Dicamba Is Back: Because Nature Was Too Green

Published on: Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:42:00 GMT
Original Story: Trump’s EPA reapproves contentious weedkiller dicamba for some GM crops – The Guardian

The Drift Is Real, And Not In A Cool Fast & Furious Way

I hope you’re all having a productive Tuesday—or whatever day it is. It’s hard to tell when the flickering fluorescent lights of the open-plan office have permanently seared your retinas and your soul has been reduced to a collection of unread Slack notifications. But hey, I’ve got some “great” news from the EPA to brighten your existential dread! They’ve decided that what America really needs right now isn’t a living wage or a functioning healthcare system, but more Dicamba. You remember Dicamba, right? It’s the herbicide that acts like a toxic ex: it refuses to stay where you put it and ruins everything it touches within a three-mile radius.

For those of you who haven’t spent your lunch breaks reading environmental litigation because you’re too busy staring into the middle distance wondering if you’ll ever actually retire, here’s the gist. Dicamba is designed for crops that have been genetically engineered to survive it. The problem is that Dicamba is incredibly “volatile.” In corporate speak, that means it turns into a gas and drifts onto neighboring farms, killing any plant that hasn’t been modified to be a corporate-friendly super-soldier. It’s the ultimate “circle back” to the concept of property lines and “not poisoning your neighbor.” If you thought your coworker stealing your labeled almond milk was annoying, imagine your neighbor’s weedkiller murdering your entire vegetable garden because the wind changed direction.

The EPA’s reapproval feels like getting a “per my last email” from the universe. We’ve been through this. Courts have blocked it before because, shockingly, destroying your neighbor’s livelihood is generally frowned upon. But under the current administration’s vision of “MAHA”—Make America Healthy Again—we’ve apparently decided that “health” includes a generous seasoning of weedkiller on every salad. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for anyone other than the chemical conglomerates who are currently laughing all the way to their offshore tax havens while we argue about whether “drift” is a bug or a feature.

As an Elder Millennial who has lived through three “once-in-a-lifetime” economic collapses and a global pandemic, I find the EPA’s logic strangely comforting. It’s consistent. It’s the same “move fast and break things” energy that gave us the gig economy and a generation of thirty-somethings who consider a nap to be a luxury vacation. Why worry about the long-term ecological impact or the collapse of biodiversity when there are quarterly earnings reports to satisfy? It’s not like we need pollinators or, you know, an environment that doesn’t actively try to kill us. We can just replace the bees with tiny drones, right? I’m sure there’s a startup in Palo Alto working on that as we speak, funded by the same people selling the herbicide.

So, cheers to the EPA for bringing back the herbicide that nobody except the people selling it actually wanted. I’ll be over here, updating my resume for the fifth time this year and wondering if “professional cynic” is a viable career path in the post-apocalypse. At least the weeds will be gone. Along with, you know, everything else. Happy spraying.

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