David Biggs

Following Dioxin's Drift: Agent Orange Stories and the Challenge of Metabolic History

This essay addresses a more global history of dioxin's drift via the herbicide 2,4,5-T, bette... more 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 reorient themselves t...

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Following Dioxin's Drift: Agent Orange Stories and the Challenge of Metabolic History

This essay addresses a more global history of dioxin's drift via the herbicide 2,4,5-T, bette... more 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 reorient themselves t...

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Small Arms Control: the Need for Coordination - United Nations Contributions to the Process (Disarmament Forum, UNIDIR, no. 2, 2000)

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