Ep. 01: Ecocide

The story of the use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War and the origin of the term "Ecocide" | In the autumn of 1942, a graduate student named Arthur Galston was working alone in a laboratory in Illinois, studying soybeans. What he found would eventually contribute to one of the most ecologically destructive chemicals ever deliberately released into a living landscape.

Between 1962 and 1971, the United States sprayed 76 million liters of herbicide across the forests, riverbanks, and farmland of South Vietnam. Agent Orange stripped five million acres of canopy, destroyed half the country's mangrove forests, and deposited a dioxin contaminant into the soil and food chain that is still measurable in the Vietnamese population born decades after the last spray mission.

"Ecocide" traces the scientists who tried to stop it, the companies that knew what they were producing and kept producing it, and the word that Arthur Galston coined in 1970 for a crime the world still doesn't have a law to punish.

Transcript

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Ecocide The destruction of the natural environment through human activity, whether deliberate, negligent, or systemic. The kind of destruction that, in recent years, has gained serious traction as a potential international crime, a category of harm grave enough to stand alongside genocide and crimes against humanity in the world's highest courts. The word was coined in 1970 by plant biologist Arthur Galston. He used it to describe what the United States military had done to the forests and farmlands of Vietnam during the war. He needed a word for something he understood in ways no one else could, because the science that had made the destruction possible started with him. Welcome to Ecoside. We start here with the story that gave us our name. In the fall of 1942, a graduate student and plant physiologist named Arthur Galston was working alone in a laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying soybeans. He was trying to solve a problem that had plagued Illinois farmers for decades. Soybean plants didn't flower early enough. The growing season in central Illinois was short, and crops that didn't flower before the first frost didn't produce. So Galton was looking for a way to chemically accelerate the process. His dissertation was titled Physiology of Flowering, and his research was funded in part by the U.S. Army, a fact that at the time was unremarkable. During World War II, federal military funding flowed into university laboratories across the country, supporting research in chemistry, biology, physics, and agriculture. The Army wasn't directing Galston's work or watching over his shoulder. It was just what wartime research looked like at land-grant universities. Resources went where they might someday be useful. What Gallston found was a synthetic compound called 235 triiotobenzoic acid, which plant scientists abbreviated as Tiba. At low concentrations, Tiba did exactly what he needed. It accelerated flowering in soybean plants. He documented the result, then decided to run a follow-up experiment by testing it at a much higher concentration. This time, the plants didn't flower at all. Instead, their leaves shriveled and fell. The stems were left bare and brown, stripped of everything green. He noted this effect as a footnote in his dissertation without further consideration. Then he finished his degree and went on to become one of the most respected plant biologists in the country at Yale University. Galston had no idea what he'd just found. In fact, he wouldn't for decades. That day, in 1942, he couldn't have known that one day his discovery would be used to destroy five million acres of forest, poison generations of adults and children, and give the world a word for environmental destruction that didn't yet have a name. Ecocide. It flew low and slow, below a thousand feet, and from the ground it wouldn't have raised any eyebrows. Just another aircraft in a war full of them. But this one wasn't dropping bombs. From the tanks fitted into its hold, it was releasing a chemical mist across a strip of jungle canopy below, 240 feet wide and nearly nine miles long. Each run was done in under five minutes. Within days, the trees would begin to die. Their leaves would fall and their branches would go bare. The forest floor, exposed to direct tropical sun for the first time ever, would dry and harden. The birds would leave and the mammals would follow. And into the spaces where the forest had stood, kogon grass would take over. Kogon grass is native to Southeast Asia, and it was already present at the forest's edges, but it was held in check by the dense canopy above it. With the canopy gone, there was nothing left to suppress it. Kogon grass is what ecologists call a pioneer species. That means it's one of the first plants to colonize severely disturbed ground. It spreads rapidly, and the defoliation of the jungle canopy provided the conditions it needed to explode. It spread across the exposed earth, crowding out everything that tried to grow back. The Vietnamese came to call it American grass. The chemical in those airplane tanks had a military codename derived from the color of the stripe painted on its storage drums, Agent Orange. The story of how it came to exist, how a compound synthesized in a university laboratory to help Illinois farmers grow soybeans became one of the most destructive chemicals ever released onto the earth, begins not in Vietnam, but in Brooklyn, New York, in 1920, when Arthur Gallston was born. The son of parents who had emigrated in the late 19th century from the Tsarist Russian Empire, Golston was inspired by the popular science writer Paul de Kreif, whose books about microbiologists and disease hunters gave him the idea that science could save mankind. He enrolled at Cornell University, studied botany, and, after graduating in 1940, accepted a teaching assistantship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His graduate advisor was a plant physiologist named Harry Fuller. Fuller was mostly absent due to the war pulling him to South America for research, so Galson was left to work largely alone. Fuller had handed him a packet of soybean seeds and a problem. Make them flower earlier. Golston's graduate student colleagues called his project the sex life of the soybean. In 1942, he discovered Tiba and its defoliant effect on plants, but gave it no more than a footnote in the appendix of his dissertation. He finished his degree in 1943 and spent time on a wartime rubber research project at Caltech before being drafted into the Navy in July 1944. He served as a natural resources officer in the military government on Okinawa, Japan, until his discharge in 1946. Then he came back and began building his career in plant physiology, first at Caltech, then Yale. By 1955, he was a full professor at Yale. By the early 1960s, he was chairing the botany department and was recognized as one of the most respected plant biologists in the country. In the late 1940s, two men showed up at Galston's office at Caltech. They told him they were from Fort Detrick, Maryland, more specifically, the U.S. Army's Chemical and Biological Warfare Research Facility. They'd found the appendix footnote in his dissertation. As David Zehrler documents in his book, The Invention of Ecocide, Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the scientists who changed the way we think about the environment, military scientists at Fort Detrick had spent the final years of World War II developing herbicides as weapons, testing them through aerial dispersal over the Florida Everglades, whose tropical humidity most closely resembled the Pacific Theater. