Paolo Palladino - Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture: The Making of Scientific Careers in North America, 1885-1985

Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine
edited by John Krige, CRHST, Paris, France.

Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine aims to stimulate research in the field, concentrating on the twentieth century. It seeks to contribute to our understanding of science, technology and medicine as they are embedded in society, exploring the links between the subjects on the one hand and the cultural, economic, political and institutional contexts of their genesis and development on the other. Within this framework, and while not favouring any particular methodological approach, the series welcomes studies which examine relations between science, technology, medicine and society in new ways e.g. the social construction of technologies, large technical systems.

Other titles in the series

Other Volumes in Preparation

The Historiography of Science and Technology: Whose History? Whose Science?
Thomas Sderquist

Making Isotopes Matter: F.W. Aston and the Culture of Physics
Jeff Hughes

The Development of Molecular Biology
Harmke Kamminga & Soraya de Chadarevian

This book is part of a series. The publisher will accept continuation orders which may be cancelled at any time and which provide for automatic billing and shipping of each title in the series upon publication. Please write for details.

Copyright 1996 by OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Malaysia.

Emmaplein 5
1075 AW Amsterdam
The Netherlands

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Palladino, Paolo
Entomology, ecology and agriculture: the making of
scientific careers in North America, 18851985. (Studies
in the history of science, technology and medicine; v. 3)
1. Scientists North America History 20th century
2. Science Vocational guidance North America History
20th century
I. Title
502.37

ISBN 3-7186-5907-7

The year was 1962, the world was in the grip of the Cold War. A very popular writer had just penned the following words into the introduction of what was soon to become a best-seller:

there was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example where had they gone? It was spring without voices The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things No witchcraft silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.1

This desolation was not the result of the much feared, final nuclear confrontation with the red menace. It was instead the work of DDT and a whole new generation of organochlorine and organophosphorous insecticides, first introduced during the second world war to fight the insect menace. The author was Rachel Carson, and the book was Silent Spring. Carson's prose was perhaps melodramatic, and it decidedly incensed those who viewed these insecticides, with some reason, as crucially important for both providing Western households with cheap, abundant food, and feeding the increasingly hungry and restive peoples of the lesser developed countries.2 Nevertheless, the deathly landscape evoked by these introductory lines bore some resemblance to the state of the Caete valley of Peru during the mid-1950s. Here, the intensive use of DDT to protect the local cotton plantations against the Cotton Boll Weevil initiated a cycle of ever increasing use of this and other insecticides to overcome both the resulting resistant strains of the Weevil, and the outbreaks of secondary noxious species, whose natural enemies had now been completely destroyed by the insecticidal regime. The guiding philosophy that the only good bug is a dead bug eventually led to a situation so unmanageable that cotton cultivation had to be halted.3

Prior to the publication of Silent Spring, however, most North Americans knew nothing about such disasters. If asked about entomology, they probably would have first recalled a childhood trip to a museum of natural history, and then ventured a guess that entomologists were somewhat eccentric collectors of beetles and butterflies, hiding in museums with their bottled beetles whenever they were not running about a field in plus-fours, wildly waving their butterfly nets. Carson told her readers otherwise. Entomologists actually worked to free farmers, fruit and vegetable growers, as well as the lumber industry, from any insect species that seemed to threaten their economic welfare. In other words, entomology was more realistically described by the commonly adopted adjective economic than by any appeal to more natural historical concerns. Carson then proceeded to describe how animals, often far removed from the fields, orchards, and forests, where DDT and the other new insecticides had been used for their intended economic end. Such as the majestic bald eagle died or became so incapable of breeding that they were doomed to extinction. Given that most Americans lived under the threat of another distant, invisible, and still more powerful killer, radioactive fallout from atomic testing in the American West and on atolls in the Pacific Ocean, it is perhaps not surprising that Carson's melodramatic lines might have reminded the readers of Silent Spring of the post-nuclear scenery evoked a few years earlier by Nevil Shute in his own bestseller, On the Beach, and thus of their own impending extinction.4 Later, these same readers' vocal opposition to aerial spraying campaigns against the Fire Ant, Gypsy Moth, and Boll Weevil was accentuated by resonance with other aerial campaigns in far away Vietnam.5

For many citizens of the United States, therefore, the destruction of the bald eagle by DDT stood as a symbol for much more than just the price to be paid for a thoughtless commitment to the control of nature, which Carson had condemned by writing that,