Agent Orange

Recent scholarship on war and nature has shed light on the short- and long-term environmental impacts of violent conflicts. Similarly, recent works on the history of toxicity have raised important questions about the dangers and consequences of the use (and misuse) of industrial chemicals throughout the world. Edwin A. Martini, an associate professor of history at Western Michigan University, brings those two strands of scholarship together in an engaging book that examines the contested and complicated history of the well-known herbicide Agent Orange. Martini sets out “to understand how actors and communities around the world shaped and were shaped by Agent Orange” (p. 4). Agent Orange does not simply focus on the deployment of the herbicide in Vietnam under the code name Operation Ranch Hand. It also examines pertinent histories from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Korea, and Johnston Atoll to highlight the multifaceted meaning of Agent Orange, which, as Martini writes, “has always been contingent upon where, when, how, and by whom it has been encountered” (p. 5). This approach transcends the binational framework of previous works on the subject, thus opening up new analytical terrain to examine how various nations and legal systems assessed risk, assigned blame, and established mechanisms for compensation for soldiers and civilians as a result of exposure to the herbicide

Agent Orange · Economic history · Environmental ethics · Environmental history · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy