IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB143927227

Roundup from the Ground Up: A Supply-Side Story of the World's Most Widely Used Herbicide (2019)

Elmore, Bartow J. (Author)

Agricultural History
Volume: 93
Issue: 1
Pages: 102-138
Publication date: 2019
Language: English

URI: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3098/ah.2019.093.1.102

DOI: 10.3098/ah.2019.093.1.102

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Environmental degradation Chemical industry Agriculture Phosphates and phosphate industry Herbicides United States Idaho (U.S.)

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.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB143927227

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Rasmussen, Nicolas; (2001)
Plant Hormones in War and Peace: Science, Industry, and Government in the Development of Herbicides in 1940s America (/p/isis/citation/CBB000671235/)

Book Duffin, Andrew P.; (2007)
Plowed Under: Agriculture and Environment in the Palouse (/p/isis/citation/CBB000950152/)

Article Derek Byerlee; (2021)
The Super State: The Political Economy of Phosphate Fertilizer Use in South Australia, 1880–1940 (/p/isis/citation/CBB126344986/)

Article Shane Hamilton; (2022)
New Materialism and the History of Agribusiness (/p/isis/citation/CBB921018299/)

Article Oatsvall, Neil S.; (2013)
Trees Versus Lives: Reckoning Military Success and the Ecological Effects of Chemical Defoliation during the Vietnam War (/p/isis/citation/CBB001421399/)

Book Allen, Barbara L.; (2003)
Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor Disputes (/p/isis/citation/CBB000650444/)

Book Monica R. Gisolfi; Paul S. Sutter; (2017)
The Takeover: Chicken Farming and the Roots of American Agribusiness (/p/isis/citation/CBB623079555/)

Book Paul S. Sutter; (2015)
Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (/p/isis/citation/CBB244055781/)

Book Curtis, Kent A; (2013)
Gambling on Ore: The Nature of Metal Mining in the United States, 1860--1910 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420380/)

Book Bartow J. Elmore; (2021)
Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future (/p/isis/citation/CBB102008697/)

Article Anderson, J. L.; (2005)
War on Weeds: Iowa Farmers and Growth-Regulator Herbicides (/p/isis/citation/CBB000830417/)

Book Michelle Mart; (2015)
Pesticides, A Love Story: America's Enduring Embrace of Dangerous Chemicals (/p/isis/citation/CBB036580158/)

Article Vail, David D.; (2012)
Kill That Thistle: Rogue Sprayers, Bootlegged Chemicals, Wicked Weeds, and the Kansas Chemical Laws, 1945--1980 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001200584/)

Article Rahul Mukherjee; (September 2016)
Toxic Lunch in Bhopal and Chemical Publics (/p/isis/citation/CBB753030836/)

Book Hay, Amy M.; (2021)
The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests (/p/isis/citation/CBB039979128/)

Article Hay, Amy M.; (2012)
Dispelling the “Bitter Fog”: Fighting Chemical Defoliation in the American West (/p/isis/citation/CBB001251552/)

Article Eda Kranakis; (2019)
A Tale of Two Inventions: Monsanto, Biotechnology, and the Geography of Postmodern Science (/p/isis/citation/CBB875215202/)

Book Alvin L. Young; (2022)
Agent Orange: The Failure of Science, Policy and Common Sense (/p/isis/citation/CBB579236627/)

Book Bradley D. Snow; (2017)
Living with Lead: An Environmental History of Idaho's Coeur D'Alenes, 1885-2011 (/p/isis/citation/CBB918352393/)

Book Clark C. Spence; (2016)
A history of gold dredging in Idaho (/p/isis/citation/CBB878190248/)