The Fire Ant Wars

Reviewed by: The Fire Ant Wars: Nature, Science, and Public Policy in Twentieth-Century America John H. Perkins (bio) The Fire Ant Wars: Nature, Science, and Public Policy in Twentieth-Century America. By Joshua Blu Buhs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. x+216. $22.50. Joshua Blu Buhs's book is an environmental history that uses conflict about the imported fire ant (Solenopsis invicta) as a way of understanding the relationship between people and nature. This insect arrived from South America during the 1930s or 1940s and spread across much of the American Southeast. In the ensuing half-century, the imported fire ant was portrayed in radically different ways, ranging from a beneficial insect to a nuisance to a deadly threat to humans and wildlife alike. In the latter portrayal, it became an insect that had to be eradicated and the target of some of the most poisonous insecticides ever invented. How, Buhs asks, could one species have such radically different images? Why were some people content to leave it more or less alone while others sought to marshal federal, state, and private funds to conduct expensive, dangerous operations? More fundamentally, Buhs wants to ask questions about the relationship of humans to the environment, and the mutual escapades of Homo sapiens and Solenopsis invicta provide a productive vehicle for his inquiry. Buhs begins with a reconstruction of the ant's entry into the United States and its natural history. Considerable confusion attended the proper identification and classification of several species of fire ants. Equally difficult was understanding when, where, and how the imported fire ant spread. Buhs then moves to the open warfare between humans and the ant. Ants had a mixed image in popular literature. Sometimes they were models of industriousness and virtue, but elsewhere they were communists and totalitarians. In the popular press, the ant became a marauder and threat to wildlife and to southern culture. In 1957, Congress funded a new division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in a massive effort to eradicate the imported fire ant. Buhs develops two parallel narratives in order to explain the eradication efforts. First he traces the shifting philosophical stances used to support and attack the federal eradication program. Proponents saw themselves as representing the best of conservation efforts, but opponents saw a perversion of conservation in the massive destruction of wildlife by insecticides. In Silent Spring (1962), Rachel Carson used the campaign against the imported fire ant as one of her most important examples of problems with pesticides. The environmental movement inspired by Carson, Buhs argues, came to see the conservation doctrine itself as the problem and called for a new way of living in nature. Second, Buhs provides a detailed accounting of the eradication campaigns. Heptachlor, dieldrin, mirex, and [End Page 451] ferriamicide each were used, then discarded, and then ultimately banned by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). By 1983, the eradication campaigns were over, but the insect was still in place, and remains a nuisance to this day. But spraying insecticide over millions of acres is not acceptable. Buhs concludes with a philosophical discourse on what it all meant. He sees the imported fire ant wars as a call for humility. He also notes that the insect acquired a mixed image: sometimes useful, sometimes destructive. The EPA, he argues, suffered considerable damage to its own image after the banning of chemicals for killing the ants. Buhs himself came to a sober realization that humans live in the environment they create. This is an important book about a controversial episode in which insects and insecticides collided with disparate attitudes. Although it clearly involved cultural conflict, Buhs gives us little insight into the complexities of American culture, particularly the ways in which land use is determined. It is best categorized as an environmental history, a history of the ways in which humans and nature mutually interact. Other publications by Buhs provide insights into the complex taxonomy of Solenopsis. This book will leave the reader wanting to know more about the exercise of political power by governmental agencies involved with natural resources. Nevertheless, Buhs has made a splendid contribution toward the efforts of environmental historians and historians

Biology · Confusion · Environmental ethics · Fire ant · Hymenoptera · Political science · Red imported fire ant · Wildlife · Animal and Plant Science Education · Ecology · History · Insect and Arachnid Ecology and Behavior · Plant and animal studies