February 2020 - Parks & Recreation - 32

Weeding
Through the

Thorny

How will your park agency kill weeds when glyphosate is banned?
By Richard J. Dolesh

A

year or so ago, few people in the field of parks and recreation had
ever heard the word " glyphosate, " much less knew that it is the active ingredient in the most widely used, non-selective herbicide in
the world. Litigation, media attention and growing concerns for
human safety have changed all that.
The Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) estimates that 280 million pounds per year of glyphosate are
applied in the United States on agricultural fields, roadsides, businesses, industrial sites, homes and public parks.
Farmers apply the vast majority of glyhposate-based herbicides (GBHs), but
tens of millions of pounds of glyphosate are applied on public and private
lands for purposes other than agriculture. " It's been the go-to herbicide for
park agencies for a long time, " says
Patti Bakker, interim manager for the
Seattle Parks and Recreation Department Natural Resource Unit.
Until a very short time ago, most
park agencies considered Roundup an
effective, benign and even safe herbicide. That belief is changing rapidly in
light of new evidence that GBHs may
be unsafe for humans and may cause
cancer.
The link to human health and
cancer may not be conclusive, but
California juries ruled in 2019 that
Roundup did contribute to developing

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Parks & Recreation

non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and awarded one couple $2 billion in damages.
At this writing, there are more than
18,000 lawsuits filed against chemical
giant Bayer, which bought Monsanto,
the original developer of this herbicide.
These verdicts and publicity about
glyphosate have awakened public concern about the safety of this widely
used herbicide. More than 50 U.S. cities
and individual park systems now have
banned or restricted the use of herbicides containing glyphosate. It is likely
that many other cities and counties will
enact new bans in the coming year.

Bans Will Directly Affect Park
and Recreation Agencies
Your city or park and recreation agency may not have yet banned glyphosate, but local actions to restrict or fully ban its use on public properties may
be likely soon. Whether your agency,
city or county enacts a ban on glyphosate or not, the health and safety
of your workers and the public are of
paramount importance with any con-

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tinued use of GBHs. The threats to
human health and to the environment
are real, despite the EPA's May 2019
declaration that the pesticide is safe for
use if applied as instructed. The choices to use it or ban it are not simple
and will have consequences no matter
what actions local governments take.

What Is Glyphosate and
What Does It Do?
Glyphosate is a non-selective systemic
herbicide that kills plants down to the
roots by blocking key enzymes that
are essential to plant growth, causing
plants to wither and die over a period
of several days to a week. It is very effective on virtually all types of weeds
and is relatively inexpensive.
Glyphosate, under the trade name
Roundup, came on the market in
1974. It is now found in more than 750
products worldwide and approved for
use on more than 100 crops in treatment of terrestrial and aquatic weeds.
Its primary use is in conjunction with
genetically modified (GMO) corn
and soybean crops. This GMO seed
stock withstands the pesticide and allows the crop to grow while weeds are
killed. Today, as much as 92 percent of
all U.S. corn and 94 percent of all soybean seeds are genetically modified to
February 2020 - Parks & Recreation

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