Romero, Adam (Author)
University of California Press
Edition Details: Book Series: Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics, No. 8
Physical Details: 270
Language: English
The toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In Economic Poisoning, Adam M. Romero upends this narrative and provides a fascinating new history of pesticides in American industrial agriculture prior to World War II. Through impeccable archival research, Romero reveals the ways in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American agriculture, especially in California, functioned less as a market for novel pest-killing chemical products and more as a sink for the accumulating toxic wastes of mining, oil production, and chemical manufacturing. Connecting farming ecosystems to technology and the economy, Romero provides an intriguing reconceptualization of pesticides that forces readers to rethink assumptions about food, industry, and the relationship between human and nonhuman environments.
...MoreReview Amy M. Hay (July 2022) Review of "Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture". Technology and Culture (pp. 893-894).
Review Tad Brown (2023) Review of "Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture". Agricultural History (pp. 319-323).
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