Beyond Herbicides: A Conversation About Forests and Values

The more I examine the stories we tell ourselves about progress, stewardship, and responsibility, the more I find that the technical details are only ever the surface. Beneath them lies something far more revealing: the values we choose to elevate, the assumptions we rarely question, and the philosophies that quietly shape the decisions affecting us all.

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In this discourse we explored the rationale behind large-scale forest herbicide spraying, the economic philosophy underpinning modern forestry, and the broader questions of institutional trust, ecological stewardship, and public accountability. While the discussion began with the technical purpose of vegetation management, it gradually expanded into a philosophical examination of how forests are valued, how scientific and political institutions shape environmental policy, and whether economic efficiency has displaced a deeper respect for living ecosystems.

Key Points Discussed

• The stated purpose of forest herbicide spraying is to suppress competing vegetation and promote commercially valuable conifer growth.
• Triclopyr and imazapyr were examined as alternatives to glyphosate and discussed in the context of modern forestry practices.
• The distinction between managing forests as timber inventories versus stewarding them as complex ecosystems became a central theme.
• Questions were raised regarding institutional incentives, regulatory influence, and public trust in scientific consensus.
• The conversation contrasted economic efficiency with ecological resilience, biodiversity, and long-term sustainability.
• Mixed-species forests and naturally diverse ecosystems were discussed as potentially more resilient than highly simplified stands.
• The discussion considered the limitations of protest, public consultation, and legal action in influencing entrenched policy.
• The philosophical assumptions beneath environmental management were explored alongside practical forestry objectives.
• The exchange examined the tension between measurable economic outcomes and values that are ecological, cultural, or spiritual in nature.
• The broader issue became less about individual herbicides and more about the worldview informing their use.

Key Takeaways

• Environmental policy ultimately reflects underlying values, not merely technical decisions.
• How society defines the purpose of a forest largely determines how it is managed.
• Institutional trust depends not only on expertise but on transparency, accountability, and public confidence.
• Ecological complexity often resists reduction to purely economic calculations.
• Many environmental debates are fundamentally philosophical before they are scientific or political.

» Trance:

What is the purpose behind forest spraying? What’s triclopyr, or imazapyr? The “pyr” suffix would seem to indicate fire. They want more widespread wildfires?

(Note: The letter was originally included from this page.)

» ChatGPT:

The short answer is that the purpose of forest herbicide spraying is generally not to kill the forest, but to manipulate which species dominate it. Whether that’s justified is a separate—and legitimately debated—question.

Why forests are sprayed

After a clearcut or wildfire, a forest naturally regenerates with whatever species establish first. In much of the Canadian boreal forest, that often means fast-growing deciduous species like:

• trembling aspen
• paper birch
• alder
• willow

If a forestry company wants a stand dominated by planted conifers (spruce, pine, fir), those deciduous species can outcompete the seedlings for light, moisture, and nutrients.

Herbicides are used to suppress the competing vegetation so the planted crop trees survive and reach harvestable size sooner.

From the industry’s perspective, it’s called vegetation management. Critics argue it’s replacing a naturally diverse forest with a simplified timber plantation.

What are triclopyr and imazapyr?

The names don’t have anything to do with fire.

The suffix “-pyr” doesn’t derive from the Greek pyr (fire) in this context. Chemical names often reuse fragments that refer to aspects of molecular structure rather than literal meaning.

Triclopyr

• Selective herbicide.
• Particularly effective against broadleaf plants and woody shrubs.
• Often leaves grasses relatively unaffected.
• Used on brush, invasive plants, rights-of-way, and occasionally forestry.

It acts as a synthetic auxin, essentially overwhelming plant growth hormones until susceptible plants die.

Imazapyr

• Non-selective herbicide.
• Can affect trees, shrubs, grasses, and many other plants.
• More persistent than glyphosate in some environments.
• Works by inhibiting the enzyme ALS (acetolactate synthase), preventing plants from producing essential amino acids.

Because of its persistence, it’s often used where long-term vegetation suppression is desired.

Why switch chemicals?

