Economic Poisoning
CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS: NATURE, SCIENCE, AND POLITICS
Edited by Julie Guthman, Jake Kosek, and Rebecca Lave
The Critical Environments series publishes books that explore the political forms of life and the ecologies that emerge from histories of capitalism, militarism, racism, colonialism, and more.
Flame and Fortune in the American West: Urban Development , Environmental Change , and the Great Oakland Hills Fire , by Gregory L. Simon
Germ Wars: The Politics of Microbes and Americas Landscape of Fear , by Melanie Armstrong
Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink , by Irus Braverman
Life without Lead: Contamination , Crisis , and Hope in Uruguay , by Daniel Renfrew
Unsettled Waters: Rights , Law , and Identity in the American West , by Eric P. Perramond
Wilted: Pathogens , Chemicals , and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry , by Julie Guthman
Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas , by Amelia Moore
Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture , by Adam M. Romero
Economic Poisoning
Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture
Adam M. Romero
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
University of California Press
Oakland, California
2022 by Adam M. Romero
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Romero, Adam, author.
Title: Economic poisoning : industrial waste and the chemicalization of American agriculture / Adam M. Romero.
Other titles: Critical environments (Oakland, Calif.) ; 8.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2022] | Series: Critical environments : nature, science, and politics; 8 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021014008 (print) | LCCN 2021014009 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520381551 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520381568 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520381575 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Factory and trade wasteCalifornia. | PesticidesEnvironmental aspectsCalifornia. | Agricultural chemicals industryCalifornia.
Classification: LCC TD897.75.C2 R66 2022 (print) | LCC TD897.75.C2 (ebook) | DDC 363.738/49809794dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014008
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014009
Manufactured in the United States of America
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To all who have mixed their hands with the soil
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Dear Ms. Carson,
I wish I was writing with better news. You once asked what future historians will think of contaminating the entire world just to ward off a few insect species, and Im writing to let you know that many of us are still truly astonished, as you were, by our distorted sense of proportion. You wondered how intelligent beings could purposefully spread poisons that brought death and disease even to our own kind. You wondered how intelligent beings could instigate an endless chemical war against nature and contaminate (hu)mans total environment with compounds that alter the material fabric of humanity. You wondered how intelligent beings justified these practices despite their rationales collapsing the moment you examined them. Even in hindsight, answers to these questions are not simple or straightforward, and scholars are still trying to come to grips with them. Nevertheless, money, power, arrogance, fear, and the stories we keep telling ourselves are a good shorthand.
The environmental movement that you helped unleash with your eloquent book raised important questions and concerns about the impact of pesticides on environmental and human health. Our war against nature trudged on, just with a new set of chemical weapons.
Your book also helped catalyze a back-to-the-land food movement that sought alternatives to many of the problems of chemicalized agriculture that you described. Now you can find organic and local food in most grocery stores. But despite peoples best intentions, over the last few decades this has led to organic farming and food movements that continue to reify the production of systemic inequality. Now our food system is bifurcating into one for the rich and one for the poor, allowing critics of industrial agriculture to believe that they can seclude themselves from the harms that the widespread use of economic poisons entails. But this head-in-the-sand approach will not bring about the systemic agricultural change that is needed; instead it simply allows harmful practices to continue alongside less harmful ones and still subjects people who look like me to increased harm.
It seems like people only read part of your book or took from it the part of its message that resonated with them most. It seems that despite your impassioned pleas, people cared more about the silencing of birds than the suffering of people who grew and harvested our agricultural abundance. It still feels that way. We remain the most agriculturally productive nation in the world, yet millions of our children go to bed hungry every night, and many of the people who grow and harvest our food cannot afford to eat it themselves or to pay for basic health care. Even the farmers who are left have a hard time making ends meet. And now climate change is throwing us for a loop. Something is still terribly wrong with our agriculture, and it only seems to be getting worse.
Many who read this letter will call me delusional and say that the agricultural systems we have now have to be this way, that the end will eventually justify the means, and that without widespread pesticide use we will all starve. But the prevention of famine and hunger has never been the most compelling reason pesticides are used, despite claims to the contrary. This was the case in the 1880s and 1890s when pesticides were first commercialized. It was the case in the 1920s and 1930s during a period of their widespread adoption. It was the case in the 1950s and 1960s when you were writing, and it is still the case today.
You once wrote that our obligation to endure gives us the right to know, and one of the things we have the right to know is that the stories we are told about pesticides are not true. We have the right to know that pesticides have never been necessary for the United States to produce sufficient food. We have the right to know that pesticide use has been important to the production of other goods and services that are critical not to the survival of the population but to the survival of a particular form of political economy. We have the right to know that the regulatory systems we have can neither fully understand nor mitigate the impacts of our widespread use of toxic chemicals. We have the right to know that despite some laboratory testing, we are the real guinea pigs. We have the right to know that our laws prioritize corporate well-being over human and environmental health. We have the right to know that ideologies of war and conquest still permeate our approaches to pest management.
But our obligation to endure, as you also wrote, entails more than just a right to know. It also requires us to develop a sense of humility in the face of the vast forces that we tamper with. It requires us to come to grips with the fact that technology will not create the utopian world that many of our technocrats envision. It requires that we learn one of the most difficult lessons of all: how to put people above profit. It requires that we rethink our relationship to each other and the nonhuman world. Raymond Williams and Clarence Glacken both wrote that how we talk about the environment reveals a great deal about who we are.
