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Fire Ant Wars

Scattered hills of solenopsis invicta, or South American fire ants, are probably the pothole’s only serious challenger for most prominent nuisance in the Louisiana landscape. After entering the American South via the hull of a ship docking at Mobile, Ala., the fire ant cunningly marched across Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas during what environmental historian Joshua Blu Buhs calls the South’s “bulldozer revolution” of the ’30s and ’40s.

Buhs’ The Fire Ant Wars is a tangential and fascinating look at the politics, environmentalism and social change that led to the McCarthy-era campaign for complete eradication of the fire ant. As we know today, that campaign failed to eradicate the terror of the South, but the book details how it also ignited public protests after powerful pesticides left huge swaths of ailing cattle and dead wildlife in its wake. Visit press.uchicago.edu for more information on The Fire Ant Wars.