There are several reasons governments or companies may consider alternatives:

• weeds or brush becoming less susceptible to one herbicide
• different target species
• regulatory changes
• public pressure surrounding glyphosate
• different environmental persistence or application characteristics

Whether a replacement is genuinely safer depends on the specific chemical, how it’s used, the ecosystem, and the quality of the evidence. It’s not automatically true that a newer herbicide is safer, nor that it’s simply “glyphosate by another name.”

Does widespread spraying increase wildfire risk?

This is where claims often become overstated.

There’s no accepted evidence that forestry agencies spray forests to promote wildfires.

However, there are legitimate questions researchers study:

• Killing shrubs and hardwoods changes forest composition.
• Conifer-dominated forests can, under some conditions, burn differently than mixed forests.
• Broadleaf species like aspen often have lower flammability during the growing season and can sometimes slow fire spread.
• Replacing mixed forests with extensive conifer stands may influence future fire behaviour at the landscape scale, though wildfire risk is driven by many factors including climate, drought, weather, stand age, and fuel accumulation.

So it’s reasonable to debate whether intensive vegetation management affects long-term fire resilience. That’s different from concluding that the objective is to create more fires.

Regarding your letter

Overall, I think it raises an important ethical question, but there are a few places where I’d be careful if your goal is to persuade Registered Professional Foresters rather than simply express opposition.

For example:

“The scientific and ethical basis for continuing this practice is now indefensible.”

That’s a stronger claim than the current scientific consensus supports. Many scientists would agree there are significant unresolved concerns about some herbicides and about large-scale ecosystem impacts, but not all would conclude the practice is categorically “indefensible.”

Likewise:

“It is poison by another name.”

This is rhetorically powerful, but it invites readers to dismiss the argument as advocacy rather than engage with your substantive points about precaution, ecological integrity, cumulative effects, and informed public consent.

I think your strongest paragraph is actually this one:

You may say Ontario policy drives this practice, but government policy does not sign off on herbicide spraying. Registered Professional Foresters do. If your professional duties to the public interest, precaution, ecological integrity, and Indigenous jurisdiction do not meaningfully affect that decision, then what does your code actually require of you?

That shifts the discussion from arguing over toxicology toward professional responsibility and ethical accountability. It’s a question that’s difficult to dismiss because it asks foresters to explain how they reconcile their statutory duties with the decisions they authorize.

If your objective is to maximize the chance of receiving a substantive response, I’d focus less on asserting that all herbicides are equivalent and more on asking them to explain the evidence, ethical framework, and professional reasoning they rely on to conclude that landscape-scale herbicide use remains consistent with their obligations to the public interest, ecological stewardship, and Indigenous rights. That framing invites an explanation rather than putting the recipient immediately on the defensive.

» Trance:

I copied the letter from a Facebook post. It resonates with a recent chat regarding glyphosate use in the Sooke area. Unfortunately, we live in an era where scientists are easily coerced and bought, and scientific consensus is even worse and even less morally grounded. A century or more of drift, and most institutions have completely lost their way.

So the widespread spraying can only be for financial concerns, as you’ve outlined, by controlling virtually all vegetation save the conifers needed for logging, lumber, etc. I’m sure they’re also planting trees engineered to grow more quickly as well. But it all leads to inevitable problems down the road, things the next generation or two will have to deal with, as these are all very myopic, greed-based, scientifically illiterate policies and practices.

Protesting isn’t likely to halt its momentum, either, as government colludes with regularity for the same reasons mentioned above. In an era of scant and sparse morality, the least of it is to be found in the highest offices of governance and the most influential corporate offices, which then dictate to lower levels of government, counties, townships, and cities, how things are going to happen. As it is with wind, solar, and data center ecological devastation, class action lawsuits seem to be the only recourse, and unfortunately, that too is usually after the damage is already done.

» ChatGPT:

You’re touching on several different issues here: forestry economics, institutional trust, environmental ethics, and the limits of public influence. Those are related, but it’s worth separating them because some are much more firmly established than others.

On the forestry side, I don’t think there’s much dispute that the primary driver of large-scale vegetation management is economic efficiency. Forestry is designed around predictable yields. A mixed, naturally regenerating boreal forest is ecologically complex but less predictable from a timber production perspective than a stand dominated by commercially valuable conifers. Herbicide use, mechanical brushing, prescribed planting densities, thinning—these are all tools intended to steer succession toward the desired outcome. Whether that should be the objective on public land is a legitimate public policy question.

