Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post–World War II South (review)

At the heart of this compact book are the stories of Americans sickened and killed on the front lines of America's war on insects: the agricultural worker who lapsed into a coma hours after spilling concentrated parathion into his shoes; the crop dusters poisoned outright by massive exposure, or killed when they became impaired by the chemicals they were spraying and lost control of their planes; and the men, women, and children poisoned by pesticides marketed for home use. Pete Daniel employs these compelling and tragic stories to drive home his angry analysis of how "chemical companies and their political and bureaucratic allies [gave] a higher priority to the death of insects than to the health of humans" (p. 170).

Recent studies from medical and environmental historians have examined many of the toxicants drifting through the environment, whether from products intentionally toxic or from the manufacture and use of products deemed "harmless." These studies tend to focus on the misconduct of industry and its manipulation of science in various settings. But while Daniel gives industry its fair share of condemnation, his chief target—and that is the correct noun for this genre—is the federal agency charged with being the people's front line of defense against harm from insecticides, the Agricultural Research Service. No mere milquetoast bureaucracy overwhelmed by economic interests, the ARS, in Daniel's indictment, was "simply the handmaiden of the chemical companies" (p. 83), willing to "falsify data, intimidate opponents, and disregard scientific evidence" (p. 57). ARS scientists "hid behind white lab coats and white lies" (p. 59), with the result that its "malfeasance and perfidy allowed . . . chemical compounds to gain access to and remain on the market mislabeled, not fully tested, and dangerous" (p. 130).

After a brief introduction, Daniel presents a dramatic case of collateral damage: a Mississippi cotton-gin manager named Lawler, poisoned by malathion, endrin, and xylene when a crop duster overshot the cotton field he was spraying for boll weevils. After two years of debilitation, Lawler sued his employers and the crop-dusting company. The transcript of the trial presents many of the competing voices involved in pesticide regulation in the predawn years of the age of Silent Spring. The next several chapters deal with the first of two misguided fire-ant control programs; the reception of Rachel Carson's research; apportioning blame for fish-kills from pesticide run-off; and the deeply flawed processes of registering and labeling new pesticides. Again and again, as Daniel demonstrates, the ARS and other regulatory bodies failed to act in the public interest. A final short chapter on the second misguided fire-ant control program—this time with mirex instead of heptachlor and chlordane—drives home how Sisyphean is the environmentalist's lot.

Toxic Drift is a natural extension of Pete Daniel's long interest in southern agriculture and the environment; his previous books include Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (1985), and Deep'n As It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood (1977). Pesticides have played a critical role in the history of agriculture in the South—and in other regions of the country as well, raising the question of Daniel's subtitle: "Pesticides and Health in the Post–World War II South." True, more than half of his case studies deal with southerners, but a substantial number do not. More significantly, the importance of regional geography is never made explicit: there is no argument for intranational colonialism, no carpetbagging chemical industries taking particular advantage of southern agriculturalists...