carried in the cradleboard of Mother Earth.”
What a beautiful and apt description of this plant, Cattails do indeed offer to lovingly envelop humanity with her many gifts, providing both our ancestors and us with loving support and nourishment to be able to survive and thrive in challenging situations. The academics and Big Ag “professionals” of modern industrial civilization look upon this plant with distain, and yet cultures that are more mature, ecologically literate and spiritually wealthy instead recognize her many gifts.
The English language is structured to re-enforce anthropocentric delusions of grandeur, relegating all our non-human relations on earth to the demeaning status of being an “it” and using demeaning terms like “weeds” to refer to plants that stand in the way of corporate agriculture.
Older languages with an animistic ethos of deep belonging to place do not have a word for “weeds” and refer to the trees, or the birds, or the fish, or the river or the mountain as an “it”, they refer to those beings as kin.
These variations in language in how we refer to the beings we share this world with may seem inconsequential to the indoctrinated self-important statist that trusts “The Science”, but ask yourself this, how much easier is it to train human beings to be willing to poison a river, or carve into a mountain for lithium or clear cut an ancient forest for profit when you raise them describing those beings as inanimate objects, rather than referring to them in the same way you would refer to a sister or a grandfather?
And that brings me to another pathway I found to be really empowering when I'm stewarding ancestral knowledge as well as endangered plants or rare heirloom plants in a garden space.
And that is to embrace the ancient worldview of the animistic worldview to see plants as our relations, as our relatives, and to let go of the idea of this “invasive” plants idea.
While there are plants that can out-compete some native plants, When we look at plants, if we see them through the lens as the gifts that they can offer rather than seeing them in an adversarial way, we can see that there might be a potential for that plant that's now naturalized in an area to provide gifts to the project we're working on while giving a space for the plants that we do want to grow there.
One example would be the Phragmites. Here in Ontario, they're seen as invasives and people go to war with them with chemicals and machines. It is a futile effort because their strong rhizomes come right back but you can use the plant material, the stalks grinded up instead of hay or straw to grow oyster mushrooms so you can use them as a substrate for growing oyster mushrooms ( for more info read: https://open.substack.com/pub/gavinmounsey/p/designing-bio-cultural-refugia?selection=1be8a23c-089d-4cc0-a5f7-7472040082f1&r=q2yay&utm_medium=ios ) turn those things into food as long as you're getting them from a clean area because they do hyper accumulate specific toxins from polluted waterways and you can also use the stalks that are dried as supports for your young plants like you would bamboo if you get the bottom like three feet of the really tall ones you could use those like bamboo instead of importing bamboo from overseas and then additionally the seed heads you can use in a similar way that cattails would have traditionally been used to make insulation for things like pillows.
Many of our indigenous ancestors (yes we all have them) knew how to cultivate food while leaving ecology intact (sometimes enhancing it while growing food via regenerative agroforestry practices). No they were not all “hunter gatherers” and no it was not only possible due to lower populations of past populations. Regenerative agroforestry and regenerative ocean gardening produces far more food per acre than monoculture intensive farming.
For details, I suggest reading books like Dirth: The Erosion of Civilizations, 1491, The Dark Emu, Regenerative Soil : Science and Solutions , The Dawn of Everything, The Largest Estate On Earth, Tending the Wild and dissertations such as Lyla June’s Architects of Abundance: Indigenous Regenerative Food and Land Management Systems and the Excavation of Hidden History ( https://www.proquest.com/openview/17597a179528716e1a9e8515ca76ec77/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y )
The poisoning of New Zealand written by Meriel Watts - 1994 covers: How pesticides are contaminating our food and water, detoxification from them, legal challenge.
Sadly nothing has changed since this book was written despite the Homeopathic protocol mentioned in this book used to detoxify chemicals from the body developed by Dr Matt Tizzard treating at least 200 hundred thousand folk , still being used successfully by his student Michael Balmer of New Era Homeopathy. Plenty of folk are aware of it.