Regarding genetically engineered trees, though, I’d be cautious. There has been research into genetically modified and gene-edited trees—faster growth, disease resistance, altered wood properties—but widespread commercial planting in Canadian public forests is not something I’m aware of. Most reforestation stock comes from selective breeding programs rather than genetic engineering. Traditional breeding alone can significantly improve growth rates over successive generations without involving transgenic modification.

Where I think your concern is strongest is less about any single herbicide and more about the underlying philosophy of management.

One could frame it this way:

• Is a forest primarily a timber crop?
• Or is it an ecosystem with timber as one of many values?

Those different answers naturally lead to different management practices.

There is also a growing body of forestry research suggesting that forests managed for resilience—mixed species, varied age classes, structural diversity—may be more resistant to insects, disease, drought, and, in some circumstances, wildfire than highly simplified stands. That doesn’t automatically mean herbicides are never appropriate, but it does challenge the assumption that maximizing timber production necessarily aligns with long-term ecological health.

On institutions, trust is clearly under strain in many countries. There are documented examples of regulatory capture, industry influence, revolving doors between regulators and industry, selective publication, and funding biases. Those are real concerns, and they are reasons why transparency, independent replication, disclosure of conflicts of interest, and open data matter.

At the same time, I’d be hesitant to conclude that most scientists are coerced or that scientific consensus is inherently untrustworthy. Science isn’t a single institution; it’s a process carried out by thousands of people across universities, governments, nonprofits, and industry. That process is imperfect and influenced by incentives, but it also has mechanisms—peer criticism, replication, competing research groups, international collaboration—that can and do correct errors over time, even if sometimes more slowly than we’d like.

As for legal action, you’re right that lawsuits often come after harm has already occurred. Courts are generally reactive rather than preventive. They can establish accountability or change future practice, but they rarely restore a damaged ecosystem to its previous state.

One thing I find encouraging is that forestry itself is not static. Practices that were considered standard fifty years ago—large clearcuts without retention, routine slash burning, little regard for riparian buffers, minimal consultation with Indigenous nations—have changed substantially. Whether those changes have gone far enough is open to debate, but they demonstrate that forestry practices are not immutable. Public pressure, evolving science, Indigenous stewardship, market demand, and policy reforms have all influenced how forests are managed.

Ultimately, I think one of the deeper questions your comments raise is philosophical rather than technical:

What is the purpose of a public forest?

If the answer is “to maximize annual timber yield,” then herbicide programs are relatively easy to justify within that framework.

If the answer is “to steward a living ecosystem for present and future generations, balancing biodiversity, watershed protection, cultural values, recreation, carbon storage, wildlife habitat, and timber,” then the burden of justification for landscape-scale chemical intervention becomes much higher.

That is a conversation about values as much as it is about toxicology or silviculture. It’s also one where reasonable people can agree on the importance of forests while disagreeing on how they should be managed.

» Trance:

My comments are generally more philosophical than anything else because most of the world’s problems aren’t going to be solved in our era of near-zero accountability, morality, and justice.

You said:

“There is also a growing body of forestry research suggesting that forests managed for resilience—mixed species, varied age classes, structural diversity—may be more resistant to insects, disease, drought, and, in some circumstances, wildfire than highly simplified stands. That doesn’t automatically mean herbicides are never appropriate, but it does challenge the assumption that maximizing timber production necessarily aligns with long-term ecological health.”

Your choice of language can be either amusing or frustrating. Let’s call it what it is: land and money grabs, combined with widespread ecological poisoning. A natural, diverse, complex forest is always the best option, as nature doesn’t make mistakes in this regard, has no human schedule to consider, and will take as long as it needs in ways humans cannot fully comprehend or wait around to find out about. There is no “may be more resistant…” Monocrops are the worst idea in history, especially in forests. They’re tinderboxes, overloaded with decades of uniform and extremely flammable fuels. So it would seem they’re gambling with what future generations may or may not benefit from regarding for-profit forestry. Then they have the audacity to blame “climate change” when things go horribly wrong. Climate change is a put-up, a fraud, and a hoax, as is “carbon capture” bullshit. No need to go into that here.

