"Only You Can Prevent A Forest"

From the jungles of Vietnam to the Cultural Revolution: the continuing adventures of Agent Soybean

Spraying Agent Orange in Mekong Delta near Can Tho, 1969, Department of the Army Special Photographic Office

Advances in science and technology frequently present us with ethical dilemmas that are difficult to resolve, partly because of their intellectual novelty, but also because society has so little experience coping with the kinds of problems presented by new science. So it was, after the first atomic explosion forced us to confront how to regulate this powerful new force to benefit, rather than to destroy, humankind. So it is now, with our newfound ability to clone mammals and to engineer the genetic makeup of cells and organisms. No field of science, no matter how innocuous it may seem, is exempt from an ability to stir the ethical pot, yielding vexing new problems. What follows here is an account of a major ethical dilemma that emerged from research on green plants. As a result of this work, the botanist, probably the last of the scientific innocents, was unexpectedly catapulted into the same ethical hot pot as other scientific colleagues.

Arthur Galston, “Falling Leaves and Ethical Dilemmas: Agent Orange in Vietnam”

As a PhD candidate in botany at the University of Illinois in 1943, it is hardly surprising that Arthur Galston’s dissertation research involved soybeans. Then, as now, Illinois harvested more soybeans than any other state in the union. Galston focused on a topic of enormous local utility: he identified a chemical, 2,3,5-triiodobenzoic acid (TIDA), that, when applied to a particular part of the soybean plant, accelerated flowering and increased yield. But there was a caveat. Apply too much of the chemical, and the soybean’s leaves would fall off.

What is surprising is that the U.S. Army was paying attention to soybean-related botany dissertations. In 1946, two plant physiologists from the Army’s biological weapons laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, informed Galston that his “thesis work on the defoliation effects of TIDA had served as a model for further investigation.” The researchers had subsequently found two other compounds that were even more destructive than TIDA. When combined together, they became the “defoliant” known to history as Agent Orange. In a Vietnam War operation code-named “Ranch Hand,” (and sporting what Galston characterized as the “jaunty motto” of “Only You Can Prevent A Forest”) 100 million pounds of Agent Orange were dumped on 12,000 square miles of Vietnam between 1961 and 1971.

The U.S. military’s goal was to remove vegetation obscuring the movement of Viet Cong soldiers. The result was an act of “ecocide” that caused horrific damage to the environment and deleterious health impacts for Vietnamese military and civilians as well as American troops.

Perhaps most surprising is that Galston, outraged at the perversion of his research, helped lead a successful protest effort that resulted in President Nixon banning the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam in 1971. His victory is a reminder of an era when awareness of environmental problems led to concrete action, including the creation of the EPA and the passage of the Clean Air and Clean War Acts. It’s hard not to be impressed at Galston’s commitment and follow-through.

When I first learned that there was a soybean-Agent Orange connection, I thought the details of the story would make a great hook for a narrative investigating the intersection of soybeans, genetic modification, and herbicides. Because one of the two primary chemicals incorporated in Agent Orange was 2,4 D, which is today one of the world’s most widely used herbicides. And one of the manufacturers of Agent Orange was Monsanto, later the creator of the, so far, most commercially successful genetically modified organism in the world, the Roundup Ready soybean. Roundup Ready soybeans are popular because they are designed with built-in resistance to the herbicide Roundup. When an agribusiness sprays a field of Roundup Ready soybeans with Roundup, every plant except the soybean dies.

Or at least that’s what used to happen. Nature is more persistent than even Arthur Galston. Resistance to glyphosate, Roundup’s primary herbicidal chemical, has evolved rapidly, most famously in the form of the “super-weed” palmer amaranth. The relentless emergence of herbicide-resistant weeds has forced soybean agribusinesses to diversify beyond Roundup. One of the more popular backups has been 2,4 D. To keep pace with evolution, the big seed companies are now marketing genetically modified soybeans that are resistant to both glyphosate and 2,4 D.  Your move, palmer amaranth!

And so it goes.

But that narrative is currently on hold due to an unanticipated (to me) chapter in Arthur Galston’s life-story. As a consequence of his Agent Orange activism Galston and another anti-war scientist, Ethan Signer, a biologist at M.I.T., were invited to visit North Vietnam in 1971. The two men jumped at the chance to see the havoc wrought by Agent Orange for themselves. As they prepared for their trip, the news broke that the People’s Republic of China and the United States had started engaging in the “ping-pong diplomacy” that served as a prelude to eventual rapprochement between the two great powers. China’s foreign ministry started dropping hints that it was willing to countenance expanded contacts with the West. Since Galston and Signer were already going to be in the neighborhood, they decided to apply for visas to visit China. To their great surprise and delight, they were granted entry, becoming the first American scientists to visit China since 1949.

Galston ended up visiting twice, and wrote a book about his experiences, Daily Life in People’s China, the first chapter of which is titled “To China By Soybean.” Readers who have following my soybean series from its inception will likely appreciate why Galston’s book jumped to the top of my reading list.  

How did I gain entry into China at a time when so many others, better qualified by knowledge and experience, tried and failed? The answer is sufficiently eccentric to satisfy the most fatalistic reader. It began with soybeans – one of China’s most useful contributions to agriculture in the United States.

Daily Life in People’s China is a vivid snapshot of the People’s Republic of China in 1971 and 1972. As a record of what Galston saw and heard, it rings true. I have no doubt that the peasants that he and his wife and daughter toiled beside in the fields for two weeks at the Marco Polo Bridge People’s Commune were welcoming and friendly, or that the streets of Beijing and Shanghai were clean or that the physical health of the general population was orders of magnitude improved since pre-Liberation. Daily Life in People’s China is a time-capsule of unmistakable authenticity.