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan ended the war before those weapons were deployed. But in the early years of the Cold War, with new conflicts taking shape across Asia and beyond, the research was resuming. Tiba, along with two related compounds, 2-4D and 2-45T, had emerged from that work as the most effective defoliance available. Golston's soybean footnote had pointed the way. By 1961, the U.S. had been involved in Southeast Asia for years, first propping up the French colonial government in Vietnam against a communist-led independence movement called the Viet Minh. Then, after France's humiliating military defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the U.S. backed the newly created government of South Vietnam against a communist successor movement to the Viet Minh called the National Liberation Front, more commonly known in America as the Viet Cong. We'll refer to them as the NLF for the remainder of this episode. The defeat at Dien Bien Phu effectively ended French colonial rule in Vietnam. The peace agreement that followed split the country at the 17th parallel into two states, a communist North and a U.S.-backed South, with national reunification elections promised within two years. Those elections never happened. Instead, the division hardened into a conflict that would define the next two decades in the region. American military advisors had been on the ground in Vietnam since the Eisenhower administration in the late 1950s, not combat troops, but military personnel embedded with South Vietnamese forces to train and guide them in their war against the NLF. The fear, rooted in Cold War thinking, was that if South Vietnam fell to the north, the rest of Southeast Asia would fall to communism too, a theory known as the domino effect. Helping South Vietnam win its war against the NLF without sending American soldiers to fight it was the central challenge of President John F. Kennedy's Vietnam policy. The herbicide missions were his answer to part of that challenge. In November 1961, Kennedy authorized the first herbicide spray missions in South Vietnam, more than three years before the first American combat troops landed on the ground at Dauning in March 1965. The NLF relied on the dense jungle canopy of South Vietnam's interior for cover. South Vietnamese forces couldn't see them, track their movements, or defend against ambushes. The strategy was that herbicides would strip the dense forest and expose the NLF. The U.S. military had three goals with this operation. The first was crop destruction, denying food to the NLF by spraying the rice fields and vegetable gardens in the areas they controlled. The second was observation, stripping the dense triple canopy jungle that hid the NLF infiltration routes from aerial surveillance. The third was logistical, defoliating patches of jungle to clear landing zones for American helicopters and footprints for new fire bases. Helicopter mobility was the signature American capability of the war, but it required ground to land on. That's why in regions with dense forest, the spray planes went in first. The original name for the program was Operation Hades, after the Greek god of the underworld and the realm of the dead. Someone decided that wasn't the right brand for an operation the U.S. was describing as a routine agricultural assistance to a friendly government. They renamed it Operation Ranch Hand, a name chosen because it conjured imagery of the American West, with the ranch hand clearing brush and taming wild land. Ranch Hand was run by the U.S. Air Force using modified C-123 cargo planes fitted with large pressurized spray tanks. Each aircraft could spray a swath of jungle roughly 240 feet wide and 9 miles long in under five minutes. The planes flew at low altitude, which meant the crews were exposed to both ground fire and the Agent Orange itself. Between 1967 and 1971, unarmed ranch hand aircraft took roughly 5,000 hits from hostile ground fire, making them one of the most shot-at units in the entire war. From the start, the program was designed to obscure American involvement. The C-123s carried removable identification insignia so that spray missions would appear to be flown by South Vietnamese forces. A 1962 agreement assigned formal ownership of the herbicide to the South Vietnamese government once the chemicals crossed into their territory, and the U.S. began describing ranch hand as a South Vietnamese program for which Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam and the seat of the U.S.-backed government, had requested American technical assistance. There was internal debate about whether herbicidal warfare constituted chemical warfare under the Geneva Protocol of 1925, and therefore whether it was prohibited under international law. Secretary of State Dean Rusk attempted to resolve the debate by citing British precedent. In Malaya, a British colonial territory in Southeast Asia, now part of Malaysia, the British military had used similar herbicides during the 1950s to strip jungle cover from communist guerrillas during a decade-long insurgency. The U.S. had not objected at the time. If it was acceptable then, Rusk argued, it was acceptable now. The program launched, and Kennedy personally approved individual spray runs until late 1962, when he delegated that authority to the military command and the ambassador in Saigon. Operation Ranch Hand's motto was twisted from the famous Only You Can Prevent a Forest Fire, Smoky Bear Public Service Campaign. It read, Only You Can Prevent a Forest. Posters went up at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and at Bienhua Air Base in Vietnam, starting in late 1965. The cowboy mythology went deeper than a slogan. As literary scholar Charles Waugh has noted in his analysis of ranch hand pilot Paul Cecil's memoir, Herbicidal Warfare, one of the only firsthand accounts from within the program, the formation radio commands were drawn directly from cattle drive language. Leaving the corral meant departing the aircraft parking area. Saddle up meant getting into formation. Take it down, cowboys, was the operation to descend to target altitude. Cecil's account describes who was assigned to the most dangerous work. Loading and unloading the 640-pound Agent Orange drums, the task involving the most direct skin contact with undiluted chemicals and the greatest risk from spills, was assigned to the South Vietnamese soldiers. Admiral Harry Felt, commander-in-chief of U.S. Pacific Forces, made this policy explicit in a telegram. South Vietnamese personnel would be used to the maximum extent possible in handling chemicals for the defoliant operation, including delivery to spray aircraft. The calculus changed in March 1965, when the first American combat troops, 3,500 Marines, waited ashore at Donang. The U.S. was no longer just advising South Vietnam's war against the NLF. It was fighting in it. Under President Lyndon Johnson, ranch hand expanded dramatically. As David Zealer documents in his book The Invention of Ecocide, 75% of all herbicide spraying took place between 1966 and 1969. The peak was 1967, when crews sprayed more than 1.5 million acres. The program grew alongside the escalation of direct American involvement in the war, a shift that had begun cautiously under Kennedy and then accelerated dramatically under Johnson, who had 500,000 American soldiers in Vietnam by 1968. In nine years of operation, Ranch Hand sprayed approximately 20 million gallons of herbicide across South Vietnam, Laos, and parts of Cambodia, a figure established not from the Air Force's wartime records, which understated the total, but from a 2003 reanalysis of the military's flight data by a Columbia University research team. About 11 million of those 20 million gallons were Asian Orange. Air Force records documented at least 6,542 spraying missions, typically three to five C-123s flying side by side on each run, laying down parallel spray lanes across the canopy below. 5 million acres of forest were defoliated. 