Affiliation:
1. Amy M. Hay is a professor of Twentieth-century America at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her research interests focus on medicine and public health, women’s and gender history, and twentieth-century America. Her book, The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests (Alabama, 2021) examines the domestic and international use of Agent Orange and the various groups who challenged that use. Her current research project looks at the intersections of local migrant...
Abstract
The 1981 publication of David Weir and Mark Shapiro’s exposé
Circle of Poison
almost ten years after the banning of DDT represented how the landscape of understandings about hazardous chemicals and their regulation had changed. The book exposed two things. One was the ways power had reconfigured itself, which in turn highlighted the ways the story
Silent Spring
told, which effectively moved hearts and minds to make change happen. One thing that remained hidden, however, to both Rachel Carson and Weir and Shapiro, was the degree to which the chemical industry traded at the local and regional level, conducting international trade, emulating the poor and often bad faith practices of the transnational corporations. The failure of
Circle
’s narrative, coupled with an overlooked and extensive network of mom-and-pop chemical companies, failed to build on
Silent Spring
’s legacy.
This article was published open access under a CC BY licence:
https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0
.
Publisher
Liverpool University Press