War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring. By Edmund Russell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 336 pp., $55.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-79003-4), $14.00 paper (ISBN: 0-521-79937-6). In War and Nature , Edmund Russell, Associate Professor of Technology, Culture, and Communication at the University of Virginia, cleverly traces the interaction between chemical warfare and pest control from World War I to the Vietnam War. His central thesis is that war and the control of nature have co-evolved. Specifically, “the control of nature expanded the scale of war, and war expanded the scale on which people controlled nature” (p. 2). Following up on his dissertation (Russell 1993), which won the Rachel Carson Prize from the American Society for Environmental History, Russell has culled a wide variety of recently declassified US government documents, business publications, and contemporary books and articles. He finds that World Wars I and II and the Cold War forged close ties between military and scientific institutions. Efforts to maintain these links became the hallmark of the post-World War II era. Scientifically and technologically, the fields of pest control and chemical warfare each created knowledge and tools that reinforced the other (p. 4). For example, on the eve of World War I, few US chemical companies existed. They primarily manufactured low-profit bulk chemicals. In contrast, Germany had the …