Following dioxin’s drift: Agent Orange stories and the challenge of metabolic history

Abstract

This essay addresses a more global history of dioxin's drift via the herbicide 2,4,5-T, better known in Vietnam as the dioxin-tainted herbicide in Agent Orange, but also widely available as a commercial herbicide. Drawing on theories of metabolic flow that challenge Marxist and other notions of a social-nature divide, the essay uses 2,4,5-T and dioxin as a focus for writing a metabolic history to examine how the origins, delivery and fate of a herbicide can pass far beyond expected boundaries. It uses the concept of drift with respect to the herbicide and its contaminant to get at a core challenge facing writers in environmental history and the environmental humanities: how to describe environmental phenomena with multiple and often divergent cascades of causal effects in different social, economic and ecological settings. A focus on a toxic molecule's drift through multiple metabolic webs challenges readers to think beyond dominant moral frameworks and re-orient themselves to a more dynamic, multi-threaded approach.