It is also, at the same time, from a contemporary perspective, fatally naïve in its willingness to parrot the Maoist party line. In 1971, the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution were over, so Galston missed out on the chance to witness competing factions of armed Red Guards battling each other with machine guns on city streets. But what later became dubbed the “ultra-left” line of the Gang of Four was very much the law of the land. Mao’s personality cult was at or near its peak; his wife, Jiang Qing, was the ultimate arbiter of all-encompassing cultural indoctrination.

Galston expresses misgivings about the level of state control exerted over the educational process, and occasionally notices when it is obvious that something is being staged for the benefit of foreigners, but he still expresses a fundamental positivity about how both the masses and intellectuals support the brilliant leadership of Chairman Mao. His enthusiasm not only fails to stand the test of time, but is also hard to reconcile with his sharp critiques of his own country’s leadership. He was no fool, and yet… he was still a “scientific innocent.”

For example, in reference to a purported recent rise in the standard of living for the peasantry, Galson notes that “all our hosts agreed that, while much of this advance resulted from new methods and diversification, the most important gains arose from the new political consciousness inspired by the Cultural Revolution, the most recent step in the socialization process.”

Or:

“In spite of certain deficiencies, however, the facts are quite clear: the People’s Republic of China has a definite educational objective – the training of socialist man and woman – and has fashioned an effective mechanism to implement it. The masses support the system enthusiastically. They’ve tried it and they like it.”

There are a lot of things going on here. In 1971 very few people outside of China were aware of the millions of people who died of starvation during “the three bad years” of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961). The true extent to which the Cultural Revolution had gutted China’s educational system and exposed countless loyal and patriotic Chinese citizens to public humiliation and torture was also largely obscure to the Western eye. Indeed, the politics of the time were complicated by the fact that negative portrayals of Mao’s China were usually assumed by Western analysts of China to be right-wing anti-Communist propaganda (and to be fair, this was often the case!) It’s also hard not to be sympathetic to Galston’s yearning for an alternative to the environment-destroying, Vietnam-defoliating, capitalism-run-amok United States of the early 1970s. As recently as 1969, the unregulated disposal of industrial waste was setting rivers on fire in Ohio! When Galston spent his two weeks on the commune, admiring the same ethos of recycle-everything efficiency that F. H. King had raved about six decades earlier, it’s easy to see how he could favorably compare on-the-ground reality to the out-of-control pollution and wanton wastefulness of his home country.

Which makes Daily Life in People’s China something of a cautionary tale for China visitors at any point in time, all too willing to pontificate based on a quick visit.  

When Galston applied for a visa he was asked to include names of “friends” he knew who lived in China. He included Dr. Loo Shih-wei, a plant physiologist who had been a graduate student at CalTech, where Galston conducted research following his stint at the University of Illinois. Dr. Loo met up with Galston during his trip to China, and he is one of a handful of English-speaking scientists whose “frank” and “uninterpreted” conversations convinced Galston of elite-buy in to the Cultural Revolution.

But in her informative analysis of Western visitors to China in the 1970s, Speaking About China, Learning From China, Amateur Chinese Experts in 1970s America, Sigrid Schmalzer adds what she calls “a sad coda” to Galston’s experience.

In 1971 Loo Shih-wei met Galston in Shanghai and, after the initial awkward airport meeting, spoke enthusiastically about his life in China and the opportunities afforded him by the Cultural Revolution to benefit from peasant wisdom. In 1979, Loo was on a delegation of Chinese botanists to the United States. Sitting on Galston's couch, he burst into tears as he told the "real story" of that encounter. During the early years of the Cultural Revolution, his past life in the United States caught up with him and he was made to wear a dunce cap and shovel pig manure. In fact, Loo was still in the countryside when Galston wrote Loo's name on the visa application. He was greatly startled when he was suddenly called back to Shanghai and returned to his apartment, now cleared of the people who had taken it over. When Galston heard this in 1979, he was “angry.” He felt he had been "hoodwinked…"

“Hoodwinked” or not, Daily Life in People’s China closes with a moment of absolute crystal-clear prescience:

Visiting China has raised more questions than it has answered for me. It made me wonder whether “human nature” as we know it in the competitive West is the only course of development possible for mankind. It reawakened some of my youthful idealism and made me question some of the deep-rooted cynicism prevalent in our society. Yet the warm glow resulting from my admiration of the working-together spirit of the Chinese masses is dulled somewhat by the uneasy feeling that the present state of affairs might suddenly transform if a change in China’s leadership should bring with it a radical shift in direction.

Which is exactly what happens. On September 9, 1976, four years after Galston’s last visit to China, Chairman Mao Zedong dies. Within a month, the Gang of Four is arrested. (Jiang Qing ends up committing suicide in jail in 1991.) By 1978, Deng Xiaoping has secured “paramount” power, and the “age of reform and opening” has begun. In 1981, the masses are informed via the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, that “The ‘cultural revolution’, which lasted from May 1966 to October 1976, was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic. It was initiated and led by Comrade Mao Zedong.”

And in 1982, a thirty-year-old Sichuanese teacher named Liu Yonghao takes advantage of the new entrepreneurially-friendly zeitgeist to quit his public sector job as a teacher and go into business raising quail with his three brothers.

The long-term implications of Liu Yonghao’s decision -- for international trade in soybeans, for biodiversity in Southern America, for the amount of pork consumed per capita by citizens of the People’s Republic, and for his own bank account (Liu is currently estimated to be the eleventh richest person in China) -- would be almost inconceivably immense.