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

The core subject of this book is the development of chemical warfare and chemical insecticides, but Edmund Russell has wrapped this fascinating story in several significant themes. The chemical revolution in war on humans and insects helped to make the twentieth century the most ironic of centuries. Moreover, this story, set between the years of World War I and the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), reveals the complex interplay between war and nature, an element of environmental history still largely unexplored.

Elegant in its simplicity, Russell’s thesis states that war and nature coevolved, that the control of nature was part of total war and total war helped to expand that control of nature to a new scale. To support this argument, Russell traces the interaction between chemical warfare and pest control during the twentieth century. He suggests that chemical warfare and pest control developed mutually on ideological, technological, and organizational grounds. The scale of war and insect control as it developed during the twentieth century holds particular interest for Russell. Only in the past century could military leaders and pest control agents aspire to total annihilation of their enemies.

The story begins with gas warfare as it developed during World War I. Having resisted gas as a weapon in previous wars, commanders suddenly chose gas over alternatives during the great war. Russell reveals how the chief of the Gas Service in Europe, Amos A. Fries, spearheaded the campaign for chemical warfare initially in response to American casualties suffered as a result of gas attacks. In time, military commanders grew to like gas for its remarkable power and humanity (only two percent of the Americans who succumbed to gas actually died). The American public however took a divergent view, clouded by the rumors surrounding gas warfare. One notable example was a massive work called “Gassed” by the portraitist John Singer Sargent, which was sharply criticized as propaganda by chemical warfare advocates. In addition to developing gas for use against humans, chemical warfare scientists worked to convert the gases and use them to control insects, most significantly the lice that carried typhus.

Efforts to control insect-borne disease present a recurrent sub-theme of War and Nature. The desire to control louse-borne typhus drove chemists to develop new insecticides during World War I and II. Even before the war, malaria threatened the population when, as Russell states, “Before the war a stagnant economy had joined with stagnant pools of water to send the malaria rate climbing” (p. 112). Truly the magic bullet in the fight against insects was DDT which circumvented a typhus outbreak in Naples, Italy. Moreover, DDT facilitated the occupation of Pacific Islands by reducing and even eliminating the swarms of mosquitoes carrying malaria. In fact over the course of the war, malaria claimed five times the number of casualties as combat. DDT’s metamorphosis from military miracle to civilian use in public health and agriculture, emanated from extensive army reports eagerly received and disseminated by the American press.

War and Nature provides superb analysis and a seamless narrative. With admirable skill, Russell has clarified the role of chemicals against humans and insects in times of war and against insects in times of peace. Moreover, Russell’s thoughtful interpretations sharpen our understanding of the ways that the nature of war and the war on nature are intertwined. Finally, the book makes a persuasive case for the twentieth century as the most ironic of centuries exquisitely captured by Russell in this statement: “The events described here made the world both a better place and a worse one. For some people insecticides and chemical weapons were blessings, for others they were curses, and for...