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Book Review
| Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post–World War II South. By Pete Daniel. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xiv, 209 pp. $26.95, ISBN 0-8071-3098-2.)
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| Toxic Drift is an extraordinarily intelligent, comprehensive, and moving history of the disastrous effects that synthetic agricultural chemicals had on the health and ecology of the South in the post–World War era. |
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Chlorinated hydrocarbons (such as ddt and endrin) and organophosphates (such as Malathion) became crucial components of southern agriculture after 1945. Pete Daniel demonstrates that chemical companies touted the benefits of these products despite the fact that little or no toxicity research had been done on them. Both before and after the publication of Rachel Carson's classic 1962 study, Silent Spring, skeptics inside and outside the scientific community questioned both the utility of agricultural chemicals and their short- and long-term health effects. Despite the phenomenal growth of the environmental movement after 1970, and the tremendous impact that it had on American society in general, it had a minimal impact on the application of agricultural chemicals on farms across the United States. In fact, pesticide usage grew 75% from 1966 to 1999 and that of herbicides expanded a whopping 282% in that same period. |
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