Mother Jones
PBS airs our glyphosate reporting
“They’re taking away the choice of being surrounded by a toxic chemical,” says Tahoe resident and three-time Olympian Hannah Teter about the US Forest Service’s spraying of herbicide around her home town.
The Supreme Court decided last month that the maker of Roundup, the world’s most widely used weed killer, can’t be held responsible for failing to warn users that one of its key ingredients – a chemical known as glyphosate – may pose risks to human health. Glyphosate has been a mainstay of agriculture in this country for decades, and thousands of lawsuits allege that exposure to the chemical caused cancer. PBS NewsHour featured our reporting based on an analysis of millions of pesticide reports in California which reveals another, lesser known way glyphosate is being used right now: to spray this country’s national forests.
Our analysis of California pesticide records shows that the amount of glyphosate sprayed in state forests has quadrupled over the past decade. From Yosemite to Lassen Volcanic National Park in the very north of the state, residents are up in arms about the fact that the efforts to help them recover from wildfires may expose them to a harmful chemical.
PBS NewsHour featured our reporting on their nightly newscast. You can watch the story here: