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When Charles Darwin published his “Origin of Species” in 1859, he was sure that evolution happened, and that natural selection took place constantly, though he believed changes took place too slowly to be observed while they were in progress.

What has become clear in the 156 years since is that evolution is now happening right under our noses, and that much of it is the result of misguided attempts to attack an enemy, whether it be a pest in agricultural fields or a bacteria in hospitals, by throwing larger and larger of quantities of chemicals at the target in question.

When hospitals started to use antibiotics regularly in the 1950s, resistance to them appeared within a year or two. Now we’re facing resistant forms of serious diseases and infections, like TB and MERSA. By hitting a bacteria colony, such as E. coli with an antibiotic, most of it will disappear but a few cells will remain—those that carry resistance to the antibiotic. And they will pass their resistance to their descendants.

Turning to agriculture, invented the herbicide glyphosate and brought it to market under the trade name Roundup in 1974, after DDT was banned. But it wasn’t until the late 1990s that the use of Roundup surged, thanks to the strategy of genetically engineering seeds to grow food crops that could tolerate high doses of Roundup. With the introduction of these new genetically engineered seeds, farmers could now easily control weeds on their corn, soy, cotton, canola, sugar beets, and alfalfa crops—crops that thrived while the weeds around them were wiped out by Roundup.

According to the EPA’s own fact sheet, is among the most widely used pesticides by volume. Usage in 1990 was estimated to be 11,595,000 pounds. It ranked 11th among conventional pesticides in the U.S. during 1990-91. In recent years, 13 to 20 million acres were treated with 18.7 million pounds annually.

Between 1996 – 2011, the widespread use of Roundup Ready GMO crops increased herbicide use in the U.S. by 527 million pounds — even though in 1993, when Monsanto sought USDA approval for Roundup, the company claimed its GMO crops would reduce pesticide and herbicide use.

But since then, resistance to glyphosate has emerged in numerous weed species. Farmers are discovering that when you spend years dousing land with a single herbicide, ecosystems adapt. Roundup-ready crops met Roundup-defying weeds. In recent years, Mainland farmers have had to supplement Roundup with other, harsher herbicides, subjecting their land to highly toxic chemical cocktails. But now, weeds are developing resistance to the cocktails, too.

The problem is accelerating, because the resistant weeds are driving out their non-resistant counterparts, and also cross-pollinating them with the resistant gene, spreading it far and wide. These weeds adapt faster and more vigorously than their weed cousins because pollen flying through the air can transfer the resistant trait.

Not only have weed species become resistant to glyphosate, but a growing number survive multiple herbicides. The same selection pressure creating bacteria resistant to multiple antibiotics is leading to the rapid evolution of plants that survive modern herbicides. So what the average consumer is left with it is the unhappy prospect of a cycle of more toxic herbicides, leading to resistant super-weeds, leading in turn to decreasing yields and higher food costs as these super-weeds become increasingly difficult to uproot.

Roundup, of course, is not the only heavily used herbicide in Hawaii and elsewhere in the U.S. Atrazine, a creation of Syngenta, although it’s been banned in dozens of countries, including the European Union, which banned it in 2003 “because of ubiquitous and unpreventable water contamination” is still used here. In 2002, the EPA was sued by the Natural Resources Defense Council for failure to adequately regulate Atrazine based on current evidence of potential environmental and human health risks, specifically citing recent amphibian research as well as studies suggesting a link between chronic seasonal Atrazine exposure and hormonally driven cancers in humans. Yet in 2003, Syngenta, Atrazine’s manufacturer, persuaded the EPA to reduce the limit to three times less than the level at which developmental effects were seen. (Editor’s Note: Read Syngenta’s view of Atrazine.)

What is disturbing in the recent debate surrounding pesticide disclosure and the need for buffer zones is the sanguine testimony from those opposed to any increased regulation from the state because all is stringently regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But the EPA has yet to prohibit the use of Atrazine in the U.S. and has taken no substantive action on the use of neocotinoids, the relatively new class of insecticides that has been found to be a primary cause of the decline of the bees that pollinate so many of the crops that sustain us by affecting the central nervous system of insects, resulting in paralysis and death.

So we have the use of Roundup and Atrazine as herbicides for the dubious goal of sustaining genetically engineered crop monocultures and the use of neocotinoids that are having significant and potentially disastrous effects on bees and other pollinators. Yet they have yet to merit a place on the agency’s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI).

The TRI tracks the management of certain toxic chemicals that may pose a threat to human health and the environment. U.S. facilities in different industry sectors must report annually how much of each chemical is released to the environment and/or managed through recycling, energy recovery, and treatment. (A “release” of a chemical means that it is emitted to the air or water, or placed in some type of land disposal.)

Given that we have tradewinds here that can carry toxic chemicals as well as comforting breezes should give concern to all of us, especially to those entrusted with safeguarding our health as well as the health of the place we call home.

If we as a citizenry have decided that the current year-round production of monoculture GMO crops is here to stay, then, at the very least, buffer zones around sensitive areas — schools, homes, hospitals, nursing homes, etc. — should be a given. That bills to provide for that were tabled by the House and Senate by the unilateral decisions of the respective committee chairs is a matter of concern for all us troubled, not just with the issue at hand but the stifling of the democratic process.