Our kids. Our water.
Our forests. Protect them.
California sprayed 265,836 pounds of glyphosate on public forests in 2023 — five times what it was two decades ago, on a trend line verified back to 1994. It penetrates the air our children breathe. It kills the forest life it's supposed to protect. It contaminates the water that runs below and above ground. And it's linked to genetic damage and classified as a probable human carcinogen. We're asking Governor Newsom for a moratorium until the state can prove our health isn't the cost of doing business.
Five things, before a single acre more.
Logging, thinning, and prescribed burns continue under this moratorium. What stops is aerial and ground application of glyphosate on public forestland, until California completes independent air, water, and health monitoring the state has never required before approving it.
- 01
Immediate moratorium
Halt glyphosate and other pesticide spraying on California's public forestland.
- 02
Transparent reporting
Public disclosure and advance community notification before any herbicide application.
- 03
Independent air monitoring
Health impact assessments of glyphosate and its combustion byproducts in wildfire smoke.
- 04
Non-chemical alternatives
Investment in manual clearing and native replanting for forest restoration.
- 05
Publicly funded research
Independent study of the health and environmental impacts, free of industry influence.
This isn't one problem. It's three.
Glyphosate spraying gets defended two ways: that it reduces wildfire risk, and that it helps newly planted conifers outcompete other vegetation after logging or fire. Neither holds up on its own terms — and neither is even the main issue.
Human health
- A UC Berkeley cohort of 480 mother-child pairs, followed from before birth through age 18, found that childhood glyphosate/AMPA exposure was associated with a 14% increase in a liver-inflammation marker and a 55% increase in metabolic syndrome risk by young adulthood.
- The World Health Organization's cancer research arm classified glyphosate a probable human carcinogen in 2015.
- The industry study long cited as proof of glyphosate's safety was ghostwritten by Monsanto employees and retracted in late 2025 — details below.
Forest health & fire risk
- Glyphosate is non-selective — it kills native understory and forage plants alongside whatever it's targeting, not just the competing species.
- Removing slow-burning deciduous trees and shrubs in favor of conifers can leave a stand more flammable, not less — the opposite of the stated wildfire-resilience goal.
- The commercial-timber argument cuts against itself, too: pushing mixed native forest toward single-species conifer stands increases vulnerability to the same insect and disease outbreaks the government's own emergency order names as part of the current forest health crisis.
- The strongest predictor of whether a home survives a wildfire is the home itself, not vegetation hundreds of feet away — spraying public forestland doesn't address the actual risk to communities.
Water & the food we eat
- EPA sets a federal drinking-water limit for glyphosate specifically because agricultural and forestry runoff is a recognized contamination pathway.
- AMPA, glyphosate's main breakdown product, is 3–6 times more persistent and toxic than glyphosate itself, and has documented harmful effects on fish and aquatic invertebrates.
- Active or planned spray operations sit above navigable waters and drinking-water sources on federal forest land across California — the Lake Tahoe Basin and the Feather River watershed among them — and near the same forests where people forage for wild mushrooms and hunt game.
We're spraying a chemical on public land that no regulator has ever fully modeled for what happens when it burns. Nobody has measured what's in that smoke. That's not science-based policy. That's an experiment on the public without consent.— Michelle Perro, MD
You were told the science was independent. It wasn't.
What actually happened
For twenty-five years, one paper did the heavy lifting for glyphosate's entire safety record: Williams, Kroes & Munro, published in April 2000 in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology and credited to three independent academic scientists. Its finding, stated flatly: glyphosate and Roundup pose "no health risk to humans" — no cancer, no reproductive harm, no developmental or endocrine effects.
They weren't independent. Litigation records disclosed in 2017 showed Monsanto employees substantially wrote the paper's content and conclusions. The company's role was never disclosed — not to the journal, not to regulators, not to the public that was told this was neutral science.
In late 2025 — a quarter century after regulators started leaning on it — the journal formally retracted the paper for undisclosed authorship and hidden conflicts of interest.
This isn't limited to industry literature. It's in EPA's own file. The agency's 2016 Glyphosate Issue Paper — the document behind its "not likely to be carcinogenic" finding — cites this exact paper as evidence, not in a footnote but in the body of its assessment. EPA's own footnotes acknowledge the other studies it leaned on were funded by or linked to Monsanto too. The agency's safety finding relied in part on evidence from the company being regulated. Reporting by Nate Halverson for Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting found that EPA's own Inspector General's Office had internally flagged this exact paper as research misconduct nearly a decade earlier — and the agency kept relying on it anyway.
EPA later had the opportunity to revisit this and did not. The ghostwriting was already public in 2017. EPA's next major decision on glyphosate — the 2020 Interim Registration Review Decision — came three years later, and reached the same conclusion: no human health risks of concern, not likely carcinogenic. That decision does not revisit the tainted study or address why it still counted as evidence after the ghostwriting was already public record.
What that gives you standing to do
A federal agency's decision has to rest on evidence that holds up. This one didn't. EPA built part of its "safe" finding on a paper the chemical's own manufacturer secretly wrote — and never disclosed that to anyone reviewing its work.
