Germ Wars: The Politics of Microbes and America’s Landscape of Fear

302 Pages·2017·2.814 MB·English

by  Melanie Armstrong

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

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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-