Herbicides poison and waste weeds, transforming the weed into a toxic waste. Herbicides are a major threat to global biodiversity. The herbicides often get into our streams and rivers. Only habitat clearing does more damage to natural systems.
Herbicides affect our ability to produce healthy food, fibre and other types of agricultural produce. For example, on farms and forestry plantations in Australia, over A$1.3 billion dollars is wasted annually on wholesale herbicides (APVMA, 2010-2011). Along with the cost of the herbicide, there are other hidden costs, such as loss of biodiversity resources, damaged soils, environmental pollution as well as the cost of related health issues to both humans and wildlife, such as cancer.
Herbicides contaminate water supplies and produce dead and barren environments. Herbicides affect all of us, not just farmers, land managers and urban gardeners, but all living beings. One of the main obstacles to addressing problems caused by herbicides is that not everyone realises that there are sustainable weeding options available which are beneficial to humans, wildlife and the environment.
Toxic synthetic herbicides pollute our environment and poison humans and other living beings. The WHO estimate that more than 40% of cancer deaths can be avoided if we avoid poisoning humans with unwanted chemicals. The health cost of toxic synthetic herbicides is immense. Recent studies have found that the predicted health costs due to our current use of pesticides could be as high as 90 billion in African and $48 billion in Europe.
Not only are toxic synthetic herbicides ill-advised on health and environmental grounds, they waste the plant. Weeds, even though unwanted, can be useful. They can be eaten or used as compost to build healthy soil. The uses of weeds are only limited by our imagination. The Sustainable Weeding Guide aims to find uses for plants that that we call weeds.
In Australia conventional agricultural systems use a wide range of chemicals (DPI Victoria, 2012). We know these chemicals are dangerous. They are designed to ‘kill’. The need for a wide range of chemicals is due in part to ‘Nature’ fighting back in the form of herbicide resistance.
Herbicide resistance is the ability of ‘weeds’ to fight for their life, to fight against their extinction. ‘Weeds’ have managed to do this through a transformation which makes them immune to herbicides. These weeds have been named as ‘Superweeds’ – perhaps it would be more accurate to call them the ‘Super Heroes’ of the floral kingdom.
