War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (review)

War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring. By Edmund Russell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvii+315. $54.95/$19.95.

Sci-fi fans who recall the 1957 film The Deadly Mantis, in which soldiers trap and gas the movie's star in the Lincoln Tunnel, will readily appreciate the theme of this engaging book. Edmund Russell aims to show that "war and the control of nature coevolved: the control of nature expanded the scale of war, and war expanded the scale on which people controlled nature." "More specifically," he continues, "the control of nature formed one root of total war, and total war helped expand the control of nature to the scale rued by modern environmentalists. This book makes that argument through a case study, the interaction between chemical warfare and pest control in the twentieth century" (pp. 2-3).

The chief claim, that war and the mastery of nature have come to be closely linked, will be uncontroversial for most historians. Nor will most historians of technology be surprised by the stations that Russell visits in developing his case study: the use of poison gases in World War I, the growth of the U.S. chemical industry, the history of the Chemical Warfare Service and its propaganda campaigns, and the development of DDT and the organophosphate compounds. Russell adds new detail to some of these topics by exploiting such sources as advertising copy and editorial cartoons. He also revises the conventional wisdom in at least one instance, by showing that U.S. officials, public health experts, and entomologists harbored concerns about broad use of DDT even as it was first entering civilian markets. Still, readers familiar with the literature on Russell's subject will find his book a bit thin on new empirical content.

But Russell is not so much telling new stories as he is reframing stories that have been told by others. He does so with panache, knitting together a lively narrative out of episodes that have more often been treated as problems for specialists. From beginning to end he keeps his eye on the zone where the history of warfare and the history of pest control overlap: the institutions that served these dual uses, the technologies of gassing, and the rhetoric of extermination. The goal of eradicating pests by chemical means, proposed by the chemical warriors of World War I, led to tools, phrases, and habits of thought that found application against human beings in World War II. The wholesale destruction of human life in that war, in turn, helped legitimize and intensify campaigns of annihilation aimed at insects and other pests in the postwar era. In developing this narrative, Russell brings together elements of the history of technology with cultural history in ways that will appeal to practitioners of both.

Any short book that treats large issues will have some gaps, and Russell's is no exception. He describes his work as a case study in the relationship between war and pest control, yet deals almost exclusively with the United States. Are the patterns that he describes peculiar to America or more general? Readers of John Dower's War Without Mercy (1986) will know that Japanese propagandists in World War II, like their American counterparts, depicted the enemy as pests and vermin, and such themes can be found in Nazi propaganda aimed at Jews and Slavs. But Russell says little about the role of the "pest" in propaganda outside the United States and even less about martial themes in overseas advertising for pesticides.

Russell may also underplay evidence relating to widespread public enthusiasm for chemical pest control while relating how opposition developed to the indiscriminate use of pesticides in the 1950s and early 1960s. DDT and its successors, such as chlordane, found a...