The War On Weeds

When are you gonna get rid of those weeds, my father would ask every time he visited my Vermont lawn. Splotched with purple thyme, yellow dandelions and white clovers, the lawn attracted honeybees and, later in the season, fireflies. He and I saw the same plants, but we had learned to see differently. Where my father saw interlopers, I saw residents.

For most of my childhood, my father was at war on his quarter-acre plot, my childhood backyard. In some of my most vivid memories, he struggles with the lawnmower, sweat beading on his arm hair. He curses the crabgrass, he drenches dandelions and clovers with chemicals from white spray bottles he got at the hardware store down the street. It was an endless battle.

My father was a Vietnam veteran and a lifelong Republican. He liked to say that women belong in the kitchen. I had become an environmental studies professor, a member of the East Coast liberal elite, a daughter he was ashamed to introduce to his friends at the Post.

He died a few years ago of multiple myeloma, a brutal cancer that riddled his bones with holes. Until the end, he was convinced that being exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam had caused the disease. He had lived half a century longer than many of the young men he’d served with, and he felt ashamed, I think, of the extra time.

In the weeks after his death, I looked up the logbooks of his aircraft carrier, hoping to piece together whether he would have been exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. I later realized he’d been exposed to it in our backyard.

“Our global biodiversity crisis, a crisis of being, is at its core a crisis of seeing.”

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With ample supplies of chlorine and phenol, a waste product of fossil fuel refining, Dow and other chemical companies then faced the task of selling farmers, homeowners and land managers on the need to kill broadleaved plants. This included many Dust Bowl farmers who, for years, had been told that the degradation of their land was their fault precisely because they had removed too many broadleaved plants. It was not, in other words, a ready-made market. The author of a 1947 article in Agricultural Chemicals wondered, “Are weeds merely an annoying nuisance or are they something that farmers will pay money to combat?” Tellingly, the first venue in which Mitchell published his 2,4-D results was not a scientific or agricultural journal but a golf magazine.

Early advertisements for 2,4-D weed killer portrayed hand-pulling and hoeing as outdated technologies soon to be replaced by chemical tools. In 1947, Dow released a 20-minute promotional film, “Death to Weeds.” The film opened with an imagined class-action lawsuit pitting the plaintiffs, farmers and homeowners, against the defendants, weeds. Weeds, the narrator explained, robbed crops of water and food, and they harbored insects and plant diseases. Charging that “weeds are our common enemy,” the narrator argued that they inflicted “never-ending warfare against the American farmer.” But Dow’s “arsenal of chemical warfare” was capable of bringing these enemies to justice. The film closed by declaring weeds “guilty as charged” and deserving the death sentence. Biocide, it argued, was justice.  

Companies sought their own niches in the synthetic herbicide market. While Dow initially focused on growers of corn, wheat and sugarcane, the J.T. Baker Chemical Company worked to sell dairy farmers on 2,4-D by arguing that plants like wild garlic and ragweed imbued milk with “weedy flavors” and that killing these species with 2,4-D would improve profits. Companies’ 2,4-D products diversified as they insinuated that different formulations were needed for croplands versus pastures, small-scale operations versus large ones, fog sprayers versus airplane sprayers. Over the years, Dow has marketed 2,4-D formulations under a variety of names, including “2-4 Dow Weed Killer,” “Esteron 44,” “Dow Contact Weed Killer,” “Formula 40,” “Weed Killer 4D,” “Scorpion III” and even “Justice.”

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Rachel Carson described a world without birdsong and asked her readers to hear the silence of death, of birds killed by two decades of heedless biocide use. Today, when we look outside, we see a world shaped by eight decades of heedless biocide use. We see grass. We do not see what is missing, what we have killed.

The world that would be if synthetic herbicides had not been so successfully marketed is invisible.

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