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From Wilderness to the Toxic Environment: Health in American Environmental Politics, 1945-Present

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From Wilderness to the Toxic Environment: Health in American Environmental Politics, 1945-Present From Wilderness to the Toxic Environment: Health in American Environmental Politics, 1945-Present The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Thomson, Jennifer Christine. 2013. From Wilderness to the Toxic Environment: Health in American Environmental Politics, 1945- Present. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11125030 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA From Wilderness to the Toxic Environment: Health in American Environmental Politics, 1945-Present A dissertation presented by Jennifer Christine Thomson to The Department of the History of Science In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History of Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2013 @ 2013 Jennifer Christine Thomson All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Charles Rosenberg Jennifer Christine Thomson From Wilderness to the Toxic Environment: Health in American Environmental Politics, 1945-Present Abstract This dissertation joins the history of science and medicine with environmental history to explore the language of health in environmental politics. Today, in government policy briefs and mission statements of environmental non-profits, newspaper editorials and activist journals, claims about the health of the planet and its human and non-human inhabitants abound. Yet despite this rhetorical ubiquity, modern environmental politics are ideologically and organizationally fractured along the themes of whose health is at stake and how that health should be protected. This dissertation traces how these competing conceptions of health came to structure the landscape of American environmental politics. Beginning in the early 1950s, an expanding network of environmental activists began to think in terms of protecting the health of the planet and its inhabitants from the unprecedented hazards of nuclear energy and chemical proliferation. They did this by appropriating models and metaphors of health developed by postwar ecologists, philosophers, epidemiologists and nuclear physicians. Through this process of appropriation, scientists and philosophers were likewise drawn into environmental activism. Through five case studies, this dissertation traces the collaborations between scientists, environmental activists, philosophers, and medical doctors which enabled a broad range of articulations of health: the health of the wild, the health of the environment, the health of the planet, and the health of humans within the environment. Each case study attends to the iii Dissertation Advisor: Charles Rosenberg Jennifer Christine Thomson intersection of political thought and practice, and explores how science and environmental activism were in constant dialogue in the postwar period. Drawing on archival materials and extensive oral history interviews, this dissertation demonstrates the centrality of health to American environmental politics from the end of World War Two until the present day. iv Contents Introduction…..1 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Environmental Movement…..18 Friends of the Earth and the Health of the Environment, 1969-1984…..39 Gary Snyder, Biocentrism and Land Medicine…..96 “You’re Murdering Us”: Love Canal, Human Health, and the Environmental Justice Movement…..144 Planetary Health in the Age of Climate Change: James Lovelock, Gaia, and Bill McKibben…..187 Conclusion: Redefining Environmentalism, Moving Beyond Health…..227 Sources Used…..238 v Introduction This dissertation began with a political observation. A language of health and disease, of life and death, suffuses present-day American discussions regarding the environment. President Obama claimed in his 2012 State of the Union address that a healthy economy and a healthy environment were one and the same.1 Dr. James E. Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Space Institute, argues that reducing global carbon emissions to 350 parts per million is the only way to maintain a healthy environment.2 Oceanic and riparian “dead zones” are identified with alarming frequency, as are the carcinogenic and mutagenic repercussions of more than a century of toxic waste disposal and oil, coal, and shale gas extraction.3 Meanwhile, Stonyfield Farms claims that its yogurt promotes healthy people and a healthy planet.4 Throughout official political discourse, climate change science, ecology, environmental activism and advertising, claims about the health of ecosystems, the health of the planet, and the health of humans within the environment abound. Yet despite this ubiquity, contemporary environmental discourse is gridlocked over whose health is at stake, and how that health should be protected. This dissertation traces the intellectual and political history which shaped these competing conceptions of health. As an intellectual history, it documents how after the Second 1 Barack Obama, “An America Built to Last,” State of the Union Address, January 24, 2012, accessed January 29, 2013, http://www.whitehouse.gov/state-of-the-union-2012. 2 James Hansen, etal. “The Case for Young People and Nature: A Path to a Healthy, Natural, Prosperous Future,” accessed January 29, 2013, http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110505_CaseForYoungPeople.pdf. 3 David Biello, “Oceanic Dead Zones Continue to Spread,” Scientific American, August 15, 2008, accessed January 29, 2013, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=oceanic-dead-zones-spread; Merrill Singer, “Down Cancer Alley: The Lived Experience of Health and Environmental Suffering in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25 (2011); Charles W. Schmidt, “Blind Rush?: Shale Gas Boom Proceeds Amid Human Health Questions,” Environmental Health Perspectives 119 (2011). 4 As the company claims on its website, “We’re committed to healthy food, healthy people, a healthy planet and healthy business”. Accessed January 29, 2013, http://www.stonyfield.com/about-us/our-mission. 1 World War a broad swath of environmental activists appropriated models of health from fields as diverse as ecology, philosophy, and epidemiology, in order to protect the health of the planet and its inhabitants from the unprecedented hazards posed by nuclear energy and chemical proliferation. As a political history, it analyzes how environmentalists’ varied use of these models of health created fault lines among large lobbying organizations, local grassroots groups, decentralized collectives of eco-anarchists, and science-based advocacy organizations, fault lines that persist today. Ultimately, it demonstrates how these models of health and their political expressions, which took shape in the context of mid-twentieth century concerns about global environmental contamination from radioactive fallout and indiscriminate pesticide use, have been reshaped in light of present challenges posed by rapidly escalating climate change. Until recently, scholars of American environmental politics described the postwar period as one of transition from protecting wilderness areas from human intrusion towards defending the health of humans and their standards of living.5 By contrast, this dissertation argues that although human health was a defining issue for some postwar environmentalists, this anthropocentric focus was just one way of thinking about the environment, challenged by others’ emphases on the health of the biosphere, ecosystems, or the planet. In this broadening of scope, the dissertation agrees with recent studies by historians James Morton Turner, Keith Woodhouse, and Tom Robertson, which illustrate the diversity of concerns animating the budding environmental movement in the twentieth century.6 To interpret the historical significance of these divergent interpretations of health by environmental activists, the dissertation approaches 5Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington: Island Press, 2005); Samuel P. Hays and Barbara D. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 6 James Morton Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); Thomas Robertson, The Malthusian Moment : Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012). 2 health as a conceptual repository from which activists drew to become culturally intelligible. Increasingly, this dissertation argues, to talk about the environment one needed to talk about health. There was no clear evidence in the two decades following World War Two that health would become an orienting focus of environmental politics. Wilderness preservation issues were foremost for established organizations like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society; however, lands preservation was infused with new concerns about the pressures which unchecked population growth and economic development placed upon wilderness.7 Outside of conservationist circles, these postwar decades were suffused with anxiety about humanity’s self- induced and dire fate. Bestsellers urging mandatory population control, government
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