Hepler-SmithE VtP Collaboration Biography

If I do pursue the toxaphene project that I mentioned, possibilities include:A toxaphene manufacturing plant in Brunswick, GA circa 1910s-1960s:https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/dec/10/toxic-chemicals-managed-forests-georgia-southLongleaf pine forest restoration sites—all over my part of North Carolina—aiming to replant the trees whose stumps were ground into toxaphene.https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/dec/10/toxic-chemicals-managed-forests-georgia-southCotton plantations (in the US or any of the many other places where large quantities of toxaphene were used) where toxaphene was applied and workers were exposed. Occupational exposures and health effects are a big whopping “known unknown” in the ATDSR (the US CDC’s toxics registry) profile on toxaphene. There may be an agnotological story here.The ambiguities of molecular location in the addition of chlorine to pine-stump-derived camphene to produce toxaphene, which created challenges for environmental monitoring and toxicological studies using methods premised on targeting a substance of a distinct molecular identity.Toxaphene’s location in (or absence from) the lists of environmental regulators and advocacy groups. (The pesticide was notably omitted from the EDF’s late 60s and 70s campaign against DDT and other organochlorine pesticides. I don’t yet know how much this has to do with its non-petrochemical origins, its ambiguous molecular structure, or the fact that it was much more of a hazard to aquatic ecosystems than to birds, and thus less of a concern to the early EDF, an Audubon Society spinoff.)Global maps of production, use, and environmental transport of toxaphene, circa 1950-present.