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302 Pages·2017·2.814 MB·English
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Germ Wars The Politics of Microbes and America’s Landscape of Fear Melanie Armstrong university of california press Germ Wars critical environments: nature, science, and politics Edited by Julie Guthman, Jake Kosek, and Rebecca Lave The Critical Environments series publishes books that explore the political forms of life and the ecologies that emerge from histories of capitalism, militarism, racism, colonial- ism, and more. 1. Flame and Fortune in the American West: Urban Development, Environmental Change, and the Great Oakland Hills Fire, by Gregory L. Simon 2. Germ Wars: The Politics of Microbes and America’s Landscape of Fear, by Melanie Armstrong Germ Wars The Politics of Microbes and America’s Landscape of Fear Melanie Armstrong university of california press University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Armstrong, Melanie, 1977– author. Title: Germ wars : the politics of microbes and America’s landscape of fear / Melanie Armstrong. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: lccn 2016037674 (print) | lccn 2016039496 (ebook) | isbn 9780520292765 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520292772 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520966147 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Bioterrorism—United States—Prevention. | Bioterrorism—United States—Psychological aspects. | Biopolitics. Classifi cation: lcc hv6433.35 .a76 2017 (print) | lcc hv6433.35 (ebook) | ddc 363.325 /35610973—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037674 Manufactured in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Introduction: Political Ecologies of Bioterror 1 1. “Smallpox Is Dead”: The Public Health Campaign to (Almost) Eradicate a Species 30 2. Microbes for War and Peace: On the Military Origins of Containment 68 3. The Wild Microbiological West: Fighting Ticks and Weighing Risks 97 4. Agents of Care: Bioterrorism Preparedness at the CDC 139 5. Simulation Science: Securing the Future 167 6. Bioterror Borderlands: Of Nature and Nation 203 Conclusion: “Freaked Out Yet?” 223 Acknowledgments 231 Notes 235 Selected Bibliography 263 Index 283 Introduction Political Ecologies of Bioterror I was working in the visitor center at Arches National Park in the fall of 2001 when we received a report of suspicious behavior in the park. The reporting party said a man who appeared to be “Middle Eastern” was dusting a white powdery substance around the base of Delicate Arch, the sandstone span venerated on the Utah state license plate and in the pages of sporting goods catalogs. We put out a call to a law enforcement ranger, and within minutes a cavalcade of park rangers, county sheriff s, city police, and fi refi ghters rushed into the park with lights spinning and sirens blaring. From the front gate, we watched the cars streak by and listened to the tight-jawed radio traffi c, imagining the spectacle that was shattering the serene desert landscape a few miles to the north. We pic- tured bodies clad in Kevlar vests and thigh-high fi re boots clunking up the mile-and-a-half-long trail. We envisioned hikers in Patagonia polos gathering near the arch for a late afternoon meditation or to munch on granola bars and imagined the look on their faces when a SWAT team pounded over the horizon brandishing batons and body shields. Later we speculated about how long it had taken the man with the dark com- plexion to convince the rangers that the powder on his hands was not anthrax, but the ashes of his dead father. He had come to this place to ritualistically honor and remember someone he loved. Imagining the emotions of that confrontation—confusion, panic, anger, grief, insult, and fear—awakened in me an understanding that the terrorist events in the United States earlier that year were changing the 1 2 | Introduction world. More than new laws or renewed patriotism, these changes were manifest in the ways people interacted with each other and how they read the bodies and behaviors of other human beings. Three months earlier, the report might have attracted the attention of one ranger, who would have reminded the man that it violates the Code of Federal Regulations to spread ashes in a national park. Onlookers would have inquired what he was doing and perhaps asked questions about his dead father and why he’d selected this scenic resting place. But white powder had a new mean- ing after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and when carried by a person of color, the substance provoked not feelings of respect for the dead but fear of the living. Even a remote desert landscape near Moab, Utah (pop- ulation 5,000), was remade by the new materialisms of a war on terror. Small-town cops and national park rangers were enlisted in a nationwide project to secure every space, every citizen, and every icon of American life. No landscape was exempt from the security practices implemented around the country over the next few years. In the national park, we covered our electrical outlets, locked doors to the restrooms, and subjected our volunteers to formal background investigations. Two years later, in Yellowstone National Park, I watched a bomb squad from Denver take a briefcase we had found in the visitor center into a meadow and blow it up. The case was likely a tourist’s misplaced collection of maps and guidebooks, but by this time we were trained to treat it as a potential weapon designed to wreak havoc at a public park. By this time, I recognized that I was participating fully in the production of this new security regime. Citizens like me submitted to airport security, and workers like me radioed in suspicious-looking briefcases, creating through our actions the threatening world we expected to see. Startled though I was by the level of response I saw at Arches, I had spent enough time working in national parks to realize that peoples’ rela- tionships with natural landscapes are complex and deeply rooted in notions of power (and powerlessness), reverence, and nationhood. Over time, people have produced ideas of nature as a wild place, moral com- pass, or selective breeder, enacting a cultural politics of nature through the daily management of place.1 Nature is also a site of political struggle where both meaning and materiality are contested. The events at Delicate Arch showed, for example, that the use of nature by people of color is suspect. These naturalized assumptions about race are being remade in the twenty-fi rst century. The ways we engage with nature forge new material forms, and the overlapping struggles between nature and cul-

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.