The Movement to Ban Glyphosate Grows

Glyphosate sprang from Monsanto (a former manufacturer of DDT) as a common home and commercial weed killer in 1974, just two years after DDT’s ban in the United States. And as with DDT, it has taken decades for glyphosate’s full effects to be identified. Today, glyphosate is used worldwide, especially in large-scale wheat, corn, soy and oat agriculture, and forest management.

Oddly, unlike DDT, as glyphosate’s harms have become established, glyphosate has been embraced by some unlikely bedfellows.

Some conservation groups embrace glyphosate

For three years, beginning in August 2021, after I retired from lobbying on behalf of the Sierra Club in California, the state Senate’s leadership appointed me to serve on the California Wildlife Conservation Board (WCB). Each year, that board distributes millions of dollars in grants to projects meant to protect wildlife and habitat.

During my first meeting, I learned that the WCB routinely pays out funds that are used to buy and apply toxic glyphosate on public and private lands. The funds accompany so-called restoration projects on those lands. 

Over the next three years, I was aghast to learn that some environmental groups—including statewide and national groups, like the California Native Plant Society, the Xerces Society and the Audubon Society—were among the most outspoken proponents of using glyphosate rather than nontoxic weed removal methods

I learned that some former and current Democratic elected officials who self-identify as environmental champions, including presidential hopeful Governor Gavin Newsom, are much more tolerant of toxic pesticides than I ever anticipated. Newsom appointees and the agency staff routinely side-stepped or entirely ignored recent peer-reviewed science that raises alarms about glyphosate’s impacts. Instead, they rely on old research that suggests glyphosate is entirely safe for everything except plant life.

(Notably, in November 2025, one of the most cited papers claiming glyphosate is safe was retracted by the journal that published it in 2000, after editors learned that Monsanto essentially wrote the paper. The Environmental Protection Agency still deems glyphosate as having “no risks of concern to human health” based on this faulty science.)

By ignoring the science, Democratic politicians have illuminated just how far they are removed from the significant environmental health concerns of average people. Meanwhile, some Republicans willing to differentiate themselves from Trump, have been taking credit for glyphosate bans.

Commonly sold as the active ingredient of Roundup, a popular pesticide brand, glyphosate’s effects on wildlife are more subtle, but no less broad than DDT’s. Its harms are numerous. Among other things, it has been shown to impair the ability of bees to find their way back to the hive, reduce reproductive success in birds, cause a rare cancer in lab mice and kill worm populations responsible for helping keep soil healthy. It can also persist in the soil for years.

Glyphosate’s effects on humans have garnered most of the poison’s attention. State and international health organizations have deemed it a probable human carcinogen. Those harms have resulted in more than $10 billion of payouts by Bayer, the current manufacturer of Roundup after the company bought Monsanto in 2018. Plaintiffs in over 100,000 lawsuits from tens of thousands of people claim exposure to the herbicide made them sick, usually with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

(In 2023, Bayer decided to remove glyphosate from formulas for residential Roundup, with italics added to differentiate it. Glyphosate remains in commercial and industrial uses of Roundup. The four plant poisons residential Roundup now contains—triclopyr, diquat, fluazifop and imazapic—are similarly problematic.)

Despite the evidence, glyphosate continues to be embraced by influential leaders, in and out of agricultural settings—largely because it’s an easier way to kill weeds in the short term than alternative methods like, well, hoeing. But also because believing the science on glyphosate would be inconvenient.

Democrats face a comeuppance

I have come to think of my time on the Wildlife Conservation Board as the Alice-in-Wonderland period. As I tried to bring newer peer-reviewed research and concerns about glyphosate to the WCB’s attention, I was essentially told that up is down, left is right, and so forth.

Why does this matter?

It matters because while agencies and elected officials in one of the country’s most liberal state capitals have been ignoring science to justify a toxic herbicide, activists have been building opposition to glyphosate in some of America’s reddest regions. This might be viewed as allowing Republican leaders in those regions to jump on the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) bandwagon. But viewing it that way ignores how Democrats have allowed another visceral issue—people’s desire not to be poisoned or to poison the earth—to be hijacked.

