Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think About the Environment

ONE: Introduction

1 CHAPTER ONE InTroducTIon for the past four years, I have followed 2,4-d (2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid) and 2,4,5-t (2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid) through history. Plant physiologists classify these synthetic chemical compounds as selective auxins of the phenoxyacetic herbicide family. They were the first plant killers developed by scientists to target specific “weeds”—any plants useless or counterproductive to human needs. The discoveries that led to modern herbicides began in Charles Darwin’s laboratory. Late in his life, Darwin discovered that some internal mechanism directs plants to grow toward sunlight and sources of water. American and European scientists later called this mechanism the plant’s hormone system. On the eve of World War II, scientists discovered that certain chemical syntheses could enhance the growth of a plant—and in higher concentrations, kill it. Via absorption through the leaf, 2,4-d and 2,4,5-t wreak havoc on the plant’s hormones.1 Several days after exposure, the treated plant experiences uncontrolled and rapid growth, until its leaves shrivel back to a brown mass and fall off. The biochemical specificity of these herbicides has no cultural analog: no universally accepted characteristics distinguish weeds from other plants. The designation depends on what people want from land they seek to control . On farms, sprayed applications of 2,4-d and 2,4,5-t can keep weeds out of cropland and animal pasture. After World War II, herbicides, along with pesticides, dramatically increased agricultural yields worldwide in what became known as the Green Revolution.2 The massive application of herbicides for farming, forest management, and lawn care continues today at global annual rates exceeding a billion gallons. This book focuses on one aspect of herbicide use that is now a relic of his- 2 CHAPTER ONE tory. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military combined 2,4-d and 2,4,5-t, named the 50:50 mixture Agent Orange, and defoliated approximately five million acres of forests in an attempt to expose communist guerrilla fighters loyal to the National Liberation Front (nlf, or Viet Cong) of South Vietnam. Known as Operation Ranch Hand, from 1961 to 1971 the herbicidal warfare program targeted not specific weeds but entire ecosystems. In Vietnam the forest was the weed. The goals of agricultural use and military use of herbicides differ: one aims to increase crop yields, the other to win wars. But the logic of unburdening human labor through chemistry applies to both. For a wheat farmer determined to rid his crop of invasive weeds, an herbicide application may seem more economical in the short run than removing the plants by hand.3 For President John F. Kennedy, determined to defend the government of South Vietnam from communist takeover, herbicidal warfare battled the nlf by chemical proxy. As part of the broader counterinsurgency mission, Kennedy sought innovative means to neutralize the nlf’s ambush tactics. The president’s strategy was simple: deny guerrillas their only tactical advantage with chemicals, not infantry. Under President Lyndon B. Johnson, herbicidal warfare expanded dramatically : during a ten-year program, Ranch Hand crew members sprayed fifteen of the twenty million total gallons, or 75 percent, between 1966 and 1969. This escalation occurred generally because the “Americanization” of the war after 1965 amplified all the myriad U.S. military operations in Vietnam, but specifically because Johnson never considered his predecessor ’s use of herbicides to prevent—rather than to abet—an expansion of the war. The massively destructive effects of herbicidal warfare became known as “ecocide,” so called by several academic scientists who protested herbicidal warfare beginning in 1964 and who ultimately won the right to inspect its effects in Vietnam six years later. What they found was not simply the elimination of “weeds” but the destruction of whole environments upon which humans depended—and the looming prospect that the chemicals themselves might harm humans and animals. The ensuing herbicide controversy turned upside down a key component of President Richard M. Nixon’s policy of détente, or relaxation of cold war tensions, with the communist world. One of Nixon’s early détente initiatives attempted to establish American leadership in the global nonproliferation of chemical and biological weapons (cbw). To that end, the president unilaterally abolished the U.S. military’s biological weapons program. In late INTRODUCTION 3 1969, he announced his plan to resubmit the Geneva Protocol of 1925...