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Many people are afraid of pesticides, but these chemicals can be used with safety and effectiveness to help control many kinds of biting and stinging pests. The use of insecticides has changed a great deal during the last 60 years since the first introduction of DDT. Modern chemicals are much safer for the environment. Insecticides for use by the public in and near homes are generally the safest of the chemicals. It is important to follow all the precautions and directions on a product's label in order to avoid injury to the applicator and other people who might contact the insecticide.

This chapter examines neonicotinoids, synthesized compounds from nicotine and related insecticidal compounds. Agricultural usage of neonicitinoids exploded when the EPA cancelled the registrations of many organophosphates. In 2013, neonicotinoids surpassed organophosphates as the most widely used insecticides in the world. Neonicotinoids provided agribusiness with alternatives, but ones that may contaminate ecosystems and threaten nontarget organisms, including bees and birds.

Campaigns against insects in the east became entwined with preparations for biological warfare. The idea of unleashing disease pathogens to destroy Nazi Germany's enemies fascinated disinfection experts, for it seemed to them that if a disease could be prevented, it should also be possible for epidemics to be deliberately spread. The fear that Germany's opponents were stockpiling arsenals of biological and chemical weapons spurred on offensive preparations. Consequently, disease control programmes became radicalized, shifting from containment and prevention to strategies for total eradication of pathogens and their carriers. Whereas the Germans clung to delousing by poison gas, the Allies adopted innovative DDT-based methods, and accelerated louse- and mosquito-control studies. Ironically, Germany's development of biological warfare remained stunted. Leading figures in biological warfare profoundly disagreed over theoretical approaches to epidemiology. As the German sanitary measures became more draconian, they accelerated genocide.

Before World War II ended, allied medical experts devised stringent measures to prevent a massive ‘blow up’ of epidemic typhus in Germany. The United States of America Typhus Commission (USATC) conducted chemotherapeutic and clinical trials in US-liberated camps. While the typhus problem was most acute in the liberated camps, it also shaped responses to ‘displaced persons’ (DPs), who were suspect as potentially criminal, disorderly, and diseased, and so required detention, and sanitary processing by delousing and DDT dusting. When epidemic hazards declined, the possibility of migration loomed once again. The medical techniques of disinfestation, fumigation, and disinfection which were devised to facilitate safe migration were unleashed by the Nazis for genocide. With the end of the war a new climate of compassion slowly dawned. The defeat of Nazism meant the demise of typhus. The fear of an epidemic recrudesence in 1945 meant that the Americans wished to maintain the Behringwerke as a functioning entity. The Nuremberg Trials were carried out to prosecute war criminals from Nazi Germany.

In the late 1990’s the US Environmental Protection Agency designated the Palos Verdes Shelf off the coast of Los Angeles County as a superfund site due to heavy contamination with DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichlorothane) and PBEs (polychlorinated biphenyls). In the same time period, locally sold fish, specifically white croaker, were found to be contaminated with levels of DDT and PBE that exceeded the US Food & Drug Administration levels. Consumption of contaminated fish posed a public health threat. In conjunction with federal and state partners, the Los Angeles County Public Health Department engaged on a three-prong institutional controls program: public education and outreach; increased enforcement of commercial and recreational fishing restrictions; and monitoring markets and ocean fish quality. This chapter describes the events leading to the local public health response, the strategies to reduce health risks and quantifies the impacts of the activities implemented in Los Angeles County.