Accordingly Dr Tizzard attempted to stop chemical use in NZ using his wealth of knowledge and took the government to court, apparently the judicial system changed legislation to override the case because it would have created a phenomenal insurance claim against the Government.
Also used in massive doses in New Zealand (they are about to drop in an area of 45 thousand hectares in Aspiring National Park;) Compound 1080, also known as sodium monofluoroacetate or sodium fluoroacetate, is an organofluorine chemical compound with the chemical formula FCH₂CO₂Na.
It is a white, fluffy, odorless, and tasteless powder that is highly toxic to most mammals and insects.
The compound functions as a metabolic poison by inhibiting the citric acid cycle through the formation of 2-fluorocitrate, which binds tightly to the enzyme aconitase, halting cellular respiration and leading to energy depletion in cells.
It is used extensively in Australia and New Zealand to control pest animals such as foxes, rabbits, wallabies, feral pigs, and brushtail possums, often through baiting programs.
While it occurs naturally in about 40 plant species in Australia, Brazil, and Africa, including Gastrolobium and Dichapetalum species, its synthetic form is primarily used for pest management.
Dropped through pristine forests it "kills everything" animals suffer horrendously when ingensted it will kill humans also and i do wonder if it is killing the forests microbiome, as some areas look sick as it slowly becomes like a homeopathic formula when it seeps into the water and soil.
There used to be requirements of notification, etc... I highly suspect these requirements were minimally provided, let alone overspray and conditions that prevent specific spray times... speculating here...
Narwhal put out an amazing map of the glyphosate spraying in BC here:
https://thenarwhal.ca/bc-glyphosate-forestry-map/
In ON - yah - are the first nations just bugs? They are treating their lands as if they are, with no say (from 2021):
https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/49966/here-is-where-your-lands-will-be-poisoned-without-your-consent/
NB info on spray zones here:
https://www.conservationcouncil.ca/2023-hotspots-for-herbicide-spraying-in-n-b/
CAREX -
"Glyphosate Environmental Exposures Overview
The general population is exposed to glyphosate through their diet, domestic application, direct skin contact, or inhalation during pesticide application.[1,2] Glyphosate mists can contaminate air and soil as they are applied and transported into neighboring residential areas by the wind.[3,4]
CAREX Canada estimates that over 2 million people in Canada live in areas where the potential for exposure to glyphosate is higher than other areas in the country, which amounts to about 6% of the Canadian population. Since people residing near agricultural land may have higher pesticide exposures than those who live in non-agricultural areas due to the geographical proximity to areas with high pesticide usage, these estimates focus on community exposure related to agricultural pesticide use.[5,6] In addition, data availability for other routes of exposure (e.g. diet, domestic application) are limited."
https://www.carexcanada.ca/profile/glyphosate-environmental-exposures/
I've been saying for years that the recent rise of "Gluten Intolerance" is actually "Glyphosate Intolerance"...
My province of New Brunswick feels free to poison its inhabitants (humans, moose, deer, etc.) every year. Wild game and blueberries are not safe to eat here. And all the waterways have glyphosate in them.