500,000 acres of cropland were destroyed. More than 20% of South Vietnam's forests were sprayed at least once, and 12% of the country's total land area. Ranch hand was 95% of the defoliation program. The remaining 5%, about 1.6 million additional gallons, was sprayed by Army helicopter crews, Navy riverboats, ground trucks, and soldiers walking with tanks strapped to their backs, mostly around base perimeters, roadways, and firebases. Approximately 600,000 gallons fell on Laos along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The full record of what fell on Cambodia is incomplete to this day, but one mission in May 1969 sprayed a 173,000-acre rubber plantation in Kampong Cham province. Agent Orange was a 50-50 mixture of two herbicides, 24D and 245T. Monsanto Corporation and Dow Chemical were the primary manufacturers. As Charles Waugh documents, the herbicides were applied in Vietnam at up to 50 times the concentration recommended by the manufacturers for agricultural use. The military-grade formulations also contained dioxin, a toxic byproduct of the manufacturing process, at concentrations 6 to 25 times higher than in commercial products. Dioxin is classified by the World Health Organization as one of the most toxic compounds ever created by humans. It causes cancer and the birth defects and persists in soil for more than 100 years. Because of that longevity, it moves up the food chain through a process called biomagnification. Each organism that eats something contaminated accumulates a higher concentration than what the organism below it carried, so that a fish at the top of a river food chain carries far more dioxin in its tissue than the smaller prey it feeds on. At the concentrations found in the military-grade herbicide, it was a catastrophe in every barrel. The researcher who corrected the wartime accounting was Jean Mager Stellman of Columbia University. Her 2003 paper in the journal Nature added more than 7 million liters to the official record by combing through the Pentagon's archived flight logs and identifying missions the original tally had missed. But the volume correction was only a part of what Stellman's team uncovered. Her team also documented what the wartime accounting had obscured. The most contaminated herbicides were those sprayed earliest, between 1962 and 1965, in areas that saw concentrated, repeated application. Those areas corresponded to some of the most densely populated rural zones in South Vietnam. How much Monsanto and Dow understood about the dangers of what they were producing is documented in the memo that didn't become public until decades later. We'll address that later in this episode. The reason those concentrations were so high was manufacturing speed. To meet the Pentagon's supply quotas, Monsanto and Dow cooked the compounds at higher temperatures and reduced quality controls. What they didn't tell the military was that a slower, cleaner method existed. Documents unearthed during post-war veterans' litigation show that Dow had known since at least 1957 that reducing cooking temperatures could eliminate most of the dioxin contamination, but they didn't apply that technique to Vietnam grade production. The faster method was cheaper, and the customer, the Pentagon, was too important to their bottom line to slow down. Agent Orange didn't just kill trees. To understand the extent of the destruction to plants, forests, and ecosystems, you have to start at the cellular level. The herbicides in Agent Orange, 24D and 245T, are synthetic auxins. Oxens are the plant's growth hormones. Basically, they are chemical signals that regulate how cells elongate, how stems reach towards sunlight, and how leaves know when to unfurl. They dictate the timing of flowering, the direction of root growth, and the plant's response to injury. A defoliant containing auxin doesn't poison the plant the way a toxin poisons an animal. It overwhelms the plant's own regulatory system. After absorption through the leaf surface, the synthetic auxin hijacks a plant's internal signals. The plant begins growing uncontrollably in multiple directions at once. Cells multiply faster than the plant's structure can support. Within days, the leaves curl inward and yellow, branches wither at the tips. A single spray pass could strip the canopy to bare limbs within a week. In a tropical forest, this matters in ways that ripple outward in all directions. A tropical forest canopy is layered with microhabitats, each with its own temperature, humidity, and light conditions that support different species of wildlife. The triple canopy forests of South Vietnam's interior held insects that pollinated only in the Understory, birds that nested only in the mid-canopy, and mammals that foraged only at the forest floor. By removing the canopy, the entire system collapses. When a canopy dies, the forest floor is exposed to direct tropical sunlight. The soil underneath, which only knows the slow rhythm of leaf fall and gradual decomposition in a moist shaded environment, is suddenly overwhelmed with decomposing matter it can't absorb at normal rates, a phenomenon scientists call nutrient dumping. In South Vietnam, where months of intense seasonal rain follows months of dry heat, the rains that the canopy once absorbed now hit exposed ground directly, washing that nutrient-saturated topsoil away, triggering erosion and long-term nutrient depletion across vast stretches of the country. Native tree seedlings that might otherwise germinate find nothing to root in. Kogon grass, a pioneer species that colonizes a severely disturbed ground, moves in first. Once established, it can hold land for decades, crowding out every plant that tries to grow back. Bamboo follows, spreading aggressively from surrounding areas into the spaces the grass has already claimed. The mangrove forests of South Vietnam's coastal zones took the worst of it. Mangrove forests are among the most ecologically productive ecosystems on Earth. Their dense, interlocking root systems create nursery habitat for shellfish, crabs, shrimp, and the juvenile stages of fish species that spend their adult lives offshore. They filter sediment from rivers before it reaches the open ocean. They buffer coastlines against storm surge. They're also extremely vulnerable to defoliants like Agent Orange. Since their root systems are already stressed by the brackish tidal environment they inhabit, a single spray pass was often enough to kill them outright. As much as 50% of South Vietnam's mangroves, more than 1,400 square kilometers in all, was destroyed. The destruction of the mangroves triggers what's called a trophic cascade, a chain reaction through the food web that reached far beyond the trees themselves. The mangroves were the nursery on which the entire coastal fishery depended. Destroy the mangroves, and you destroy the fishery. Destroy the fishery, and you destroy the food source that coastal human communities and the species competing with those communities for the same fish depended on. In the rivers and streams draining the sprayed area, aquatic life suffered. The herbicides and the dioxin contamination entered waterways both directly through spray planes flying low over rivers and canals, and indirectly through runoff and erosion from the surrounding lands that had been sprayed. The invertebrate communities that formed the base of freshwater food chains were the first casualties. Mayflies, stoneflies, and caddysflies, among the most pollution-sensitive aquatic insects and the primary food source of many river fish, disappeared from affected waterways. Their loss cascaded upward. The fish that ate them declined. The birds and mammals that ate those fish declined. And the human communities that fished those rivers found themselves with less to eat. On land, biodiversity showed a massive decline. A Harvard scientist named Matthew Messelson, who surveyed a heavily sprayed forest, found 24 bird species and five mammal species. An adjacent unsprayed section of the same forest held 145 bird species and 30 mammal species. Those numbers described two different ecological worlds, differentiated only by whether a spray plane had flown over them. In the soil itself, earthworms, centipedes, millipedes, springtails, and termites are the engineers, breaking down organic matter and maintaining the porosity that allows water to penetrate further than run off. They too felt the effects of the application. Spray a forest with a concentrated defoliant like Agent Orange, and you don't just kill the trees. You disrupt the entire living matrix in which the trees are embedded. In 2021, researchers Kim Chung and Huan Xin published a study in environmental science and technology, documenting something extraordinary. In the five decades since Operation Ranch Hand ended, no systematic study had been conducted of what Agent Orange did to Vietnamese wildlife. Dozens of papers had examined human health effects. Others had tracked dioxin in soil and sediment, but the effects on the biodiversity of the impacted ecosystems, the animals, insects, and microorganisms, remained entirely unexamined. The researchers identified endemic Vietnamese species whose ranges overlapped precisely with the most heavily sprayed zones. The Vietnamese pheasant, found only in the forests of central Vietnam, and the Saula, one of the world's rarest large mammals, a bovine so elusive it wasn't discovered by scientists until 1992, both inhabit terrain that was heavily defoliated and then subjected to further destruction by Rome plows, the massive bulldozers the U.S. military deployed as Ranch Hand wound down. Chong Enzin's conclusion was not a finding about what happened to these animals. It was a finding about the fact that after five decades, across hundreds of published studies on Asian Orange's consequences, no one had looked. The question of what Operation Ranch Hand did to the wildlife in the ecosystems it destroyed, to this day remains unanswered. Then there's the dioxin. TCDD, the most toxic form of dioxin, doesn't dissolve in water. It binds to organic matter in soil and sediment, where it can remain active for more than 100 years. As researchers Kenneth Olson and Lois Wright Morton documented in their analysis of USAID contamination reports, dioxin from sprayed areas clings to sediment and settles in wetlands, marshes, rivers, lakes, and ponds. There, it's ingested by bottom-feeding fish and shrimp, accumulating in their fatty tissue and moving up the food chain into the larger fish that formed the basis of the Vietnamese diet. The dioxin that entered the ecosystem during the spray program didn't stay where it landed. The opposition to Operation Ranch Hand began almost as soon as the planes started flying. Bert Pfeiffer was a wildlife biology professor at the University of Montana, who had spent years studying the fallout from decades-long nuclear weapons testing in Nevada. Montana set in the path of fallout drifting from the Nevada test site, and Pfeiffer was alarmed enough that he had powdered milk shipped in from California to feed his young children, not trusting the local dairy that grazed on land he believed was exposed to nuclear fallout. He understood what it meant for a government to expose a population to a substance it claimed was safe, because he'd seen it before. In the summer of 1966, Pfeiffer read a newspaper article about ranch hand. It disturbed him enough that he began pushing for an organized scientific response, and he took that push to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS. The AAAS's Executive Council received his concerns cautiously, as his call for urgent action was rejected as too political for the organization to take on directly. By that point, other scientists had been pushing for a response too. In January 1966, 29 researchers from Harvard and other Boston area institutions sent a petition to the White House calling for the immediate end of herbicidal warfare and labeling the program barbarous. One of them was Matthew Messelson, who you remember from earlier in the episode as the Harvard scientist who conducted wildlife studies in Vietnam. Messelson was a biochemist who had built a career at the intersection of science and Washington foreign policy. His rationale for opposing chemical and biological weapons was that modern war should be kept as expensive as possible. That's because cheap weapons proliferate. A compound that any state or insurgency could manufacture inexpensively was a threat to every conflict. The January 1966 petition received no response. Lyndon Johnson, as documented by David Zehrler in The Invention of Ecocide, personally instructed his staff to ignore it. In September 1966, 12 plant physiologists, led by Arthur Galston, sent a second letter to Johnson. It explained the ecological interconnectedness that Ranch Hand ignored, that selective herbicides couldn't target only one plant species, that some compounds persisted in soil for years, and that the massive chemical alteration of an entire region could produce consequences no one had yet studied. The letter added that crop destruction would disrupt local food systems in rural Vietnamese communities, particularly those reliant on subsistence agriculture, and potentially deprive tens of thousands of non-combatants of food. Two weeks later, Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy replied that the scientists' concerns were unfounded. They couldn't understand the situation because they weren't there. The government had prepared for exactly this type of scientific challenge. A National Security Council memo titled For Use Only If Asked contained three stock answers to be used whenever the herbicide question arose in press conferences or congressional testimony. Both Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, and Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, were instructed to deliver them unchanged. The answers were these: the herbicides aren't anti-personnel weapons and don't fall under the Geneva Protocol. The spraying is more carefully controlled than the scientists claim. The administration is actively reviewing the program. All three of these answers were used from 1965 on. Then in 1970, Messelston traveled to Vietnam on behalf of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences Herbicide Assessment Commission. While in Saigon, he visited the office of General Creighton Abrams, then the commanding general of all U.S. forces in Vietnam. Messelsen asked what Abrams thought of the herbicide program. Abrams replied, Do you want to know what I think? I think it's shit. When Messelston asked why the program continued, if even America's highest-ranking onsite official thought so poorly of it, Abrams answered that the decision to continue was made in Washington, D.C. The general commanding the war thought the chemical program was worthless, but he kept flying it because his bosses told him to. In February of 1970, Arthur Galston was 49 years old, chair of the botany department at Yale, and had spent the last four years consumed by his fight against herbicidal warfare. He acknowledged that the obsession came partly from guilt that his own dissertation research had contributed to Agent Orange being sprayed across the forests of Vietnam. That month, he attended a conference in Washington, D.C. Dozens of scholars had gathered to survey the full range of American actions in Vietnam. During a panel titled Technology and American Power, working from notes that he'd been refining for years, Galston coined a term. He first described genocide, the deliberate destruction of a people. Then he proposed a parallel category, the willful and permanent destruction of an environment in which people can live in a manner of their own choosing, he argued, deserved the same moral and legal standing as genocide. He proposed calling it ecocide. That was the word's first appearance in the public record. The man who coined it had spent nearly three decades living with the knowledge that his soybean research had made it necessary. What made the moment even more noteworthy was that it coincided with the collapse of a cover-up that had protected the program for years. A government-suppressed report documenting that 245T, the dioxin-carrying component of Agent Orange, caused birth defects in lab animals, buried since 1966, had just surfaced. A Harvard biology graduate student named William Hasseltine had obtained it, passed it to Matthew Messelson, and in January 1970, weeks before Galston's Washington conference, the three men published the story as a cover article in The New Republic. The revelation was a bombshell. Not just that Agent Orange may cause birth defects in humans, but that the government had possessed evidence of the risk since 1966 and had actively suppressed it. We'll return to that cover-up in full detail later in this episode. In October 1969, Nixon's science advisor Lee DeBridge issued a White House statement promising to restrict 245T while further evidence was gathered. On April 15, 1970, the Department of Defense suspended all use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. On December 26, 1970, the White House announced it would begin a phase out of the entire herbicide operation. The announcement came a week earlier than planned. The AAAS Commission report was about to be released, and it was expected to be scathing. The Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Nixon agreed to let the announcement out first, before the scientists could, so it wouldn't look like the administration was being dragged into action by a group of academics. On January 7, 1971, the last Ranch Hand aircraft flew, bringing an end to the Air Force program that had defined the defoliation campaign for nearly a decade. But Ranch Hand wasn't the only operation. Army helicopter and ground crews had been running their own herbicide missions throughout the war, spraying around fire bases and defensive perimeters. Those operations continued until October 31st, 1971, when the last U.S. helicopter herbicide mission was flown and the program finally ended in full. Six months earlier, the Herbicide Assessment Commission spent a month in Vietnam documenting the program's effects on the ground. The Commission then compiled a scientific assessment, drawing on ecological surveys, field samples, and existing military records. Its findings, presented at the AAAS annual meeting in Chicago in December 1970, were damning. Up to one half of South Vietnam's mangroves had been destroyed, with almost no sign of recovery years after the last spray mission. Half of the mature hardwood trees north and west of Saigon were dead, with Kogon grass and the bamboo filling the spaces they left behind. Militarily, the crop destruction program had been a near total failure. Nearly all the food destroyed had been intended for civilian populations, not the NLF. On the question of human health, the Commission couldn't go as far. To establish a link between the spraying and the birth defects and stillbirths being reported across the country, the commission needed the Pentagon's flight logs, the precise record of where the spray had gone and when. The Pentagon refused to provide them. Without that data, causation couldn't be proved. But the eco side was irrefutable. The political battle around the use of herbicides in war ran for years, and it centered on a document called the Geneva Protocol. The Geneva Protocol is an international arms control agreement, first signed in 1925 in the aftermath of the chemical warfare of World War I. It prohibits the use of chemical and biological weapons in war. The U.S. had signed it, but never ratified it, meaning it had never formally committed to be bound by it. For decades, that gap hadn't mattered much. Now it did. Beginning in the late 1960s, resolutions had been introduced at the United Nations arguing that the herbicide campaign violated the protocol. The Nixon administration rejected that interpretation. Herbicides, Nixon insisted, were not weapons. They killed plants, not people, and the protocol didn't apply. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee disagreed. When the committee took up ratification of the program, it made its position clear. It would only approve ratification if the administration agreed that herbicides were covered under the ban and renounced their use in future wars. Nixon refused the deal. The standoff lasted through the end of his presidency. In December 1974, the Senate ratified the Geneva Protocol. Four months later, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order renouncing the use of herbicides in war. It had taken 11 years, but the scientists who had opposed the wartime use of herbicides finally won. In 1966, a young Vietnamese woman named Tran To Gna was working in the Ku Qi District north of Saigon as a war correspondent for the NLF's Liberation News Agency. She'd been born in 1942 in the Sochtong province in the Mekong Delta and trained as a chemist before she became a journalist. Now, she was reporting from the field for the NLF. One day, as she emerged from an underground tunnel where she'd been sheltering, she looked up and saw an American C-123 plane trailing a long white cloud across the sky above her. A sticky rain trickled down her shoulders and smeared on her skin and sent her into a fit of coughing. She didn't know what it was. In those fields and forests and river deltas, no one had been told what was being sprayed above them. Two years later, Nga gave birth to a daughter. The girl died at 17 months old from a heart malformation. A second child later developed a serious blood disorder. Nga herself would go on to develop breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, heart and lung disease, and other conditions, she would spend the rest of her life connecting to that cloud of Agent Orange that fell on Ku Chi. As of 2026, at the age of 84, she isn't done fighting. More on her later. The scale of direct human exposure to Agent Orange across the country was staggering. The flight logs the Pentagon had refused to hand over to the Herbicide Assessment Commission in 1970 were eventually declassified and archived in a database that recorded the coordinates of every ranch hand spray mission. Decades later, Jean Mager Stellmond and colleagues at Columbia University used that record to calculate that at least 3,181 Vietnamese villages had been sprayed. Somewhere between 2.1 million and 4.8 million Vietnamese civilians were present during those spraying missions. Farming communities underneath the spray were devastated. Some of it was collateral damage. Ranch hand crews flew at 150 feet in the early morning because once the temperature reached 85 degrees, the chemical mist rose instead of falling. At wind speeds above 10 miles per hour, the spray scattered across miles of ground that hadn't been targeted at all. Protocols required crews to abort missions when conditions exceeded those limits, but conditions almost never cooperated. The monsoons rolled through. Hot air rose off the hillsides that the spray had already cleared. The C-123s themselves stirred turbulence as they flew. A 1974 National Academy of Sciences study of ranch hand found that chemical drift from defoliation missions destroyed more Vietnamese crops than the dedicated crop destruction missions ever did. The planes aimed at the forests, but the fields took the spray anyway. But not all of it was drift. Some was deliberate. In October 1962, the U.S. began directly targeting food crops with a food denial campaign. The idea was to starve the NLF out of the countryside by destroying the rice fields in areas they controlled. By 1965, 42% of all herbicide spraying in Vietnam was crop destruction. That year, members of Congress were told in a classified briefing that crop destruction was the program's more important purpose. The defoliation framing was for the public. The Rand Corporation studied the program in 1967. Its analysts interviewed more than 200 former Viet Cong fighters and Vietnamese civilians. The NLF didn't grow most of its food, so it had to steal from rural villages. When the spray destroyed those crops, the NLF replaced what it lost by confiscating whatever remained of the villagers' food. Rand estimated that for every ton of rice denied to the Viet Cong, more than 500 civilians lost their crops. When the AAAS Urbicide Assessment Commission traveled to Vietnam in 1970, it found that nearly all the food destroyed had been grown by mountain farming communities, civilians with no connection to the NLF. Rice crops stood in flooded patties and died. Corn and vegetable gardens collapsed. For some farmers, the spray had drifted in from missions aimed at the forest. The fish disappeared too. In coastal areas where the mangroves had been killed, the fishery that depended on mangrove nursery habitat was decimated. Fishing communities that had pulled food from those waters for millennia found the yields declining sharply as dioxin settled into river sediment and coastal mud and moved through the food chain into the fish. The long-term human health effects were even worse than the immediate losses. In 1970, during the AAAS survey, scientists collected breast milk from nursing mothers in heavily sprayed areas of South Vietnam and transported the samples back to the U.S. for analysis. The results were documented by Arnold Schechter and colleagues at SUNY Health Science Center in a 1995 study published in the American Journal of Public Health. They revealed the highest concentration of TCDD dioxin ever recorded in human breast milk. Mothers in the most heavily sprayed areas of South Vietnam were carrying approximately 1,832 parts per trillion of TCDD in their milk in 1970. The same analysis found that two decades later, by the early 1990s, people in the southern and central regions of Vietnam still showed blood and tissue TCDD levels roughly six times higher than people in the North, where Agent Orange had never been used. Dioxin passes from mother to infant. Through breast milk, a process scientists call toxic offloading, in which an organism transfers its accumulated chemical burden directly to another. It passes from contaminated soil into the vegetables grown in that soil, from contaminated sediment into the fish and shellfish that live there, and into the people who eat them, with concentrations multiplying at each step through biomagnification. The exposure that began in 1962 when the first spray missions flew over South Vietnam didn't stop when the last spray plane returned to base in 1971. It continued, silently and invisibly, through the food people ate, the water they drank, and the milk mothers gave to their infants. The Vietnamese government estimates that exposure to Agent Orange led to the deaths of more than 400,000 people. Roughly 500,000 children are estimated to have been born with Agent Orange-related birth defects. The U.S. government has described those figures as unreliable, while acknowledging that dioxin exposure causes cancer, birth defects, neurological damage, diabetes, and immune system disorders. Today, 55 years after the last spray mission, the contamination is still moving through the food chain. In 1968, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr. took command of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam, the so-called Brown Water Navy, which was the fleet of swift boats that patrolled the country's rivers and inland waterways. Officially designated Patrol Craft Fast, or PCFs, they were 50-foot aluminum vessels originally designed as oil rig water taxis, fast and shallow enough to operate in the river networks where larger ships couldn't go. His mission on the Ka Mao Peninsula, at the southernmost tip of the country, was to cut off NLF supply routes moving through the dense vegetation lining every canal and waterway in the region. Those riverbanks were thick with growth. Every waterway was bordered by vegetation that could conceal an ambush. Sailors on patrol in swift boats were regularly killed and wounded by fire from both banks, from positions they couldn't locate before the rounds were already in the air. Somewhat made the decision to spray the riverbanks with Agent Orange. Before issuing the order, he consulted the manufacturers. He asked Monsanto and Dow whether there were health risks to American personnel who would be operating in sprayed areas, drinking from those rivers, breathing the air above those banks, touching vegetation that had been sprayed. The companies told him the herbicides were safe. Zumwalt ordered the spraying. One of the sailors patrolling those rivers was his son. Lieutenant Elmo Zumwalt III commanded the PCF-35, a fast attack patrol craft on the Kwa Long River in the Camao Peninsula. Among the other Swift boat commanders serving under his father was a young officer named John Carey, who would later serve as a U.S. Senator and Secretary of State. Elmo III served his tour, came home, went to law school, and built a practice in Fayetteville, North Carolina. His son Russell was born in 1977, but within months, his parents noticed he was slower to develop than expected. He was eventually diagnosed with sensory integration dysfunction, a condition that affected his ability to discriminate sounds and sights that disrupted his speech and learning. In January 1983, Elmer III was diagnosed with lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system, at the age of 36. In February 1985, during his ninth biopsy, doctors discovered he also had Hodgkin's disease. He initially survived thanks to an experimental bone marrow transplant from his sister. The father and son wrote a book together, My Father, My Son. It told the story that the family believed the spray program had given Elma III two cancers and given his son a disability. But after five years of treatment, Elma III couldn't hold the cancers off. In August 1988, he died at his home in Fayetteville, with his father and his brother Jim at his side. He was 42 years old. His father, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr., issued a statement on the day his son died that contained both what he believed about Agent Orange and what it had cost him. In his statement, Zumwalt said he would have still ordered the defoliation if given the chance, that the objectives it had achieved were worth it. But none of that erased what he carried about Elmo. He said it was the first thing he thought of when he woke up and the last thing on his mind before sleep. Elmo Zumwalt Jr. spent the remainder of his life fighting for Agent Orange compensation for veterans. He didn't believe the manufacturer's denials. He believed that he'd been misled by Monsanto and Dow, who told him the chemicals were safe when they had reason to think otherwise, and that his son had paid for it. He became, in the words of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, veterans' most tenacious advocate in Washington on the issue. He died at the age of 79 in January 2000 of mesothelioma, caused by asbestos exposure aboard Navy ships. In June 1966, a government contractor called Bionetics Research Laboratories sent a report to the National Cancer Institute, or NCI. The finding was that female lab mice injected with small doses of 245T gave birth in very high ratios to offspring with birth defects. In higher doses, 100% of female rats produced stillborn or malformed offspring. The NCI received the findings and convened a meeting. Present were representatives from the National Institute of Health, the National Academies of Sciences, and the executives from Dow Chemical and other herbicide manufacturers. Everyone reviewed the data. Then, as David Zero documents in the invention of EcoSide, the assembled scientists and company executives agreed to keep it hidden. The findings would not surface publicly until several years later. Three years passed, and ranch hand crews continued to spray. When the cover-up finally came to light in early 1970, Dow's vice president for medical research responded the way the company had been responding to safety concerns for years. If Dow thought 245T was harming anybody, they'd take it off the market tomorrow. They didn't. What Dow argued then and for decades afterwards was that the dioxin contamination was an unintended byproduct of the chemical reaction used to produce 245T, generated when the manufacturing process ran too hot. Better production controls, they said, could reduce TCDD levels. The herbicide itself, properly made, was safe. The dioxin was an impurity, a contaminant, not a component, and the Dow argued that liability for an unintended manufacturing byproduct was legally distinct from a product that was itself toxic. This distinction mattered enormously for liability purposes, but it didn't matter at all to the people who'd been exposed. The dioxin was in the barrels, in the soil, in the water, and in the breast milk. Whether it got there through the herbicide itself or through a manufacturing byproduct in the herbicide didn't change what it did once it was inside a human or an animal. How much Dow understood about the dangers of what it was producing and when they understood it is documented in two pieces of evidence that didn't become public until decades later. The first is an internal memo. On June 24th, 1965, Dao's chief toxicologist, V.K. Roe, wrote to company executives describing dioxin as exceptionally toxic, with tremendous potential for producing chloracne, a severe disfiguring skin condition that had already appeared in workers at chemical plants producing the compound, and systemic injury to internal organs. Roe was worried about what would happen if word got out. That same year, Dow quietly rebuilt its own domestic feedstock operations to reduce dioxin in the products it sold commercially. That means that the cleaner process existed, and Dow used it at home in the U.S., but they kept shipping the contaminated version to Vietnam. The second piece of evidence is a letter. In 1988, more than two decades after the Roe memo, a U.S. Air Force scientist named James Clary, who'd helped design the spray system used in Vietnam, wrote that the manufacturer's scientists were aware of the potential for damage from dioxin contamination in the herbicide. They were even aware that the military formulation contained higher dioxin concentrations than the civilian version, and then he explained that no one had raised an alarm because the material was to be used on the enemy. They never even considered a scenario in which their own soldiers, the pilots flying the missions, and the sailors patrolling the rivers below, would be exposed. The Vietnamese civilians who lived under the spray, farmers, children, and families who never knew what was falling on them, hadn't entered the calculation at all. The story of what the chemical companies knew has a domestic American chapter that's rarely told alongside the Vietnam story. At Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle, the U.S. military tested its herbicides from 1962 to 1970, in a climate chosen because its humidity most closely resembled the environment of Vietnam. Over those eight years, approximately 170,000 liters of agent orange and related compounds were sprayed on the C-52 test quadrant at Eglin. As Natalia Dong documents in homing toxicity, the domestication of herbicidal warfare, a 2023 study published in the journal Catalyst, civilian workers contracted through a company called Vitro Services performed support labor for these tests. They watched beakers filled with chemical compounds, collected screens from the test field for laboratory analysis, and operated cameras that recorded spray dispersal. One of those workers, a man named Tommy Brown, described to a journalist what it felt like when the spray planes passed low over his position. Sometimes it was a mist, but once it was like thin mud. It covered him. He didn't move, because Vitro had told him not to. He stayed at his camera because the company's equipment needed to be protected. Nobody told him he'd have to sacrifice his body to do so. Another worker, Sam Jordan, described a military-grade agent Orange as Roundup on steroids. Unlike veterans, who eventually won compensation through a 1984 class action settlement, contracted civilians don't qualify for VA benefits. They fall into the gap between military service and civilian liability, exposed to the same Agent Orange but denied access to the medical care to treat the ongoing illnesses. In 1979, thousands of Vietnam veterans filed a class action lawsuit against seven herbicide manufacturers, including Monsanto and Dow. The case settled in 1984 for $180 million, paid into a fund for roughly 250,000 claimants and their families. But with one clear caveat, the herbicide manufacturers would provide no admission of wrongdoing. In 2004, the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange filed a lawsuit naming many of the same manufacturers. The same federal judge who'd provided over the veterans case, Jack Weinstein in the Eastern District of New York, dismissed it. He found that the herbicides hadn't constituted a chemical weapon under international law as it existed during the war, and therefore the manufacturers weren't liable. The Second Circuit Court upheld the dismissal, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. By 2004, the National Academies of Sciences had been publishing regular comprehensive reviews of Agent Orange health effects for over a decade. The most recent update, Veterans and Agent Orange, update 11, published in 2018, found evidence linking Agent Orange exposure to 19 conditions, including multiple cancers, Parkinson's disease, type 2 diabetes, and spina bifida in veterans' children. You'll remember Tran To Gna from earlier in the episode. She's now 84 years old and lives in Erie, a suburb south of Paris. She was born in 1942 in Sochtong Province in the Mekong Delta, trained as a chemist, became a journalist, spent the war as a correspondent and NLF liaison agent, and has spent the last decade doing something that no Vietnamese victim of Agent Orange had ever been legally positioned to do: suing the American chemical companies in a court that would hear the case. The legal hinge is her French citizenship. French law allows a French citizen to sue a foreign corporation for harm committed abroad. After years as a school principal in Ho Chi Minh City, then as a go-between connecting French donors with Agent Orange victims in Vietnam, Trento Na moved to France in the 1990s and became a citizen while retaining her Vietnamese nationality. That citizenship became the only available door through which a Vietnamese victim could seek accountability from a manufacturer in a jurisdiction that wasn't the US, where every legal path had been closed. Her case was personal. Her first daughter, born in 1968, died in infancy from a heart malformation. Her second daughter was born with hemolytic disease, a blood disorder she had transmitted to her through exposure. Nga herself had since been diagnosed with breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, alpha thalassemia, recurrent tuberculosis, heart problems, and lung problems, conditions she and her doctors attributed to Agent Orange exposure. She didn't begin preparing the lawsuit until she was in her 70s. With the help of three French attorneys working pro-bono, she filed suit in the civil court in Erie in 2014, naming 14 American chemical companies, Monsanto, Dow, and 12 others, that had manufactured and supplied Agent Orange to the U.S. military. The lawsuit accused them of knowingly producing a product contaminated with an extremely toxic compound, selling it to the military at concentrations far beyond any agricultural use, and supplying it to a program they knew would spray directly on civilian populations. Over the following decade, she attended more than 20 preliminary hearings. The Vietnamese Association for Victims of Agent Orange gathered more than 400,000 signatures in support. French parliamentarians spoke at press conferences on her behalf. More than 200 overseas Vietnamese and French supporters gathered in Paris before the 2024 appeal hearing to show solidarity. At the hearing, 30 attorneys appeared on behalf of the defendant companies. In August 2024, the court dismissed her appeal and upheld the company's claim of legal immunity as wartime government contractors. Her lawyers announced within hours that she would take the case to the Corps de Cessation, France's highest court, for a final ruling. The court heard her case on June 16, 2025. As of this recording, no decision had been issued. If the court rules in her favor, the case would be sent back for a full retrial from the beginning, with expert testimony finally allowed to establish the link between her dioxin exposure and her diseases. If it rules against her, the legal options are exhausted. The chemical companies have offered her money to settle at various points in the litigation. She refused every time. Her response, when asked why, I will not stop. I will be on the side of the victims until my last breath. What she wants from the lawsuit isn't specific to herself. She describes the fight as the last chapter of her life. She was 24 years old in 1966, when the planes flew over her head and left their sticky rain on her skin. Sixty years later, she's still fighting. In the forests of central Vietnam, in the areas most heavily sprayed by ranch ant in the late 1960s, there are patches of land where the original canopy has never returned, where the spray killed the trees and the Kogon grass moved in before any native seedlings could establish. In those areas, the grass has held the ground for more than 50 years. In the years after the 1976 reunification between South and North Vietnam, the Vietnamese government launched reforestation programs. Some of them worked. A Vietnamese government scientist named Fung Tu Boi developed a method for restoring inland forests, planting high-value, fast-growing commercial shade trees to cover the ground quickly and protect native seedlings from direct sunlight until they were strong enough to compete. Once the native seedlings were established, local residents could harvest the shade trees and sell them for profit, creating an economic incentive to continue the restoration. David Zierler, who interviewed Fung for the invention of Ecocide Book, describes the method as ingenious. Not just ecologically, but socially, because it aligned the economic interests of surrounding communities with the long-term health of the forest. The mangroves have partially recovered in some areas, evidence that even severely damaged ecosystems can regenerate, given enough time and protection. This is one of the few encouraging ecological stories in the ranch hand legacy. The dioxin hotspots are a different problem entirely. Agent Orange was loaded, stored, and distributed from American airbases throughout South Vietnam. The handling process, moving 640-pound drums from ships to trucks, to storage depots to spray planes, involved inevitable spills, leaks, and contamination of surrounding soil. Former U.S. air bases at Da Nang, Bienhua, Fukats, and others accumulated extraordinary concentrations of TCDD in their soils over the years of the program. The Donang Airport Dioxin Hotspot, a joint U.S. Vietnam remediation effort funded largely by USAID, was formally completed in 2017 after years of work and tens of millions of dollars. The Bienhua Air Base, a larger and more severely contaminated site, is still being remediated as of this recording. The process involves excavating contaminated soil, encapsulating it in lined disposal cells, and allowing it to biodegrade over decades. At Bienhua, estimates of the contaminated volume run into the hundreds of thousands of cubic meters. Beyond the former air bases, dioxin dispersed by the spray missions remains in the river sediment and pond mud of the most heavily sprayed areas, in the Mekong Delta, along the central coast, and in the former mangrove zones of the Ka Mao Peninsula. Fish and shellfish in those areas continue to carry elevated TCDD concentrations in their tissues, and the contamination isn't going away. A study of central Vietnam found TCDD concentrations as high as 1,000 milligrams per kilogram in soil and sediment samples more than 30 years after the spraying, and found that contamination zones were actively expanding outward from the originally affected areas, not shrinking. Dioxin that settled into one location decades ago is moving, carried by water, absorbed by organisms, and deposited somewhere else. People who eat locally caught fish, particularly the poor rural and ethnic minority communities who have no alternative food source, continue to absorb the dioxin that entered the ecosystem 60 years ago. As Yamashita and Tin's 2022 study found, the health effects of this ongoing exposure are still measurable in the Vietnamese population born after the war ended. The damage isn't just historical, it's present, it's worse, and it's expanding. In February 1970, Arthur Gallston stood at the conference in Washington, D.C. and proposed a word for what had been done in Vietnam. Ecocide. The word has since traveled. In June 1972, Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palm spoke at the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm and invoked the Vietnam War explicitly as an act of eco-cide. That conference launched the UN Environment Program, the first international institution dedicated to global environmental governance. In the 1980s and 1990s, international law scholars began proposing that ecocide be recognized as a fifth crime under the Rome Statute, the treaty governing the International Criminal Court, alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Draft versions of the statute included eco-cide-related language through 1996. That year, the language was removed. The effort to restore it continues. In 2021, an independent expert panel convened by the Stop Ecoside Foundation published a proposed legal definition for potential adoption by the International Criminal Court. Arthur Galston died in June 2008, at 88 years old. He'd spent 65 years living with the knowledge that a footnote in his soybean dissertation had led to the largest chemical attacks on a natural environment in human history. He'd spent nearly 40 of those years actively fighting to make the world legally accountable for such attacks. Gallston never considered himself an environmentalist. He was a scientist, and his objection was ethical rather than ecological. Ecoside was wrong because it destroyed the conditions in which human beings could live freely. He was trying to protect people by insisting that the environments they depend on can't be destroyed with impunity. But the nature that Agent Orange destroyed didn't care about the distinction. The mangroves were gone, whether or not anyone had a word for what happened to them. Vietnam's wildlife was either there or it wasn't. The dioxin and the Mekong Delta sediment was either in the fish or it wasn't. And whether it was called eco-cide or a military program or an acceptable cost of war made no difference to the organisms absorbing it. The word came out of those forests in Vietnam half a century ago. It's still waiting for the law to follow. Between 1962 and 1971, U.S. military forces sprayed approximately 76 million liters of herbicides over the forests, riverbanks, and farmlands of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Asian Orange accounted for roughly 60% of the total volume. The herbicides were applied at concentrations up to 50 times those used in domestic agriculture in America. The military grade formulations contained dioxin at levels 6 to 25 times higher than commercial products. The AAAS Herbicide Assessment Commission found in 1970 that between one-fifth and one-half of South Vietnam's mangrove forests had been utterly destroyed. Hardwood forests across large portions of the interior sustained severe damage. The crop destruction program denied food primarily to civilian populations. No comprehensive study of the program's effects on Vietnamese wildlife has ever been conducted. The Vietnamese government attributes 400,000 deaths to Agent Orange exposure and estimates 4.8 million people were exposed. American veterans filed a class action lawsuit in 1979 against the chemical manufacturers. It settled in 1984 for $180 million with no admission of wrongdoing. Vietnamese victims have received no compensation from the manufacturers. Civilian contract workers at Eglin Air Force Base, where the herbicides were domestically tested, have received no compensation or formal recognition. Dioxin contamination persists in the soil, sediment, and food chains of heavily sprayed areas. Remediation of the Benhua Air Base hotspot is ongoing. Research published in peer-reviewed journals continues to document elevated disability rates in post-war Vietnamese populations in heavily sprayed districts. Arthur Galston coined the term ecocide in February 1970. Ecocide is not currently recognized as an international crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. As of April 2026, Tren To Gna's lawsuit against the American chemical manufacturers is pending in France's highest court. The General Agent Orange Act of 1991 established the Department of Veterans Affairs presumptive benefit program for American veterans. The chemical companies that manufactured Agent Orange have paid no penalties to any government and have admitted no wrongdoing. If you want to support the organizations working on these issues, the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign advocates for both American veterans and Vietnamese victims. The Aspen Institute's Agent Orange and Vietnam program has supported joint remediation and research efforts. And the Stop Ecocide International is the organization leading the global campaign to add Ecoside as a fifth international crime to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court and defines the most serious crimes known to international law. You can find links to these organizations and others at EcoSidepod.com slash organizations. If you'd like to go even deeper, episode sources and transcripts are available at Ecosidepod.com/slash episodes. Ecocide is an independent narrative podcast. Each episode tells the story of environmental harm, who caused it, and who paid the price. These are stories about what humans do to the natural world and what it takes to reckon with it.