Title: An ecosemiotic approach to weed biosecurity
Abstract: Ecology is a study of the conditions that support life in an ecos (Greek for ‘home’). Semiotics studies the intellectual frameworks that enable the sciences generally. When we combine these two interests, the result is eco-semiotics, a hybrid methodology that enables us to study the communicational conditions that sustain future life. The paper will engage with the method to focus on the relationships between weed ecology and the human construction of weed meanings. Within this context, it will be argued that the popular call for a ‘war on weeds’ is largely a human manipulation of affect. The rhetoric is designed to persuade us to malign and efface troublesome plants – to de-mean them. Plants, however, are only troublesome because we have made them so. We create the environmental conditions that generate weeds by imposing our human needs upon their ecosystems. Thus, a ‘war on weeds’ is really a struggle with our relationship with nature. Viewed in this manner, the varied ways plants respond to our interventions co-facilitate and co-construct our social understandings of ecosystem, either negatively or positively. Given this dialogical repositioning, the paper argues that the ways we re-design ecosystems to meet our future needs should ultimately depend upon our ‘eco-literacy’. In a bio-security context, it is not in anyone’s long-term interest to promote a ‘war on weeds’ without also recognising the contingent eco-semiotic frameworks that enable us to appreciate weeds in the first place. If we address the socially constructed aspects of weed preventing and/or controlling, the problem of weeds may eventually be dissolved. [Low, D. W. & Peric, Z. (2011). An ecosemiotic approach to weed biosecurity. Proceedings of the 23rd Asian-Pacific Weed Science Society Conference, Volume 2, September 23 – 30, Cairns.]