Roundup and the historical cycle of complacency

Every generation gets a miracle chemical, and every one is defended the same way: approved by regulators as scientifically sound, vital to modern agriculture. Farmers heard about lead arsenate in the 1920s. Families learned about DDT in the 1940s. Today we hear about glyphosate, the world’s most heavily used herbicide and the key ingredient in Roundup. Public health history isn’t a line of accumulating safety. It’s a cycle of delayed realizations, and the absence of immediate poisoning has never meant the absence of long-term harm.

Lead arsenate was praised in the early 1900s because it seemed selective. It killed gypsy moths and codling moths without visibly harming the farmhands spraying it, so it was judged safe for a century of orchard use. Arsenic and lead never break down. DDT ran the same script. DDT was sprayed over pools and neighborhoods in the 1940s and ’50s; one ad even declared “DDT is good for me!” while manufacturers pointed to government approval to silence doubt.

Roundup uses the same logic: It disrupts the shikimate pathway, a process absent from human cells, so it “can’t” hurt us. But that pathway is very much present in the human gut microbiome, and research now links glyphosate exposure to gut dysbiosis and depleted beneficial bacteria. The mechanism was never as absent from our bodies as the marketing implied.

Glyphosate also causes endocrine disruption, contaminates groundwater and drinking water supplies and disrupts soil health. By eliminating plant life, it also reduces habitat and food sources for pollinators, birds and beneficial insects, including butterflies and bees. Yet there are many safe herbicides with proven weed control without the risks of glyphosate, such as horticultural vinegar and Eco-Exempt, a USDA-exempt, food-grade essential oil formula.

Glyphosate’s “proven safe” defense collapsed in December 2025, when the journal “Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology” retracted a 2000 study that regulators, including the EPA, had cited for a quarter century as evidence glyphosate poses no cancer risk. The retraction followed revelations, surfaced through litigation, that Monsanto employees had secretly ghostwritten the paper without disclosure. Twenty-five years of regulatory reassurance rested on undisclosed corporate authorship.

That should worry anyone still trusting “EPA-approved” as an independent verdict. The agency reviews pesticides largely on data the manufacturers themselves submit, and it tests the isolated active ingredient, not what’s actually sprayed. Commercial Roundup contains surfactants like polyoxyethylene tallow amine that help the chemical penetrate plant cells, and cytotoxicity studies on human cells find these formulations far more damaging than glyphosate alone.

That mismatch may explain why the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm, IARC, classified glyphosate a “probable human carcinogen” in 2015 based on independent review, while the EPA, leaning on industry-supplied data, reached the opposite conclusion. A 2026 analysis of glyphosate use across Iowa found 82% of high-use counties showed non-Hodgkin lymphoma rates above the national average.

American juries have been less patient than regulators. Since 2018, Bayer, which now owns Roundup, has paid roughly $11 billion to settle Roundup cancer claims. It has absorbed more than $6 billion in verdicts since late 2023, including a $2.25 billion Pennsylvania judgment, and in February 2026 it proposed a further $7.25 billion settlement covering some 170,000 claims. Citizens reviewing the same evidence, case after case, keep reaching the conclusion the manufacturer spent billions trying to prevent.

We cannot afford to spend another 50 years confirming what we’re already being told. Lead arsenate took a century to ban and will take generations more to clear from American soil. DDT took decades of denial and irreversible ecological damage before it was withdrawn. Glyphosate sits exactly where both once did: propped up by industry science that has since unraveled, defended with an argument that misreads its own biology and increasingly contradicted by independent research and real-world cancer data.

History’s lesson is blunt: Corporate assurances of safety track profit, not precaution, and real protection has only ever come when the public demanded a ban before the damage became irreversible, not after.

Roundup and other weedkillers containing glyphosate are still being used in many public spaces and private gardens. It’s time to tell your city and county elected leaders to ban glyphosate and protect our health and the natural world.

Frank Niccoli has 65 years of experience in sustainable landscaping and environmental education. He is the newest board member of the Citizens Environmental Council, which will share his summary of the risks of and safe alternatives to glyphosate upon request to info@cecburlingame.org.