Chemurgy was a discipline that aimed to make new things from agricultural products: milk into fiber, soybeans into radio dials, agricultural waste into fuel. Alas, chemurgy was a short-lived field, and few today have ever heard of it. This 1941 Work Projects Administration report of the U.S. Government, You Might Like Chemurgy as a Career, aimed to inform students about careers in this new field. It begins by describing how George Washington Carver "resolved the peanut into its component parts in order to learn in terms of molecules what composes a peanut," bringing prosperity for both peanut growers and society. Through Carver's work, peanuts became healing oils for paralytics, ice cream cones, and in fact, 285 usable products.
Yet the skills of this discipline did not solely involve breaking things down, recombining them, and making new products. As the Personnel Brief describes, chemurgy was a way of seeing, requiring a vast and creative imagination. It was a national project, but it also required regional attunement: the chemurgist needs to know the plants of his or her region. Thus, taking the measure of plants, for chemurgy, was not simply a matter of (capitalist) production. The chemurgists valued observation, the creativity of finding new uses for things, and put these together with applied science with a sense of both national and regional purpose. However, a Great War and the rapid rise of petroleum put this nascent field to sleep.
"Some uncertainty, however, in establishing oneself in this field must be taken into consideration. The man or woman who proposes to adopt chemurgy as a career should realize at the outset that it does not offer well-classified jobs as do the older established occupations. On the other hand, there is always a thrill in pioneering new developments and in blazing new trails."
About the author Holly Jean Buck is a geographer and environmental social scientist studying how emerging technologies can help address environmental challenges and build a regenerative society. She is an Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo, New York, where she teaches environmental justice. Her recent book, After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration (London, New York: Verso, 2019), explores best-case scenarios for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
