The Alchemy of Capital: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of United States Agriculture By Adam M. Romero A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Geography in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Nathan F. Sayre, Chair Professor Richard A. Walker Professor Robin L. Einhorn Professor Garrison Sposito Spring 2015 The Alchemy of Capital: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of United States Agriculture © 2015 Adam M. Romero Abstract The Alchemy of Capital: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of United States Agriculture by Adam M. Romero Doctor of Philosophy in Geography University of California, Berkeley Professor Nathan F. Sayre, Chair Along with mechanization and scientific plant breeding, modern forms of industrial agriculture are premised on the use of synthetic chemicals to sustain yield, irrigate fields, decrease erosion, and provide defense against pests and disease. Chemicalized agriculture has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the presence of industrially produced chemicals became available on domestic and international markets, as crop production specialized, and as scientists, farmers, and policy makers turned to chemicals to “fix” fertility, pest, and labor issues. While the use of agricultural chemicals has created the conditions for astonishing yields, their generalized use has also resulted in the pollution and degradation of ecosystems, harmful effects on consumers and farm workers, and large greenhouse gas emissions. This dissertation investigates the relationships between the late 19th and early 20th century US mining, chemical, and petroleum refining industries, their waste byproducts, and the promotion and naturalization of economic poisons in US agriculture. Specifically, I explore the transition from the ad hoc use of economic poisons on US farms to the use of economic poisons as an agricultural necessity by focusing on the complex and multidirectional links between industrial and chemical waste and the use of a rapidly industrializing and specializing agriculture as an efficacious and profitable outlet for industrial byproducts. Drawing from fourteen archives across the US, I use the history of mining and smelting companies, chemical and petrochemical manufacturers, marketers and dealers, industrial R&D, governmental institutions, university scientists and extension agents, capital investment, environmental regulation, the military, along with politics of an inchoate toxicological science, to narrate the political economic thresholds of industrial waste’s transmutation and US agriculture’s chemicalization. In other words, I relay the historical and political economic origins of economic poisons in US agriculture from the mid 1860s to the end of WWII through the lens of industrial waste. 1 “Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art Wherin all Nature’s treasure is contain’d: Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky, Lord and Commander of these elements.” C. Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, 1616 i To all who have mixed their labor with the soil, and to all who ever will ii Acknowledgments My debts of gratitude are too numerous and too great to be captured in a few paragraphs. However, I would like to acknowledge my dissertation committee and the graduate students that made this adventure possible. The Martin Institute (Geraldine F. Martin, President), the Chemical Heritage Foundation, along with UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library Fellowship and the UC Office of the President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship provided funding for the project. I also want to thank all the librarians and archivists that I encountered over the last few years. Lastly, I want to thank my partner, Shannon Cram, who taught me to love the written word. Words cannot express my affection. iii Preface: When I Grow Up I Want To Tell Stories “The ‘control of nature’ is phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.” Rachael Carson, Silent Spring, 19621 In 1980, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published their seminal book Metaphors We Live By in which they argued that “human thought processes are largely metaphorical.”2 More than simply rhetorical flourish, as Aristotle suggested, metaphors shape everyday thought and practice. “If we are right in suggesting that our [ordinary] conceptual system is largely metaphorical” they wrote, “then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do everyday is very much a matter of metaphor.” Metaphors are incredibly powerful are shape how we think, act, imagine, and relate to the world. Metaphors tell stories. What Lakoff and Johnson suggested, and what has been confirmed in countless cognitive science and neuro-linguistic studies since is that the subtlest incantation of metaphor can have tremendous influence on how we conceptualize and act to solve social problems. The most prominent recent example of this is a 2011 PLOS One study titled “Metaphors We Think By: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning,” where the authors examined the role of metaphor on how people think about crime.3 Comparing crime-as- virus and crime-as-beast metaphors (both malevolent forces of nature outside human agency) they demonstrated how metaphor actively shapes how and literally where we think about crime (using fMRI). Many other studies, in kindred spirit with Donna Haraway’s Situated Knowledges, have shown similar outcomes for the role of metaphor on how science is performed, communicated, and understood.4 (Besides the military, the other group that is really interested in this area of research is the upper echelon running political campaigns). To be involved in debates with environmental and agricultural thinkers today, as I am, is to be awash in a sea of economic metaphors. I am told that the market via prices efficiently and apolitically allocates scare resources. I am told that environmental destruction, pollution, 1 Carson, R. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin 1962. 297. 2 Lakoff, G, and M Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press, 1980. 3-5. 3 Thibodeau, P H, and L Boroditsky. "Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning." PLoS One 6, no. 2 (2011): e16782. 4 Haraway, D. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-99. iv and contamination are externalities that result from market failure. I am told that our persistence as a species depends on us internalizing these externalities. When this impossible singularity occurs, markets will realign in a new equilibrium of sustainability. But this is not necessarily the case, as internalizing externalities is not by definition a societal good. Efficiency and sustainability, as demonstrated by the likes of William Stanley Jevons more than 100 years ago, are not synonymous.5 Or as Richard Norgaard, our former colleague and one of the founders of ecological economics liked to put it, “there are an endless number of ways to efficiently destroy the world.”6 All metaphors are wrong. Some metaphors are useful. But the conceptual and discursive metaphors that dominate how we think about nature, waste, and pollution are garbage. For example, in framing environmental pollution or bodily contamination as an externality – that is as an aberration and something not intrinsic to the nature of the capitalism – we privilege the market as the solution and constrain how we imagine and practice social change. It is from this conceptual framing that we also choose – because their lives are worth less – to contaminate of the poorest among us. And yet, these metaphors have spread across academia and society writ-large. Take the ecological sciences, for example, where the economic metaphors of ecosystem services and natural capital (which start from the assumption of internalizing externalities) have become the dominant way to think about nature, so much so that many ecologists now perform bad science in their name. This is utilitarian anthropocentrism at its worst; it would even make St. Augustine blush.7 “While we cannot dispense with metaphors in thinking about nature,” the evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin wrote, “there is a great risk of confusing the metaphor with the thing of real interest. We cease to see the world as if it were like a machine and take it to be a machine. The result is that the properties we ascribe to our object of interest and the questions we ask about it reinforce the original metaphorical image and we miss the aspects of the system that do not fit the metaphorical approximation.”8 Or as the pioneer cyberneticians Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Weiner put it, “the price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.”9 Unfortunately though, we have not kept watch and the fire of metaphorical vigilance has gone unattended. Externality, efficiency, and market failure now rule the roost. And remember that in this view externalities are reciprocal, meaning there are no victims or perpetrators of pollution and contamination. Instead, there are only individual parties with equal property rights open to bargaining in a system that conflates economic and social welfare. 5 Jevons, W S. The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines. New York: MacMillan And Co., Limited, 1906 (1865). 6 This is something he would often say in his lectures about the economics of sustainability. 7 Glacken, G J. "Reflections on the Man-Nature Theme as a Subject for Study." 1966. 8 Lewontin, R. The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment.