"Only You Can Prevent a Forest": Agent Orange, Ecocide, and Environmental Justice

The real story of the environmental crisis is one of power and profit and the institutional and bureaucratic arrangements and the cultural conventions that create conditions of environmental destruction. Toxic wastes and oil spills and dying forests, presented in the daily news as the entire environmental story, are symptoms of social arrangements, and especially of social derangements. The environmental crisis, more than the sum of ozone depletion, global warming, and overconsumption, is a crisis of the dominant ideology. Nevertheless, by 1971 internal and external political pressures on the U.S. government were so intense that it became necessary to cancel the entire Ranch Hand program. Thus ended a combat organization dedicated solely to the purpose of conducting war upon the environment.