DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide That Changed the World

A growing body of scholarship has begun exploring twentieth-century American foreign and domestic Cold War policies and chemical pesticides, a major tool used in the modernization efforts that composed part of those policies. In ddt and the American Century, David Kinkela examines one chemical pesticide, ddt, and its uses both internationally and in the United States within the agricultural and public health arenas. Developed in 1939, ddt earned its discoverer, Paul Müller, the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for the pesticide's public health benefits. ddt proved to be an effective killer of mosquitoes, the major carriers of malaria, and agricultural pests that lowered crop production. Kinkela begins with the use of ddt in World War II to decrease malarial infections among American troops. He then examines ddt's uses in eradicating mosquitoes in Italy and increasing agricultural production in Mexico in the postwar period. In one of Kinkela's strongest chapters, he revisits the challenge to ddt presented by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) over growing concerns that the pesticide remained and accumulated in the ecosystem, harming birds and other wildlife. He retells the 1972 Environmental Protection Agency's decision to ban ddt by including the paradox of the chemical's continued domestic manufacture for international export and use. The book ends with a consideration of the ongoing controversies surrounding the use of ddt.