For most of two centuries, the United States was a nation of small farms and many farmers, raising much of their own food along with one or more cash crops and livestock for local markets. Today, farms run by families of weatherbeaten farmers, pie-baking farm wives, and earnest 4-H offspring are disappearing. Americans live on supermarket or take-out food, mostly produced on extensive, highly mechanized and chemical-dependent industrial-scale “conventional” farms, raising single-crop monocultures or single-breed livestock. The larger farms cover tens of thousands of acres, too much for single families to manage. It is not agriculture, but agribusiness— an industry run by corporations. Conventional industrial agriculture is highly productive, and supermarket food is cheap. So why should anyone worry about growing food with chemical fertilizers, expensive equipment, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals? The reasons, acknowledged even by the industry, are that agribusiness “saddles the farmer with debt, threatens his health, erodes his soil and destroys its fertility, pollutes the ground water and compromises the safety of the food we eat.” Croplands presently encompass some 57 million acres in the 11 western states (table 2.1). Giant plantations consume huge amounts of natural resources—soil, fertilizers, fuels, and water. Synthetic fertilizers keep overused soils in production, until they become too salty (salinated) and must be abandoned. Industrial farming has taken over large areas of wildlife habitat, including forest, scrub, desert, or prairie, to replace degraded croplands. The clearings and massive pesticide applications threaten or endanger large and increasing numbers of plant and animal species in the western United States. Pesticide exposures sicken family farmers and agribusiness workers in the fields, and add environmental poisons to our diet. Pesticides and other problematic agricultural chemicals accumulate in our bodies. Agribusiness consumes especially huge amounts of increasingly costly, nonrenewable petroleum. “Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten” to run fleets of immense plowing, planting, cultivating, harvesting, and processing machines, plus countless irrigation pumps. Growing a pound of American beef consumes half a gallon of petroleum. A top executive of the giant agriculture-chemical corporation Monsanto has admitted that “current agricultural technology is not sustainable.” High-tech agriculture, such as cloning and genetically modifying crops, does not help conventional agriculture become more sustainable.

Really, though—who among us, Russian or otherwise, isn’t a sucker for a deft illusion? Who doesn’t want to believe that the girl really has vanished? And in a time when talk of The End of Nature on our almost fully industrialized planet rings chillingly true, who doesn’t want to believe that there are still a few scraps of earth left with the power to take the worst that humans can throw at them and turn it into nothing at all? Like I said, that’s one of the reasons I came here— to witness the Great Baikal’s awesome act. And the illusion is easy to get sucked into, because here’s the thing: It’s not just smoke and mirrors and nationalistic Russky hype. It’s largely true—despite decades of hefty daily doses of contaminants from the Angara industrial corridor, the Selenga River, the Baikalsk mill, and other sources, there’s been little discernable change in the overall chemistry of the lake—the vast majority of Baikal’s twenty-three quadrillion liters of water remain as pure as just about any on earth. It seems that something remarkable really is going on here. We know it’s not that contaminants are just blending into Baikal’s tremendous volume to the point of becoming undetectable. Scientists have detected miniscule amounts of industrial contaminants even far from the known hot spots, although nowhere near what they’d expect from the amounts they suspect are going into the lake. Nor is it that the lake is merely turning a trick on a grander scale that just about every body of water performs—using its plants and animals and microbes to metabolize and break down some pollutants. Normal biological processes here and elsewhere do destroy some contaminants fairly quickly, but many of the industrial pollutants coming into the lake don’t break down significantly for years or decades, and those basic biochemical limitations are no different among Baikal’s flora and fauna than anywhere else. And the water itself? Well, scientific tests prove it—it’s just plain H2O. It doesn’t have unique properties that allow it to alchemically transform tenacious pollutants into harmless substances. It’s just water.

One of the marks that distinguishes sustainability from classic environmentalism is the former’s cheery optimism. Indeed, reading side by side the 2005 guidebook Green Living—a fairly typical how-to for sustainable living—with, say, Paul Ehrlich’s doleful Population Bomb (1968) offers a case study in contrast. Green Living is constructive and buoyant whereas Population Bomb is frenzied and cynical. Yet it’s striking how much Green Living takes its inspiration not only from Ehrlich but from other titans of mid-century environmentalism—albeit with a noticeable shift in tone. Paul and Anne Ehrlich are cited approvingly in the opening pages of the book. The epigraph comes from the still-very-active David Suzuki. There are also references to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, which, of course, is named after the esteemed Aldo Leopold. But gone is the gloomy tone, replaced instead by a heartening “You can do it!” attitude. This brief observation illustrates how much the modern sustainability movement owes to the critics, intellectuals, and protestors of the 1960s and 1970s who raised awareness about environmental problems, advocated for social justice, and defended the rights of the oppressed. While the three Es of sustainability were rarely paired in the 1960s and 1970s, many of the basic concepts that shaped sustainability were clearly articulated before the 1980s. This chapter should not be taken as a comprehensive look at the environmental movement, about which there is reams more to say. Instead, it will examine in general terms some of the disparate sources that contributed to the holism of sustainability. Particular emphasis will be laid on the key ideas, associations, and scholars who developed the environmental movement and the success that environmentalists had in getting politicians, economists, and the public at large to think in ecological terms—a singular achievement that continues to inform the world of sustainability. It is important to note that the reason that this book jumps from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s is not because the era of the two world wars has nothing to do with the history of sustainability.

