Multispecies Feedback Loops in Toxicity Research and Practice in the Twentieth-Century United States

• In Event: Beastly Bodies and Toxic Pathways

Abstract

What, this paper asks, can environmental historians learn by applying the methods and insights of multispecies ethnography to the story of toxicity research and practice in the twentieth-century United States?

While my first two books employed a range of approaches familiar to environmental historians, my current work-in-progress—tentatively entitled An Animals’ History of the United States—has led me to survey a broader array of animal-related fields. Of these, multispecies ethnography strikes me as the most compelling and useful for understand past interactions between people and the environment. Inspired by the work of Donna Haraway and allied theorists, multispecies ethnographers aim to develop what Eduardo Kohn calls an anthropology “beyond the human.”

Though environmental historians have been situating the human past in its larger ecological contexts for decades, we nonetheless need new tools if we are to enhance our understanding of how the various webs of life in which we are incessantly and irrevocably entangled have shaped the human past. This paper uses a multispecies approach to analyze a series of key moments in which American research on toxics revealed or catalyzed unexpected interrelations between people and other living things. Biological and chemical contaminants in U.S. food systems, for instance, spurred Progressives to enact the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. The resulting legislation gave rise to animal testing for cosmetics, drugs, and other products. During the mid-twentieth century, however, a combination of political, biological, economic, and ethical developments led more and more researchers to conclude that laboratory animals were poor proxies for modeling toxicological impacts on human bodies. More recently, the ascendance of industrialized meat production and the passage of toxic animal bodies from “wild” to “domestic” spaces have destabilized efforts to police the migration of deadly substances between humans, other creatures, and the ecosystems we all inhabit.

Author

• Thomas Andrews, University of Colorado Boulder