For instance, in April 2025, local residents in Lago Vista, Texas, a red community in a red state, persuaded their city council to adopt a pesticide policy that effectively eliminates the use of glyphosate and other harmful pesticides in city parks and other public spaces. 

Just over a month ago, conservative Beaufort County in South Carolina became the first county in that state to ban the use of glyphosate in parks and recreational fields. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) released a statement praising the county for its action and further took personal credit for helping “strip pesticide-preemption and liability-shield provisions out of the Farm Bill, preserving the right of states and local governments to adopt stronger pesticide protections than federal law requires.”

Notably, the South Carolina action occurred just months after the Trump administration signed an executive order to help boost glyphosate production for “national defense.” If Donald Trump and some Democratic leaders in California, including Newsom, have one thing in common, it is that they misread public concern about pesticide exposure.

A common thread in the Texas and South Carolina actions is a scrappy, assiduously nonpartisan nonprofit, Non-Toxic Neighborhoods. It was started when its founder, Kim Konte, discovered the public baseball field where her kids played in Irvine, California, was being sprayed with glyphosate. 

In 2015, Konte organized other parents in Irvine to successfully pressure the city to stop spraying synthetic pesticides on more than 570 acres of parks and athletic fields, more than 6,000 acres of open space, and more than 800 acres of public right of way. A few years after that, Konte and her family moved to South Carolina, where she continued her work, passing the ban in Beaufort County and helping residents in more than 200 cities, counties and school districts around the country to ban glyphosate use on public lands. 

This grassroots activity is gaining traction in California, including rural, more conservative areas. In late August, activists, including Konte, spent hours testifying remotely and in person near Lake Tahoe against new glyphosate spraying in Tahoe National Forest on the edge of the lake. This spraying plan and the overall increased use of glyphosate in forests on public lands is being led by logging companies and the U.S. Forest Service. This increase in glyphosate spraying has been documented this year by investigative journalist Nate Halverson for Mother Jones, among other outlets. Halverson estimates that in the last two decades, the amount of glyphosate products sprayed in California’s forests has quadrupled.  

Only days before the Tahoe event, two prominent California Democrats, state Sens. Henry Stern and Josh Becker, were pushing a bill, S.B. 1370, that would have exempted environmental review for wildfire prevention projects that use glyphosate and other pesticides. The anti-glyphosate activists, who lean heavily female, put on their lobbying shoes and started walking the halls of the state capitol. These included Kelly Ryerson, a social media influencer who goes by Glyphosate Girl online and has organized residents in the Tahoe area.

When Stern, who identifies as an environmental champion, attended a Sacramento luncheon hosted by Cal Enviro Voters during this time, the anti-glyphosate activists confronted him. It was, by all accounts, awkward for the senator.

On the same day as the Tahoe forest hearing, the now-schooled state senators 100 miles away in Sacramento dropped their glyphosate-exemption language. (The resulting bill, however, which provided other environmental review exemptions for other actions ostensibly to address wildfire preparedness, passed despite much environmental group opposition and moved to the governor’s desk, where it awaits his signature.)

Could the activists now anticipate that the U.S. Forest Service would capitulate too and ditch its Tahoe glyphosate spraying plans? Not likely, Konte said, shortly after she finished remotely testifying. She noted a lot of Bayer talking points coming out of local, state and federal officials’ mouths in Tahoe that day. 

Worth noting: It took 20 years from DDT’s introduction before the public became widely aware of the science finding that it was killing wildlife. It took another 10 years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring for a ban to go into place. 

Konte and others have been fighting glyphosate, informing one community at a time, since 2015. The first lawsuit in which a jury found that Monsanto’s glyphosate had caused a plaintiff’s cancer concluded in 2018, just as Bayer was preparing to buy Monsanto. That’s 11 years and 8 years respectively.

Without doubt, momentum to ban glyphosate is growing. The question is whether Democrats will be able to recognize and respond to the public sentiment as well as some southern Republicans have.

Kathryn PhillipsMore by this author →

Kathryn Phillips retired in 2021, after nearly 20 years as an environmental policy advocate in Sacramento, California’s state capital. Before that, she worked for nearly 20 years as a journalist, where she focused on science and environmental reporting. She is the author of two books about environmental issues, Tracking the Vanishing Frogs and Paradise by Design.