Roundup from the Ground Up: A Supply-Side Story of the World's Most Widely Used Herbicide (2019)
Digging deep into the history of phosphate mining, this article engages contemporary debates about the environmental sustainability of using Roundup to produce our food by focusing on the front end rather than the back end of the product's life cycle. Though many people may not know it, the critical raw material Monsanto uses to make Roundup an effective herbicide is elemental phosphorus, which comes from a processing plant in southeast Idaho that remains an operating Superfund site to this day. In the years ahead, scholars may well demonstrate a clear and irrefutable link between Monsanto's herbicide and carcinogenesis. But if we look to history, we see that there are some troubling realities about producing Roundup in the first place. Documenting the supply-side ecological costs of Roundup manufacture, this article questions the efficacy of a decentralized EPA remediation strategy, honed in the 1990s, that allowed an operating facility to continue releasing pollutants into the environment more than a quarter century after it had achieved national priority listing under the Superfund program.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Rasmussen, Nicolas;
(2001)
Plant Hormones in War and Peace: Science, Industry, and Government in the Development of Herbicides in 1940s America
(/isis/citation/CBB000671235/)
Book
Duffin, Andrew P.;
(2007)
Plowed Under: Agriculture and Environment in the Palouse
(/isis/citation/CBB000950152/)
Article
Shane Hamilton;
(2022)
New Materialism and the History of Agribusiness
(/isis/citation/CBB921018299/)
Article
Derek Byerlee;
(2021)
The Super State: The Political Economy of Phosphate Fertilizer Use in South Australia, 1880–1940
(/isis/citation/CBB126344986/)
Book
Paul S. Sutter;
(2015)
Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South
(/isis/citation/CBB244055781/)
Book
Allen, Barbara L.;
(2003)
Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor Disputes
(/isis/citation/CBB000650444/)
Book
Curtis, Kent A;
(2013)
Gambling on Ore: The Nature of Metal Mining in the United States, 1860--1910
(/isis/citation/CBB001420380/)
Book
Monica R. Gisolfi;
Paul S. Sutter;
(2017)
The Takeover: Chicken Farming and the Roots of American Agribusiness
(/isis/citation/CBB623079555/)
Book
Michelle Mart;
(2015)
Pesticides, A Love Story: America's Enduring Embrace of Dangerous Chemicals
(/isis/citation/CBB036580158/)
Article
Vail, David D.;
(2012)
Kill That Thistle: Rogue Sprayers, Bootlegged Chemicals, Wicked Weeds, and the Kansas Chemical Laws, 1945--1980
(/isis/citation/CBB001200584/)
Article
Oatsvall, Neil S.;
(2013)
Trees Versus Lives: Reckoning Military Success and the Ecological Effects of Chemical Defoliation during the Vietnam War
(/isis/citation/CBB001421399/)
Book
Bartow J. Elmore;
(2021)
Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future
(/isis/citation/CBB102008697/)
Book
Clark C. Spence;
(2016)
A history of gold dredging in Idaho
(/isis/citation/CBB878190248/)
Book
Hay, Amy M.;
(2021)
The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests
(/isis/citation/CBB039979128/)
Article
Anderson, J. L.;
(2005)
War on Weeds: Iowa Farmers and Growth-Regulator Herbicides
(/isis/citation/CBB000830417/)
Book
Brooks, Karl Boyd;
(2006)
Public Power, Private Dams: The Hell's Canyon High Dam Controversy
(/isis/citation/CBB000772061/)
Article
Hay, Amy M.;
(2012)
Dispelling the “Bitter Fog”: Fighting Chemical Defoliation in the American West
(/isis/citation/CBB001251552/)
Book
Michael C. Mix;
(2016)
Leaded: The Poisoning of Idaho's Silver Valley
(/isis/citation/CBB800367020/)
Book
Bradley D. Snow;
(2017)
Living with Lead: An Environmental History of Idaho's Coeur D'Alenes, 1885-2011
(/isis/citation/CBB918352393/)
Thesis
Dodd, Douglas W.;
(2000)
Preserving multiple-use management: The United States Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the struggle for Idaho's Sawtooth Mountain Country, 1911--1972
(/isis/citation/CBB001562589/)
Be the first to comment!