ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Toxaphene: Material Genealogy of a Forest Product

• In Event: Second Nature: Synthetic Materials and the (Re)making of Biological Knowledge in the Twentieth Century

English Abstract

Chemicals are historical, and history is chemical. This paper brings these observations together via the synthetic pesticide toxaphene. Developed in the United States in the 1940s, toxaphene was used heavily in agriculture worldwide during the later decades of the twentieth century, before being banned as a “persistent organic pollutant” by intergovernmental agreement in 2001. A high-tech chemical made from pine tree stumps, toxaphene was widely associated with cotton farming but also tied to paper-making, road construction, electrification, cigarette filters, and more. Tracing the career of this compound across distant landscapes and industries illuminates the long histories, surprising connections, and ambiguous legacies of “bio-based” chemicals. Toxaphene also provides grist for employing context-savvy histories of production and use—“material genealogies”—as inputs to the computational methods central to present-day assessments of chemicals’ boons and hazards.

Author

• Evan Hepler-Smith, Duke University