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Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America's Grasslands since 1945
An exploration of the elaborate relationship between farmers, aerial sprayers, agriculturalists, crop pests, chemicals, and the environment.
The controversies in the 1960s and 1970s that swirled around indiscriminate use of agricultural chemicals—their long-term ecological harm versus food production benefits—were sparked and clarified by biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). This seminal publication challenged long-held assumptions concerning the industrial might of American agriculture while sounding an alarm for the damaging persistence of pesticides, especially chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT, in the larger environment.
In Chemical Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945 David D. Vail shows, however, that a distinctly regional view of agricultural health evolved. His analysis reveals a particularly strong ethic in the North American grasslands where practitioners sought to understand and deploy insecticides and herbicides by designing local scientific experiments, engineering more precise aircraft sprayers, developing more narrowly specific chemicals, and planting targeted test crops. Their efforts to link the science of toxicology with environmental health reveal how the practitioners of pesticides evaluated potential hazards in the agricultural landscape while recognizing the production benefits of controlled spraying.
Chemical Lands adds to a growing list of books on toxins in the American landscape. This study provides a unique Grasslands perspective of the Ag pilots, weed scientists, and farmers who struggled to navigate novel technologies for spray planes and in the development of new herbicides/insecticides while striving to manage and mitigate threats to human health and the environment.
The controversies in the 1960s and 1970s that swirled around indiscriminate use of agricultural chemicals—their long-term ecological harm versus food production benefits—were sparked and clarified by biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). This seminal publication challenged long-held assumptions concerning the industrial might of American agriculture while sounding an alarm for the damaging persistence of pesticides, especially chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT, in the larger environment.
In Chemical Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945 David D. Vail shows, however, that a distinctly regional view of agricultural health evolved. His analysis reveals a particularly strong ethic in the North American grasslands where practitioners sought to understand and deploy insecticides and herbicides by designing local scientific experiments, engineering more precise aircraft sprayers, developing more narrowly specific chemicals, and planting targeted test crops. Their efforts to link the science of toxicology with environmental health reveal how the practitioners of pesticides evaluated potential hazards in the agricultural landscape while recognizing the production benefits of controlled spraying.
Chemical Lands adds to a growing list of books on toxins in the American landscape. This study provides a unique Grasslands perspective of the Ag pilots, weed scientists, and farmers who struggled to navigate novel technologies for spray planes and in the development of new herbicides/insecticides while striving to manage and mitigate threats to human health and the environment.
208 pages, Hardcover
Published January 9, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 10, 2018
I expected this book to be a bit more than it is. It’s focus is very narrow, centering on airborne spraying of crops, both insecticides and herbicides, grown in the US, mostly in the great plains. It further narrows it’s consideration in the main to the early evolution of spraying in the period immediately after world war II and a decade or two after that.
It is interesting, but hardly surprising, that the chemical industry went after Rachel Carson, the author of “Silent Spring” for “... not only questioning the indiscriminate use of poisons but declaring the basic responsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the natural world.” Even in the 1960s Chemical companies were fostering the view that pesticides and herbicides were central to American agriculture and by extension to America’s way of life. In a bitter irony, they touted their toxic chemicals as key to our agricultural health.
As far as a history of how aerial spraying developed the book is okay. But, the elephants remain in the room because the author does not address the issues associated with long term effects of these chemicals on our soil. Of course, that was not his intent, but a book whose major focus is on the evolution of airborne spraying is of marginal utility.
i admit, that my perspective is a bit colored because I was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. One of the Agent Orange ingredients, 2,4-D, which the author details as one of the chemicals sprayed widely in agriculture is not on my list of favorite things.
It is interesting, but hardly surprising, that the chemical industry went after Rachel Carson, the author of “Silent Spring” for “... not only questioning the indiscriminate use of poisons but declaring the basic responsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the natural world.” Even in the 1960s Chemical companies were fostering the view that pesticides and herbicides were central to American agriculture and by extension to America’s way of life. In a bitter irony, they touted their toxic chemicals as key to our agricultural health.
As far as a history of how aerial spraying developed the book is okay. But, the elephants remain in the room because the author does not address the issues associated with long term effects of these chemicals on our soil. Of course, that was not his intent, but a book whose major focus is on the evolution of airborne spraying is of marginal utility.
i admit, that my perspective is a bit colored because I was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. One of the Agent Orange ingredients, 2,4-D, which the author details as one of the chemicals sprayed widely in agriculture is not on my list of favorite things.
May 17, 2019
Reviewed this work in the weekly feature, Plains Folk. Chemical makes notable contributions to both agricultural and regional history. In each case Vail identifies a fundamental shift in modes of operation and habits of thought. In mid-twentieth century, agricultural operators embraced chemical alternatives (herbicides and pesticides) while fashioning a line of thought that considered these things to be measures promoting the "health" of farmlands. For the Great Plains, Vail engages in a re-labeling of regional life - "chemical lands" - that is disquieting.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews