Spraying of glyphosate over our forests
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I got a question from Kevin Proteau of BC, in relation to spraying of glyphosate over forests. I decided to tell my story directly into a Camera, for record.
BC has been using glyphosate over its forests for decades. I had made a freedom of information request to the BC government to let me know how much (by weight) glyphosate had been sprayed over BC forests by logging corporations from the beginning till date.
I learned that:
1) Glyphosate is routinely used, for many years
2) The details are neither completely held by ministry of forest management, nor the ministry of environment, but in bits and pieces here and there. As a result they could not give me any year upon year total (which I had asked) of amount of glyphosate sprayed over BC Forests.
3) The BC Government asked me if I was prepared to dole out several hundred dollars extra for the information since the request needs more man-hours than stipulated and would require the government to write to all the logging contractors, who might have better records, to furnish the information, to be tallied and tabulated by the Government, and then given to me.
I refused to pay several hundred dollars, but settled to get a small portion of the information that the BC Government had, sketchy and in a rather incomplete list for only a few years, for around $100.
And so, the answer is – two fold:
A) Yes, glyphosate is routinely sprayed over BC forests
B) Nobody knows how much of it has been sprayed. The Government is not keeping tab on it.
On a separate request to the BC Government, I asked to be shown what document it had seen that glyphosate was safe to be used over BC forests, from the point of view of forest ecosystem and wildlife. I got only a vague answer that the product was approved by Health Canada.
This answer indicates, to me that
C) Nobody in the BC Government has seen any evidence that glyphosate is safe to be sprayed over our forests.
D) Since Health Canada, far as I know, has never conducted nor sighted any test on effect of glyphosate on environment, and has only presumably seen tests of glyphosate in mammalian food, which it refuses to disclose to the people – that there has not been any tests seen by anybody in Canada, and as far as I can tell, anybody else anywhere else either, that glyphosate is at all safe to be sprayed over our forests, for sustainability of our biological diversity, our flora and fauna, our wildlife or out environment.
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