Thanks for this Gavin. Can’t help but relate it to the ‘logic’ I recently heard about forest fires—the problem is we’re not cutting down enough trees, apparently. 😖
great data for the uniformed, passing it on to others in hopes it'll edumacate them a bit
Thank You for the plants/foods remedies sections, which are great, but the substantial info about glyphoste is NOT right. Even wiki will tell you that, quote:
Glyphosate was first synthesized in 1950 by Swiss chemist Henry Martin, who worked for the Swiss PHARMACEUTICAL company Cilag. The work was never published... Why pharmaceutical? Because glyphosate as N-phosphonomethylGLYCINE chemically mimicks the No1 HUMAN INHIBITING neurotransmitter GLYCINE... So for 20 years nobody discussed glyphosate, somehow, and suddenly it becase just a weedkiller.... The binding partner of glycine is NMDA receptor, which has to bind it in order to function properly.. There is SO much to the story that I should write one post on it, I guess.. The GMO plants are genetically MODIFIED in a lab cloning experiments where Agrotumefaciens gene T-DNA (stands for tumor DNA in plants, btw. eukaryotes, like we humans...) is fused with a VIRAL genetic promoter from for example CMV in order to express MANY copies of that MODIFIED EPSP enzyme, which binds GLYPHOSATE instead of natural ligand necessary for the production of AROMATIC AMINO ACIDS, which ONLY PLANTS CAN PRODUCE!!!!! Normal plants have juyst one copy of the EPSP, which once inhibited by the glyphosate, causes its death. The GMOs with multilp[e copies survive... So the plants of corn, soy, sugar beets, etc., etc. are no longer plants, but rather bacterial-viral-PLANT-HYBRIDS, which produce NEW EPSP enzyme in every of its cells,, which can and will have bound GLYPHOSATE... That also means, all precursors for the neurotranmsitters (Tyr,Trp,Phe in 3-letter code) produced by those enzymes, made of tyrosine, tryptophan, phenylalanine are being affected by that RANDOM GENETIC modification of the EPSP enzyme. One again HUMAN BODIES do not have EPSP and thus rely 100% on plants in that respect... Please note the UV absorption by those aromatic rings aminoa cids is equally important in human bodies.... Now, things changed. Production of EXACTY THOSE AMINO ACIDS WHICH ABSORB UV light, is affected!!! Consequences are: the entire world is chronically sick.
Stefanie Seneff and ANthony Samsel published LOT on this topic starting around 2015, BUT they never touched the GENETIC MODIOFICATIONS enough, in order to WARN humanity! One of the most essential books on the topic GLYPHOSATE is the 2015 book by Steven Drucker "Altered Genes Twisted Truth: How the Venture to Genetically Engineer Our Food Has Subverted Science, Corrupted Government, and Systematically Deceived the Public " In that book you can read how BILL CLINTON CRIMINALLY prohibited a research in UK showing that genetically modified potatoes are causing cancers in rats, not after 3 months, but 'just' few months later... French Prof Serallini repeated all the studies later on again and showed the cancers in multiple studies, which gave that decision about carcinogenic properties of glyphosate.... MONSANTO paid so far LOT of money to those injured... BUT ever since ~1996, thanks Bill Clinton, the agricultural world in US and worldwide started to deteriorate.
EXACTLY the same situation happened in 2020, where fraudulent 'science' pretends to rescue humans from 'covid' with injections 'they' call vaccines, but which in fact are GENE MODIFICTION TREATMENTS....The crime and murder committed by the scientists is just mindblowing.
I added your additional info on the history of this biocidal substance to the article for additional context.
While I am suspicious of Wikipedia (given what I uncovered in this article: https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/self-education-vs-behavior-modification ) I know you are meticulous in your research and cross-reference independent sources so I appreciate the input.
With regards to the other info you shared would you say that other aspects of the article above are factually inaccurate, or rather that they just require additional context and specific info on the deleterious effects of glyphosate on human biology? In other words, is the info I found and added to the article above pertaining to the stated past and present uses, as well as damaging impacts on ecology and human biology just incomplete (as far as you see it) or are there flat out inaccuracies?
Thanks again for your time and thoughtful comment.
It may be a few days before I can respond again, been working on a community food forest installation and planning.
Thanks for the in depth comment I’ll look into the early history big pharma connection you mentioned and edit article when I have time.
Wow this is an impressive article
Visited Smokey Mountains National Park in June 2024. Park personnel was using the product for invasive plants along walking paths. I asked what product they were using, Glyphosate. Park personnel took no precautions to protect themselves or visitors.
My opposition to herbicides is what got me into investigating the "invasive plant" narrative. Yeah, we just gotta stop spraying them. The narrative is really just some cultural tropes masquerading as science. No need to be poisoning the environment.