Well, we cannot say we didn’t see this coming. Fresh off her successful gambit to remove the word from the county’s budgetary lexicon, Margaret Wille and her rag-tag band of enviro-alarmist supporters have just rolled out the next salvo in the “War on Roundup”(also known as glyphosphate).
The opening salvo was to rename a county budget item from Roundup to the more bureaucratic-sounding term, “vegetation management.” Now that the public has been mesmerized by this use of politically correct sleight-of-hand, Bill 71 will re-define the term “vegetation management,” as it relates to the county’s weed control efforts, to exclude the use of its most cost-effective management tool.
Have we learned no lessons from the past? Many readers can remember the war on coffee from a few decades back. After years of peaceful co-existence with caffeine, health-alarmists began promoting research on its dangers. News articles were coming out in droves, citing research that purported to show coffee was a public health menace, causing everything from heart disease to cancer. The science was considered “settled” then.
Today, of course, coffee is widely regarded, when consumed in moderation, to have many beneficial health effects that offset the small perceived health risks. Among other things, the aromatic oils and anti-oxidant substances in coffee are thought to actually protect against certain cancers and other diseases, such as diabetes. But the attempt to publicly demonize coffee then was instrumental in the (ultimately failed) effort to regulate it out of existence.
This tactic will now be applied to the effort to ban Roundup.
The demon to be expunged is its purported health impact, although the best opponents have been able to muster so far is this statement from the World Health Organization: “It is probably a carcinogen.”
Here, on the other hand, is the sort of statement you will find about it in Wikipedia: “The available data is contradictory and far from being convincing with regard to correlations between exposure to glyphosate formulations and risk of various cancers.”
So it may cause cancer under certain conditions. But then so can caffeine. With either, the purported carcinogenic effects are so small that studies are inconclusive. In other words, the carcinogenic signal in Roundup is so weak that it is hard to see it above the statistical “noise” of the data.
On the other side of the ledger is the great benefit that glyphosphate provides through economical, effective weed control.
Of course, other herbicides in addition to glyphosphate are named in Bill 71 as requiring elimination from our vocabularies. However, I strongly suspect that these are included to throw us off the trail, and that Bill 71 is clearly aimed at glyphosphate, and the brand name “Roundup.”
It should not escape the notice of anyone that banning glyphosphate aids and abets a related conflict, the war on GMO. Many of you know that one of the break-through applications of GMO is the development of edible crops that are resistant to glyphosphate, so that susceptible weeds may be removed from farm fields without harming the crop species itself.
One oft-heard argument of the anti-GMO people is that the use of Roundup-resistant crops leads to increased resistance in weed species and consequently the increased use of Roundup. Hence the obvious strategy: Ban Roundup here, and you strike a collateral blow to the use of GMO technology.
Lurking behind all of this is the deep-seated hatred of Monsanto, a very successful farm-technology company whose products have enabled a higher standard of living for hundreds of millions of people around the globe. Once Monsanto is forced out of business, and GMO, glyphosphate, and other miracles of biotechnology are gone, I guess those people will have to eat cake — organic cake, naturally.
Therefore, all you farmers, homeowners, landscaping service people, and garden supply store employees — be afraid, be very afraid. The effort to ban the county’s use of Roundup is merely an interim step in a more elaborate process.
For the end-game, they will be coming after you, armed with the argument that since the county has determined herbicides to be a public health menace, how can we allow its continued use by the private sector?
We must stop this nonsense now while we can, or lose our right to use a product that has made our lives better.
This is not to say that the use of Roundup, and use of herbicides in general, is not without its problems.
Valid points have been made about wasteful overuse of the chemicals. Issues of overspray and drift caused by dispensing it at excessive pressures in unfavorable environments, such as in areas with little spatial buffer from adjacent properties on windy days, are reasonable complaints.
However, these issues are better addressed by public education and by more training of the county employees who dispense the herbicides, and not by a ban on its use and substantial benefits.
For if this misguided effort succeeds, I think the enviro-alarmists will be encouraged to go Wille-nilly all over the place, trying to ban everything of which they do not approve — plastic bags, jumbo-sized sodas and free-range kids, etc.
But you’ll have to excuse me now. I need to go spray the weeds before they take over my coffee orchard.
Curtis Beck, P.E. is a professional engineer licensed to practice in the State of Hawaii since 1984, though now semi-retired. He is a long-time resident of Hilo and remains active in civic affairs.
