Eugenic Ecologies of Herbicidal Warfare in the Vietnam War

Abstract:This article examines scientific, environmentalist, and aesthetic responses to the deployment of herbicidal chemicals across agricultural capitalism domestically in the United States and military intervention in Southeast Asia. Herbicides are weed killers, and by analyzing the social construction of the "weed" as politically expendable life across racialized, capitalist, ableist, and militarized geographies, this article situates the history of herbicidal warfare within a discourse of eugenics. Eugenics, as a politically inflected science of preserving valued life at the expense of devalued life, provides an important optic for understanding how militarized necropolitics consign different forms of human and nonhuman life as disposable in the pursuit of Cold War securitization. Bringing together disability studies and environmental justice critique to think about these racial logics of herbicidal warfare, this article develops a framework of eugenic ecologies in order to consider the herbicide as a racializing technology that shapes the contours of human and plant life as intertwined targets of the imperial war machine.