{"title":"Arsenic to the Rescue of European Potatoes: The Institutionalisation of Plant Protection in France and Germany (1920s–1950s)","authors":"Margot Lyautey","doi":"10.3828/whpge.63837646622490","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n By displacing Rachel Carson’s approach in\n Silent Spring\n to another time, another place and another family of pesticides, this paper tells the story of the wide adoption of arsenates, despite their known toxicity, to control the then newly present Colorado potato beetle in Western Europe from the 1920s to the 1950s. Although arsenate use entailed health and environmental risks, it was extended to other insect pests because this control method proved effective. The Colorado beetle appears as the matrix around which plant protection was developed in France and Germany. The regulations, administrative structures and habits that revolved around the wide use of arsenates then paved the way for the quick and massive adoption of organochlorides after 1945.\n \n \n This article was published open access under a CC BY licence:\n https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0\n .\n","PeriodicalId":42763,"journal":{"name":"Global Environment","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Global Environment","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3828/whpge.63837646622490","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
By displacing Rachel Carson’s approach in
Silent Spring
to another time, another place and another family of pesticides, this paper tells the story of the wide adoption of arsenates, despite their known toxicity, to control the then newly present Colorado potato beetle in Western Europe from the 1920s to the 1950s. Although arsenate use entailed health and environmental risks, it was extended to other insect pests because this control method proved effective. The Colorado beetle appears as the matrix around which plant protection was developed in France and Germany. The regulations, administrative structures and habits that revolved around the wide use of arsenates then paved the way for the quick and massive adoption of organochlorides after 1945.
This article was published open access under a CC BY licence:
https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0
.
期刊介绍:
The half-yearly journal Global Environment: A Journal of History and Natural and Social Sciences acts as a forum and echo chamber for ongoing studies on the environment and world history, with special focus on modern and contemporary topics. Our intent is to gather and stimulate scholarship that, despite a diversity of approaches and themes, shares an environmental perspective on world history in its various facets, including economic development, social relations, production government, and international relations. One of the journal’s main commitments is to bring together different areas of expertise in both the natural and the social sciences to facilitate a common language and a common perspective in the study of history. This commitment is fulfilled by way of peer-reviewed research articles and also by interviews and other special features. Global Environment strives to transcend the western-centric and ‘developist’ bias that has dominated international environmental historiography so far and to favour the emergence of spatially and culturally diversified points of view. It seeks to replace the notion of ‘hierarchy’ with those of ‘relationship’ and ‘exchange’ – between continents, states, regions, cities, central zones and peripheral areas – in studying the construction or destruction of environments and ecosystems.