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This is the story of how I learned to stop worrying and love chemicals.

When last I wrote about my <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/25/clearing-brush-invasive-plants/" target="_blank">battle of the brush</a>, I was losing, badly, to the invasive vines and noxious weeds that had turned forest and field at my Virginia home into an impassable jungle. I’d cut them back, but they would return in even greater numbers.

So, I consulted far and wide, asking botanists, naturalists, academics and federal and state scientists what to do. Buy a Bush Hog? Rent a herd of goats? Move back to the city?

One consistent, counterintuitive answer came back: The best thing I can do for nature is to fight the invaders with herbicides.

How could it be that the ecologically sound solution was to apply the same chemicals to my land that Big Agriculture sprays on fields by the tankerful? I disdain gardeners who douse every dandelion with Roundup — yet now I was being told that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is my friend in the fight to save my land.

Even while getting my certification this spring with the Arlington Regional Master Naturalists, a group that sends armies of volunteers to uproot invasive plants by hand, I learned from my instructors that herbicides are a necessary evil. I contacted the Natural Resources Defense Council in expectation of finding a counterargument; I received none.

Finally, I checked with Jake Hughes, who is in charge of invasive-plant management for the largest landowner in my neck of the woods, Shenandoah National Park. “The reliance on herbicides is pretty close to universal,” he told me.

Matt Eich

Before you accuse me of being a chemical-industry lobbyist, let me assure you that Hughes uses so little of the stuff that Bayer, Roundup’s manufacturer, would go broke if it relied on people like him. For the vast, almost 200,000-acre park, he uses an average of just 23 gallons of glyphosate a year, diluted and applied surgically to the offending species, usually with backpack sprayers.

With that method, the number of acres he treats each year reaches into the thousands. And if he didn’t use herbicides? “We’d probably be doing tens of acres,” Hughes said. Using mechanical (nonchemical) means to remove invasives from one infested acre takes 900 person-hours, Hughes estimated; that same job using herbicide can be done in nine hours.

It comes down to this: Without chemical treatments, the invaders would take over much of the park in the coming decades. Herbicides might be the difference between whether or not there will even <i>be</i> a forest in Shenandoah National Park in the future.

If invasive plants kill off the oaks, hickories, walnuts and pines on my land, and all the sedges and asters and shrubs that live beneath them, that’s a problem for me. If they do the same to Shenandoah National Park, that’s a problem for all of us in this region. If they are allowed to devastate the forests of Appalachia, and other woodlands and grasslands of the United States, that’s a catastrophe.

Hughes showed me two alternative futures for the forest. The first, on Rocky Branch Trail off Skyline Drive, was a forest destroyed, first by the spongy moth and then by the emerald ash borer. These disturbances created an opening for Asiatic bittersweet, which climbed the remaining trees, weighing them down and stealing their light. The trees then lost their tops, or fell entirely, in ice storms and windstorms — leaving a tangle of ugly vines that is of little use to wildlife.

Dana Milbank: I’m losing the battle against the brush. I’m not alone.

The second, in Buck Hollow off Highway 211, was likewise overrun by bittersweet a decade ago. But after years of treatment with glyphosate (and some hand pulling), the invader has been repelled. Hughes and I stand in a forest rejuvenated: Spicebush, box elder, Blackhaw viburnum, northern red oak, black cherry, American elm and dogwood are all rising in the understory. Hughes didn’t have to plant a thing. “Released from the blanket of bittersweet, stuff just took off,” he said.

And so, I have become a reluctant convert to chemicals. I bought a gallon of glyphosate concentrate, a pump sprayer, rubber gloves, goggles, a respirator (technically unnecessary, but I’m taking no chances) and a hatchet. My preferred technique is “hack and squirt.” With my hatchet, I cut gouges around the circumference of the invading tree, then spray the poison inside. For smaller invaders, I can chop the whole thing down and apply the chemical as a “cut stump” treatment.

Because I’m badly outnumbered (and because I’m liable to kill a prize specimen I’ve mistaken for an invader), I brought in experts. Workers from the Virginia Forestry and Wildlife Group arrived in their F-150 with pink, blue and yellowish jugs of chemicals in the bed. Then the three of them got to work with backpack sprayers, climbing and crawling through the brush, pursuing the invaders and spraying their trunks with a “basal bark” treatment.

Next, for the worst-affected areas, I’m bringing in “forest mulchers,” dystopian tractors that chew up everything — even whole trees — in their path. After that (if I haven’t bankrupted myself), it’s time for the “foliar treatment,” spraying the leaves of the smaller, herbaceous invaders.

It will take about five years to get the infestation under control. But already, I see possibility. The woody invaders (bittersweet, autumn olive, tree-of-heaven, Callery pear) that we hit with the first treatments have begun to shrivel and die.

Some will respond by saying that the threat of invasives is <a href="https://indefenseofnature.blogspot.com/2023/05/dana-millbank-washington-post-columnist.html?fbclid=IwAR3tMpUiHAc0IhNgZ0kyiebR2732NnOqSqhqvVscorn0ubpH7aPlW8Uh_GI" target=_blank>overblown or even invented</a>. This is akin to climate-change denial. It’s true that plenty of nonnative species are innocuous or beneficial (wheat, for example), but it’s a different story for invasive plants. Because they didn’t evolve in local ecosystems over the millennia, they have no natural controls to keep them in check. They are therefore crowding out and killing the plants that did evolve here — and the animals that rely on them for food.

“It’s settled science,” said Stanley Burgiel, executive director of the National Invasive Species Council, an interagency office of the federal government.

Repelling the invasives, and thereby protecting the rich biodiversity of local ecosystems, also serves as protection against climate change. “The natives have the best ability to adapt — they’ve been adapting for tens of thousands of years in these areas — so they’ve got the ability to change as the climates and the landscapes have been changing,” said Lori Makarick, chief of the National Park Service’s Landscape Restoration and Adaptation Branch. “Invasives can disrupt and upset that balance.”

Makarick told me that of the 85 million acres under Park Service management, 2.5 million are infested with invasive plants. In Shenandoah, the situation is much worse: About 55,000 acres, or 28 percent of the park’s area, are infested with invasive plants, and the invaders have a presence in two-thirds of the park. That’s likely because the park’s long and skinny boundary is carved out of private, developed land, and because the land was used for grazing and logging before it became a park in the 1930s.

But there isn’t enough money to keep the invasive plants at bay in Shenandoah or throughout the national parks, and not enough to put up much of a fight at all on many other lands managed by federal, state and local governments. Private lands are often even worse.

For fiscal 2021 (the most recent available), the federal government spent just $826 million on invasive plant and animal management nationwide. With such limited funds, the government focuses on identifying and eradicating emerging threats, while often leaving established invaders unchecked.

Sergio Peçanha: You — yes, you! — can help the planet. Start in your backyard.

The Park Service spends only about $5.5 million annually on “invasive plant management teams.” Much of the rest of the funding must be squeezed out of the individual parks’ operating budgets. At Shenandoah, it would take at least $27 million over a decade (and possibly a multiple of that) to get the invasives under control, and then $1 million a year to keep them in check. That’s obviously not happening on a budget of just over $20 million a year for the entire park, about 85 percent of which goes to fixed costs.

So, it’s a matter of trying to slow the conquest by the invaders. “If nothing else, we’re keeping our finger in the dam on some species,” Patrick Kenney, the park superintendent, acknowledged. “We’re trying to hold on to a healthy forest, but we have to recognize that the forest may become a different forest than it is today.”

If maintaining the status quo is a struggle now, it would be impossible without herbicides. “I think of it as chemotherapy,” said Doug Tallamy, a University of Delaware entomologist and guru of the native-plant movement. “We have ecological tumors out there. If we don’t control them, we have ecological collapse. We have the collapse of the food web.”

True believers in glyphosate claim it’s less toxic, ounce for ounce, than table salt. But I won’t be sprinkling it on my fries. I accept that it’s toxic. Still, “it’s an essential tool,” Tallamy argued. “The cost of not using it is very high compared to the cost of using it.”

Walking with Hughes in a bittersweet-overrun section of the park, I asked him whether he sometimes despairs. “Park-wide, yeah, it feels like it’s largely a losing battle,” he allowed, as a blue swallowtail butterfly danced nearby and a woodpecker tapped a tree in the distance. “You almost feel you can never get on top of anything.” But Hughes retains hope by focusing on small victories. “You can improve things a little in places that matter the most,” he said.

And how rewarding that is! He took me past the dead ash trees and the distressed oaks to a section of the Appalachian Trail where invasives have been kept out except for a little bit of garlic mustard. Here, the woods were as they should be. The forest floor burst with sweet cicely, violets, bloodroot, hepatica, fly poison and blackberry. An understory of serviceberry, witch hazel, ironwood, striped maple and basswood merged into a canopy of white oak, northern red oak and black birch.

It won’t happen anytime soon. Joe Rossetti, the hardwood-management coordinator for the Virginia Department of Forestry, struggled through the thicket with me and estimated, based on the prevalence of “early succession” trees, that much of the land had been cleared and used for grazing up until about 60 years ago. As in Shenandoah, such “disturbances” (along with the decimation of chestnuts, ash and hemlocks by invading insects) provided the foothold for invasive plants. Now I can’t see the forest for the weeds.

But this will change. Several weeks after the first herbicide treatment, I ventured into the forest with Brian Morse of Virginia Forestry and Wildlife. We found the carcasses of the newly slain invaders, shriveled and gray. Alongside them, green and unharmed, were the bushes and trees that belong here: the redbuds and dogwoods, the sassafras and persimmon, the spicebush and black raspberry, the tulip trees and the black cherry.

From here, it is possible to imagine, five years from now, a recovering forest. Beyond that, I can see a future in which, at least in my little corner of this overheating world, nature regains her balance.

White House Correspondent Association's Beckman Award

National Press Club's Gingras Prize

Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (Doubleday, 2010)

Homo Politicus (Doubleday, 2008)

Smashmouth (Basic Books, 2001)

The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party (Doubleday, 2022)

Yale University, BA cum laude in political science

Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. His new book is “The Destructionists: The 25-Year Crackup of the Republican Party” (Doubleday). 

Dana Milbank

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How I learned to love herbicides to fight invasive plants in Virginia

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Opinion How I learned to love toxic chemicals