Under the Administrative Procedure Act, a decision resting on evidence later shown to be compromised is vulnerable to challenge as arbitrary and capricious — decided without a reasoned basis in the actual record. Federal law (FIFRA) gives the public standing to formally petition EPA to reopen that decision, and gives EPA itself the authority to suspend the registration if it finds an imminent hazard.
What independent science found afterward
The 2000 paper's core claim was that glyphosate causes no cancer in humans. Three rounds of independent, peer-reviewed research since have found otherwise:
- 2015 — The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate a Group 2A "probable human carcinogen," based on evidence in both humans and laboratory animals.
- 2019 — Zhang et al., Mutation Research, a meta-analysis combining the Agricultural Health Study cohort with five case-control studies, found a 41% increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma among the most highly exposed individuals.
- 2025 — Panzacchi et al., Environmental Health, the Global Glyphosate Study — the most comprehensive toxicology study of glyphosate ever conducted — found dose-related increases in multiple tumor types in rats, including leukemia, at exposure levels regulators currently classify as safe.
Three separate research efforts, fifteen years apart, reached conclusions that contradict the paper's central claim.
EPA did not revisit this finding. Starting in 2025, new federal rules eliminated the public notice and comment period that was previously required before spray operations could begin.
The science was already in question. The public's right to object was removed anyway.
This isn't a story about one bad decision. It's two things happening on parallel tracks — and the timing is the point.
Executive Order 14225 directs USDA to expand timber production and remove "regulatory barriers" to forest management on national forest land.
Secretary's Memorandum 1078-006 declares 112,646,000 acres — 59% of all National Forest System land — an emergency situation. It authorizes "control of competing vegetation" as an emergency action, the exact legal language covering glyphosate spraying. It eliminates the standard public objection process under 36 CFR Part 218. It opens the door to sole-source contracting with no competitive bid required.
USDA rescinds 36 CFR Part 220 — the Forest Service's own NEPA regulations, in place since 2008, requiring public notice before any significant forest management action — using an interim final rule that bypassed standard notice-and-comment rulemaking. The Forest Service's own summary of these regulations had said they existed so that "the public has a voice in Forest Service decisions about its on-the-ground activities" — with public scoping required for every proposal and decisions fully documented and disclosed. But the USDA proceeded anyway — even after 154,454 public comments came in during the 27-day window before the rule took effect.
The rollback is made permanent. Not a pause, not a pilot program — the public notice requirement is gone for good, codified in federal regulation.
Reps. Jared Huffman and Chellie Pingree formally demand answers from Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz on the agency's glyphosate use, citing the retracted study and the lack of public information. Congress is now asking the same questions this page is.
Weeks later, the U.S. Supreme Court rules 7–2 that federal pesticide law shields Bayer — Monsanto's parent company — from state lawsuits claiming Roundup should have carried a cancer warning. The ruling arrives in the same stretch of time regulators are expanding the exact spraying program this page documents.
Taking away public comment doesn't repeal environmental law.
SM 1078-006 eliminated the public's right to object in advance. It didn't eliminate the laws underneath it — its own text says so. Every one of these still applies to every spray operation, whether or not anyone got to comment first.
- 01
Endangered Species Act
EPA's own biological evaluation found glyphosate likely to adversely affect 93% of the species it evaluated and 96% of the critical habitats — salmon, spotted owls, and hundreds of native plants among them. Every spray operation is still required to complete ESA consultation before proceeding. An incomplete consultation is an independent violation, emergency designation or not.
- 02
Clean Water Act
Applies to anyone discharging pollutants into navigable waters — federal, state, or private. The Lake Tahoe Basin and the Feather River watershed both have active or planned federal spray operations near navigable waters that are also salmon habitat and drinking-water sources. Water clean enough for the fish and amphibians that can't filter it out is the same water reaching the reservoirs and taps downstream. Protecting their water is protecting ours.
- 03
National Historic Preservation Act (Section 106)
Federal agencies must consult with Tribes before any action affecting Traditional Cultural Properties — medicinal plant gathering sites, ceremonial grounds, and basket-weaving harvest areas on national forest land all qualify. SM 1078-006 states outright that Tribal consultation requirements are unchanged. If that consultation didn't happen before spraying, that's a standalone violation.
- 04
National Forest Management Act
The 2012 Forest Service Planning Rule (36 CFR § 219.8) requires maintaining and restoring the ecological integrity of national forest land. This runs under a different law than NEPA, so the NEPA rollback doesn't touch it. Spray operations that wipe out native understory, disrupt soil biology, or fragment habitat connectivity can violate this requirement on their own, independent of the emergency designation.
- 05
NEPA itself — the rollback can be challenged
Rescinding 36 CFR Part 220 by bypassing standard notice-and-comment rulemaking is itself a legally challengeable act, separate from any individual spray operation. The process used to take away your voice is not, itself, above the law that governs how agencies are allowed to make rules.
Emergency authority answers whether spraying was allowed in general. It does not answer whether these laws were actually followed for any specific operation. That's the basis for challenging individual operations — forest by forest, watershed by watershed.— CA4 Pesticide-Free Forests
Put your name on the record.
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