In 1938, Hooker Electrochemical confronted a future without its founder when Elon died in a tragic automobile accident. The longtime patriarch was just 68 years old. Hosannas to his leadership piled up in a moving tribute album, which was quickly published as a special edition of the company newsletter, “Hooker Gas.” “Engineer, Industrialist, Patriot, Public Servant, Author, Humanitarian”: Elon Huntington Hooker was all of these things, the tribute declared, and would be sorely missed. Yet while Elon’s passing hit family and friends hard, it did not slow the firm’s extraordinary growth. Indeed, over the next thirty years, Hooker Chemical (as it soon became known) grew at an even more impressive rate than during Elon’s time. By midcentury, the company was a global leader in the production of an astonishing array of chemicals beyond bleaching powder and caustic soda—degreasers, rubbers, explosives, defoliants, plastics, and much more. One measure of its far-reaching reputation came in the late 1940s, when Hooker executive Bjarne Klaussen traveled from Niagara Falls to the South Pacific to watch a new round of atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. Cleared of its native inhabitants, the tiny island served as Ground Zero for a weapon far more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of World War II. Klaussen was part of a small delegation from American corporations and universities that had made “special contributions” to the nation’s atomic development. “Hooker played an important role in the Manhattan Project,” the company historian bragged just a few years later (without providing further details, though they probably revolved around chemical igniters and explosives). The company would remain a key player on the Cold War chemical front for years to come. Hooker’s explosive growth during the 1940s and 1950s had a palpable impact on the Love Canal landscape too. For booming production overwhelmed the firm’s on-site disposal capacity. Searching for new ways to deal with this growing problem, Hooker resorted to “inground disposal” at sites beyond the Niagara plant.

Although known as “Mr. Clean” for his longtime environmental advocacy, Edmund Muskie had little knowledge of the American hazardous waste grid until 1978. A congressional sponsor of the landmark Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the senator from Maine epitomized environmental politics. In fact, a few months before the Love Canal crisis unfolded, Muskie proposed yet another federal environmental law: a “comprehensive scheme to assure full protection of our national resources” in the wake of oil drilling disasters, tanker spills and toxic train derailments. Yet Muskie soon realized that his plan omitted something important: hazardous waste dumps. Love Canal had illuminated the toxic perils many Americans faced in their own neighborhoods. With an EPA study showing that tens of thousands of old toxic sites had yet to be contained, it was clear that the everyday landscape of homes, playgrounds, and schools needed environmental protection too. “In our society,” Muskie told an interviewer in the late 1970s, ...we are discovering almost every day, in almost every day’s newspaper, new hazards that have been released into the atmosphere over the period of our industrial revolution. [They] suddenly crop up in Love Canal, up in New York State … to create enormous hazards to public health, property values, to people. So we are constantly dealing with problems that [we] were not anticipating, which suddenly create almost insoluble problems for people and communities … [A]ll of these poisons and toxic materials were buried in landfill sites here, there, and elsewhere and sadly begin leaking in underground water, or into lakes and rivers, streams[,] only to rise up to hit people in the face with disease, with cancer, declining property values so on.... For Muskie, Love Canal was revelatory. It showed that federal law lagged behind the mounting problem of hazardous waste. After hearing Love Canal residents’ testimony, he believed that the time had come for a national statute governing toxic waste remediation—what he would refer to as a “clean land” law.

This chapter examines the budding movement for pesticide reform during the period 1962–1972. It begins with a discussion of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which introduced the public to the adverse effects of pesticides by addressing the unexplainable sicknesses and death that plagued people and livestock living in a fictional town. It then considers how concerned scientists disseminated information about the ill effects of pesticides directly and indirectly to the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee and environmental organizations. It also discusses the growing concern of both environmentalists and farmworker groups about pesticides, particularly DDT, as well as their development of fairly different strategies in their attempts to make change. The chapter argues that the differences in strategies limited but did not preclude opportunities for collaboration between farmworkers and the environmental movement, especially in mounting legal challenges. Their efforts paid off when in June 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency issued an order to ban nearly all uses of DDT in the six months following.

