According to Carey Gillam, Monsanto has systematically suppressed information related to the true environmental impact of their herbicide products. Documents now coming to light in the many court cases against them are said to corroborate this. Monsanto has been known to employ shills to post disinformation to widely read blogs in favor of glyphosate.
Myself, I have seen the consequences of Roundup® use near my property - fish kills caused by state employees spraying the stuff around storm sewers, for example. The actual visible effects are not congruent with the claims made by Monsanto, so I will not use the stuff for any purpose. Monsanto are proven liars who do not have the best interests of my species at heart, so I choose not to give them my dollars, and support any action to prevent them from receiving any benefit of tax monies or government policy.
This is really a funding issue; sufficient funding isn’t being made available to do the work without glyphosate using public money, and private individuals who would like to work for the good of the interdependent web of life that makes human life possible are mostly too busy working to keep bread on their tables.
People doing their best to control environmental degradation by human introduction of invasive species can’t be faulted for this problem. They have a limited number of tools available to them and have to do the best they can.
I consider this responsible use. If it wasn’t for the fact that Monsanto is an anti-human force that I don’t want to financially support, I’d be totally OK with that. I completely understand why your former employers used it.
But personally I spend many hours pulling stuff up by the roots, and when weather conditions are suitable, I use a flamethrower.
It’s a large and difficult problem and Australia is something of a special case. But generally, you want to maximize species diversity on a planetary scale if you want humans to have an optimal living environment.
