This week, thick wildfire smoke blankets parts of North America from fires burning across Canada and northern Minnesota. Over 800 wildfires are burning through Canadian forests right now and firefighters in the United States are working to contain 48 uncontained large fires.
Most of our conversations about glyphosate focus on farms, food, and health. But across North America, thousands of hectares of public forest land are sprayed with glyphosate-based herbicides every year, often from the air, over land that communities depend on for clean water, wildlife, and in many cases, food and cultural practice.
The primary purposes of glyphosate in forestry are to kill broadleaf species like birch, poplar, and berry plants that compete with commercially valuable conifers, to control invasive plant species, and to clear pipeline and road corridors. What’s left behind is a more uniform, more flammable forest.
Glyphosate and Wildfire
Aspen and birch slow fire spread naturally, keeping flames low to the ground where firefighters can contain them. When conifer forests burn, they release more than twice the carbon of comparable deciduous forests, feeding the very conditions that make the next fire season worse. Glyphosate forestry systematically eliminates the fire buffer, and the dead vegetation it leaves behind adds to the fuel load.
What’s Happening in the United States
A year-long investigation by Mother Jones found that the US Forest Service and its timber industry partners have been spraying glyphosate across clear-cut and fire-damaged forests at record levels. California alone sprayed 266,000 pounds of glyphosate on forests in 2023, five times the amount sprayed 20 years ago, making forest spraying the fastest-growing market for glyphosate in the state.
What’s Happening in Canada
In Ontario, a grassroots campaign called Stop the Spray Ontario has been pushing back for years. The group was started by a bush pilot and hunter named Joel Theriault, who became convinced something was wrong after harvesting a black bear that made his friends and family sick following consumption, with symptoms that matched glyphosate overexposure. Last summer, a planned aerial herbicide spray was abruptly halted following a wave of protests led by Indigenous communities and environmental advocates.
Ontario banned cosmetic pesticide use in 2009 to protect families, children, pets, and communities from unnecessary chemical exposure. However, forestry was explicitly exempted. So, the same glyphosate banned from lawns and schoolyards is still being sprayed by helicopter over the Crown forests that rural families, Indigenous communities, and wildlife depend on for food, water, and cultural practice.
Waiting for someone else to make a move
Why are they sitting on the fence?”
OCA, myself personally, and other COVID investigators were being slandered and censored at the same time as Morrison and Clapton. In 2020 the internet monopolies including Google, Facebook, and YouTube had begun “shadow banning” OCA and Millions Against Monsanto’s postings and videos to our two million social media followers and threatening to de-platform us entirely.
So-called “progressive” media that had carried our articles and interviews for more than a decade (Common Dreams, Truthout, Counterpunch, Democracy Now, Pacifica Radio) censored and slandered us, calling us and our fellow COVID researchers and truth-tellers racists, “Trumpers,” or “conspiracy theorists” for exposing the obvious fact that the genetically engineered SARS-CoV-2 virus, a reckless joint venture of U.S. and Chinese scientists, governments, and the military, obviously came out of a Wuhan Lab, where it was accidentally or deliberately released.
Industry’s Response: Switching Chemicals
In December 2025 a study regulators worldwide had cited for 25 years to justify glyphosate was retracted over evidence it was ghostwritten by Monsanto and built on the company’s own unpublished research. Unfortunately, industry in provinces like Alberta and Ontario is quietly switching to chemicals like Triclopyr and Imazapyr. Neither is a clean alternative. Triclopyr is moderately to highly toxic to freshwater plants and fish, can persist in soil for up to a year or more, and its breakdown products pose significant risks to groundwater and surface water. Imazapyr persists in soil for over a year, moves readily through most soil types, and has contaminated surface and groundwater following aerial application. Non-target plant species, including the food and medicine plants that Indigenous communities depend on, are at direct risk from spray drift. Swapping one herbicide for another doesn’t change what aerial spraying does to the forest, the water, or the people living near it.
The Fight in the United States
Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of cancer patients filed suit against Bayer, arguing that glyphosate caused their non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that Monsanto failed to warn them. Bayer has paid out billions in settlements. Then, on June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Bayer, effectively closing the courthouse door on remaining state-level failure-to-warn claims and tossing out around 100,000 pending cases. The Trump administration had already signaled where it stood, filing an amicus brief in support of Bayer and designating glyphosate as critical to national defense under the Defense Production Act.
What You Can Do
Change is possible. Quebec banned glyphosate in its public forests in 2001 and has managed its forests without it for 25 years. Last summer, organized community pressure stopped aerial spraying in three Ontario forest districts. The courts have narrowed as a path forward, but state legislatures haven’t, and what happened in Northern Ontario last summer is proof that organized people can still change the outcome.
OCA has been in this fight for 30 years. The Millions Against Monsanto campaign launched in the mid-1990s. In 2017, OCA and Beyond Pesticides sued Monsanto for misleading the public about Roundup’s safety, and a federal judge ruled in OCA’s favor. OCA has tested major food brands for glyphosate contamination, sued companies that marketed contaminated products as natural, and was a founding organizer of the Monsanto Tribunal in The Hague, where judges concluded that Monsanto’s activities violated basic human rights. The Supreme Court may have handed Bayer a victory last month, but bills restricting or banning glyphosate have already been introduced in a dozen states. OCA is pushing for all 50.
If you’re in the United States, your state legislators are now the most direct path to accountability. If you’re in Canada, follow and support Stop the Spray.