You said:

“At the same time, I’d be hesitant to conclude that most scientists are coerced or that scientific consensus is inherently untrustworthy. Science isn’t a single institution; it’s a process carried out by thousands of people across universities, governments, nonprofits, and industry. That process is imperfect and influenced by incentives, but it also has mechanisms—peer criticism, replication, competing research groups, international collaboration—that can and do correct errors over time, even if sometimes more slowly than we’d like.”

It’s a lovely sentiment, but as you state, it’s slow, necessarily methodical, and involves thousands. By the time any kind of counter-narrative gains any momentum, decisions have been made and widespread damaging actions have already happened. In fact, they likely rely on the never-to-be-found consensus because they can effect enough delays and deferment to various aspects of the whole industry simply through incentives and other maneuvering. It only requires a few agents planted here and there, and nothing will ever meaningfully move forward regarding the right and just actions to pursue. That’s par for the course. Nowadays, many of those who purport to be working on behalf of “indigenous interests” are just as corrupt or captured. The spirit has left the building.

I know I’m not looking for solutions here. But I was curious about what this particular asinine spraying campaign is essentially about, and it’s always the same thing nowadays. Let’s wrap it up.

» ChatGPT:

I think we’ve identified the core of it.

The operational justification given by forestry agencies is fairly straightforward: reduce competition, increase conifer survival, produce predictable timber yields, and meet reforestation targets more efficiently. That’s the rationale you’ll find in management plans and silviculture manuals.

The broader question is whether that rationale is sufficient when the land in question is a public forest with many competing values.

From your perspective, it isn’t. You’re arguing that forests should be allowed to regenerate according to ecological processes rather than be engineered toward commercial objectives. That isn’t merely a disagreement over herbicides; it’s a disagreement over what forests are for.

Even people who support active forest management increasingly acknowledge that forests provide much more than timber. They store water, support biodiversity, sequester carbon, provide cultural and recreational value, and exhibit forms of resilience that are difficult to replicate through intensive management. Forestry today often involves balancing those objectives, and reasonable people can disagree about where that balance should lie.

Where I’d still be careful is in distinguishing between a value judgment and a factual claim. For example:

• “Current forestry places too much emphasis on short-term economic returns.” That’s a defensible value judgment.
• “Monocultures tend to be more vulnerable to certain pests and disturbances than diverse forests.” There is substantial evidence supporting that, although the details depend on the ecosystem and disturbance.
• “Every natural forest is always superior in every measurable respect.” That’s harder to defend scientifically because ecosystems vary, disturbances are natural too, and forests change over time.

The philosophical point underneath your comments is one I think many people—across different viewpoints—would recognize:

There is a tendency in modern institutions to value what can be measured economically over what is difficult to quantify ecologically, culturally, or spiritually.

That tension isn’t unique to forestry. It appears in fisheries, agriculture, urban planning, mining, and many other areas where landscapes are managed for human purposes.

You also raise an issue about institutional incentives. Large organizations—whether governments, corporations, universities, or NGOs—can develop incentive structures that favor continuity over course correction. History provides examples where prevailing practices were maintained for years after serious concerns had been raised. That doesn’t mean every institution is captured or every decision is made in bad faith, but it does mean skepticism and public scrutiny have an important role.

As for the spraying campaign itself, I don’t think there’s a hidden objective behind it. In many ways, it’s more mundane than that. It’s an extension of a forestry model that has been refined over decades around efficiency, predictable outputs, and economic return. If one accepts that model, herbicide use can appear to be a logical tool. If one rejects the model—because one sees forests primarily as self-organizing ecosystems rather than timber inventories—then the spraying looks fundamentally misguided.

So in that sense, I think you’ve answered your own original question. The herbicides are not the first principle; they’re a consequence of a broader philosophy of land management. Whether one sees that philosophy as prudent stewardship or as an overly narrow economic framework depends largely on the values one brings to the discussion.

Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DTfXA1Q6y/

More information: https://stopthespraycanada.ca/northshore/

Edited for readability. Full chat:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a506f33-6518-83e8-8eb8-961a463d0203

Solvitur ambulando