This chapter examines the history of the chemical pesticide DDT after the United States banned its use in 1972. It explores how U.S. policy makers, environmental activists, and chemical corporations shaped federal pesticide regulation throughout the 1970s. During this period, the global marketplace for DDT and other chemical pesticides exploded, as domestic and foreign chemical corporations marketed their products around the world. The dramatic increase of pesticide consumption worldwide called into question the limits of state power. This chapter considers the regulatory limits of the nation-state and its impact on the global environment by situating the history of U.S. pesticide regulation in an international context.

“This afternoon, the sky will start to clear, with cloud shreds, runners, and thin bars followed by flocks.” If Jean- Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) had had his way, this might have been an uplifting early- morning weather forecast announcing the coming of a sunny day. Unfortunately for poetry, in 1803, several months after Lamarck proposed this first cloud classification, the “namer of clouds,” Luke Howard (1772–1864), introduced his own staid Latin nomenclature that is still with us today and includes terms such as “cumulus,” “stratus,” and “cirrus.” Howard not only had a more scientific-sounding jargon, but was soon given publicity in the form of a poem by Goethe; Lamarck’s names didn’t stand a chance. For a long time, human- scale observation of clouds was the primary source of scientific knowledge of atmospheric morphologies and dynamics. This didn’t change until the appearance of the first weather maps based on meager collections of ground station measurements around 1850. This was the beginning of the field of “synoptic” (literally “map- scale”) meteorology. Under the leader­ship of Wilhelm Bjerknes (1862–1951), it spawned the Norwegian school of me­teorology that focused notably on airmasses, the often sharp gradients between them called “fronts,” and the stability of the airmass interfaces. This was the dom­inant view when, in the mid 1920s, Richardson proposed his scaling 4/ 3 diffusion law. The spatial resolution of these “synoptic- scale” maps was so low that features smaller than 1,000 kilometers or so could not be discerned. Between these and the kilometric human “microscales,” virtually nothing was known. Richardson’s claim that a single scaling law might hold from thousands of kilometers down to millimeters didn’t seem so daring. Not only was it compatible with the scale- free equations that he had elaborated, but also there were no scalebound paradigms to contradict it. By the late 1940s and ʼ50s, the development of radar finally opened a window onto the intermediate range.

This chapter describes how toxicology emerged with the rise of public health crises in Chicago. With the industrialization of meat production in Chicago and the rise of novel technologies in agriculture to combat the threat of insect invasion, many safeguards fell by the wayside. Americans found their health and welfare compromised by pesticides and adulterated drugs. By the 1930s, the president called on Congress to revisit food and drug legislation and forge a law with greater power to protect Americans. After the Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which 93 individuals died after ingesting a contaminated drug, legislators passed the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. During and after World War II, the Division of Pharmacology at the FDA applied the new techniques of toxicology to DDT, a new insecticide introduced for the control of insect-borne disease.

This chapter examines the different harmful effects of DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) to different species in the environment. At the beginning of World War II, economic entomologists appreciated DDT for its high toxicity against a wide range of insect pests. Due to its effectiveness, scientists also explored its effects to plants, animals, and even humans. They conducted extensive pharmacologic studies on laboratory animals, including rats, rabbits, chicks, mice, guinea pigs, dogs, and monkeys. The results suggested the potential risks DDT posed to humans. All of these DDT studies contributed in some degree to the study of toxicology. DDT broadened the scope of toxicology by instigating wildlife studies, which became part of toxicological evaluation.

This chapter examines the different risks associated with exposures to pesticides and analyzes hearings held by legislators to determine the implications of pesticides for public health. Throughout these hearings, the DDT and its potential toxicity to humans was frequently cited in testimony. Due to uncertainty about pesticides, Congress revised existing legislation to address possible risks. The Miller Amendment restricted food residues and empowered the FDA to establish tolerances for foodstuffs. Congress also approved the Delaney Clause, forcing the FDA to set the tolerance for any carcinogenic food additive to zero.

This chapter discusses Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a bestseller which alerted Americans to the hazards of insecticides. Carson's prose revealed hazards found with the indiscriminate use of DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons. With the exception of malathion, organophosphates posed greater risks to humans and wildlife. However, organophosphates had one notable advantage over DDT and the chlorinated hydrocarbons: organophosphates broke down into relatively harmless components over the course of weeks or even days, whereas chlorinated hydrocarbons accumulated in ecosystems and the bodies of wildlife and humans. In general, Silent Spring painted a sharp picture of toxicological risk in layman's terms.