2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Scott, Shackleton and Wilson lasting fame, with a wealth of significant results,
its actual role was essentially a passive one as quarters for the crew. It was
only during the Banzar Expeditions, 1929-31 that the British government
learned how to make use of it as a floating research station.
Joshua␣ Blu Buhs University of Pennsylvania
The Naturalization of the Imported Fire Ants
“Dirt,” wrote Mary Douglas, “is matter out of place.” Similarly, pests are
organisms out of place, viruses in a human cell, weeds in a garden, insects in
a field of corn. While all pests are organisms out of place, not all organisms
out of place are pests, however, nor do all achieve the status without controversy.
The question, then, is not whether an organism is a pest, but, Who says so?
Why? And how do they know? In the early part of the twentieth century, a
population of fire ants reached Mobile, Alabama after a voyage from South
America. By the late 1950s, their numbers had grown to such an extent that
the ants were noticed by hunters, farmers, and politicians throughout the South.
The ants stung; they destroyed crops; they seemed to kill domestic and wild
animals; their mounds interfered with farm machinery. They were called pests
and their out-of-placeness memorialized in their name: imported fire ants. To
eradicate these pests, the USDA sprayed chemical poisons over the Southeast
in the largest insect control operation in American history. The program stirred
the anger of environmentalists such as Rachel Carson who objected to the use
of the poisons. As part of their protests against the spraying, the
environmentalists argued that the ants were not out of place, but that in the 40
years they had survived in the South the insects had become part of the ecology
of America. My paper will investigate the mechanisms by which the ants were
naturalized, tracing the way Carson and others developed their arguments and
deployed them. I will pay attention to what evidence they accumulated and
how they chose between conflicting data. The pattern that emerges illustrates
that the naturalization of the ants was as much a political as a scientific process.
The ants were incorporated into a balanced nature that repudiated what the
environmentalists saw as the autocratic bureaucracy of the USDA. The
naturalization of the ants allowed the environmentalists to move from a
narrowly technical debate—over the toxicity of pesticides—to one that
connected to the very definition of American democracy in the post-World
War II era. In the end, then, analyzing pests engages the same issues Douglas
found in her study of dirt. Both involve “reflection on the relation of order to
disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death. Wherever
ideas of dirt are highly structured,” say Douglas, “their analysis discloses a
play upon such profound themes.”
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