DDT and the Cold War Jungle

American Environmental and Social Engineering in the Rapti Valley of Nepal

Bibliographic Data

ID4154828
AuthorsThomas B Robertson (Executive director of the Fulbright Office in Kathmandu, Nepal., corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume104
Issue4
Pages904-930
Publication date2018-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jax429
OpenAlexW2789995231
LanguageEN
Citations received11

This sudden vast enhancement of man's ability to make nonhuman nature produce what man requires from her has, for the first time in history, made the ideal of welfare for all a practical objective instead of a mere utopian dream.” “Mosquitoes are justifiably unloved, but unjustifiably understudied by historians.” The Rapti Valley would surprise anyone for whom Nepal evokes only terraced hillsides and snow-capped peaks. At a few hundred feet above sea level, the broad six-hundred-square-mile basin is a Kiplingesque jungle crowded with wildlife—not yaks and yeti but one-horned rhinos, gharial crocodiles, elephants, wild buffalo, and Bengal tigers. It forms part of the tarai, the low-lying subtropical strip of jungle grasslands and hardwood forest that runs along the base of the Himalayas from northwest India across Nepal and into northeast India. For much of its history, the Rapti Valley, like much of the tarai, was also famous for another form of warm-weather wildlife: malaria. “The local pestilence,” a British observer noted in the 1920s, “is known far and wide as awal, a name which hums an undertone of death throughout the chronicles of Nepal.”3

Ancient history · Archaeology · Biology · Ethnology · Fishery · Geography · Jungle · Plateau (mathematics · Wildlife · Ecology · History · Hydropower, Displacement, Environmental Impact · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Transboundary Water Resource Management

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