Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture by Adam M. Romero

Author:Adam M. Romero [Romero, Adam M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Agriculture & Food Policy, Environmental Economics, Environmental Conservation & Protection, Political Science, Business & Economics, Nature
ISBN: 9780520381551
Google: u4hCEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 57531103
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2021-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

It is unscientific to devote ourselves merely to securing and testing spray mixtures, however necessary these may be for immediate results.

—J. B. Smith, “Cultivation and Susceptibility to Insect Attack,” 1908

I began this project as a way to better understand the history of chemical-intensive agriculture. I did not expect to focus so much on California in a book that was supposed to be about American agriculture, but since California’s input-intensive growers developed commercial crop protection before farmers in other states, its agricultural and chemical industries pioneered the models of toxicity-based repair that became integral to all of US agriculture after World War II. As the historian Edward Melillo has suggested about alfalfa, commercial pest control should be considered one of the “eastward moving [agroindustiral] trends that began on the North America’s Pacific coast.”1 Yet while California and Pacific slope growers may have led the way, they were certainly not alone. By the end of World War II economic poisons had become integral to the industrial production of hundreds of crops across the United States.

I also did not set out to focus so much on the role of industrial waste in the chemicalization of American agriculture. While I was familiar with the role of industrial waste in the history of the chemical industry, I did not know the extent of the role that it played as the raw material for so many pre-1945 economic poisons. As agriculture industrialized, growers needed cheap and effective poisons to repair the fragile ecosystems they created, and industrial waste was a key source of that cheap toxicity. But as growers transformed their farms into the types of ecosystems that required toxic chemicals to remain productive, they also turned them into the types of ecosystems that some firms could use to bury their toxic waste. But that waste never disappeared, and its proliferation has had profound effects on the structures of agriculture and the development of the chemical industry. “Our industrial waste tinkers with the chemistry of our bodies and the chemistry of our climate,” writes the interdisciplinary scholar Rebecca Altman.2 Indeed, it has even remade who we are and how we relate to the world.

There are a few things that I will take away from being immersed for so long in the pre-1945 history of American agriculture. The first has to do with expanding the functions that agriculture plays in industrial society. What I mean by this is that in addition to agriculture as a source of food, fiber, and the properties of rural life, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, growers, scientists, and government officials transformed agriculture into a sink for some of society’s most toxic industrial wastes. While agriculture was certainly not the only place that society tried to bury its waste during this period, it was one of the few places where the toxicity of the waste gave it a potential value.

One of the major issues of writing a book like this, and a major historiographical concern about the whiggish history of

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