[The Weed's Network 16 March 2014 by Zheljana Peric & David Low] — Herbicide pollution has become “safe” even though dangerous. When we use conventional weeding techniques that rely on herbicides, we are agreeing to both the risks and the background assumptions that underlie the normalcy of these risks (Carolan 2008). Rather than reduce the risks associated with herbicide pollution, these days we talk of “food safety” or “compliance within maximum residue limits”. Governments and their regulatory agents have identified the human health and environmental hazards of herbicides, but they currently make very little effort to reduce or eliminate them. The normalisation of herbicide pollution is therefore not based on what would provide us with genuine safety, nor do regulators err on the side of safety when there is any uncertainty over a particular herbicide’s impacts. As Hoffman (2013) notes, by not taking a precautionary approach, the regulators and users of herbicides are “risk takers”. Worse, the risks we are taking with herbicides cannot be contained or limited to the decision-makers and users of herbicides. There are collateral victims to be considered in the so-called “war on weeds”. For example, herbicides are found in the food we eat and the air we breathe. They are in our waterways and are affecting the lives of those beings that live in them. We are all being forced to accept the risks of deliberate acts of herbicide pollution. The risk-taking behaviour associated with herbicides is therefore paradoxical – the more we seek safety through poisoning life, the more dangers we create.
Our fear of weeds, as plant life beyond our control, is therefore socially constructed. We are defining dangers in a manner through which it is our very ‘solutions’ that are doing the menacing. We are at war with ourselves. As Fisher (2006) pointed out, we are creating a way of dealing with plant life that is failing to deal with our social dysfunction – the real basis of our fears.
Seen from the opposite direction, our denial of the riskiness inherent to seeking safety through danger, means that sustainable, non-chemical weeding methods are viewed negatively. Eco-friendly weeding methods do not involve the use of dangerous technologies; therefore safe weeding methods are ‘too safe’ to be taken seriously. Within patriarchal social structures, groups, or roles, those thought to be ‘closer to nature’ are also those thought to have less power, less prestige. In this view of the world, only women and children are properly associated with ‘nature friendly’ methods (Trauger et al. 2010). Danger has become a social marker of prestige in industrialised production systems.The more dangerous the herbicide used, the more it represents mastery over nature, and the more highly it is valued for its legitimacy as a representation of power.
Another emerging consequence of the above social understandings is our attitude to the industrial production of new life forms. In genetic engineering, society favours a very limited range of plant life and manipulates this preferred life into new forms that can tolerate and survive human controlled dangers, that is, herbicides. Here too we see a self-defeating bind being played out. People who worry about the safety of GMO’s and their associated herbicides are the less powerful. Their concerns are typically claimed to be too “emotional”. Concern for safety is once again de-valued and marginalised. This would explain why we are unable to label baby food as containing manipulated DNA, or as containing toxic herbicides invented for the purposes of human warfare. Those risks must remain invisible to consumers.
Within the domain of the above understandings there is almost no space within which we can question the legitimacy and correctness of the background assumptions being made. The social understandings that make danger and mastery over nature valuable are also the understandings that drive the use of toxic herbicides and make chemical risk-taking and pollution a normalised activity.
Note that the interests of science have been used in a strategic manner. Science is not being deployed to find ways to reduce herbicide pollution, but rather, it is being used to create obstacles to further herbicide pollution regulation (Hoffman 2013). Data has to be gathered by ‘objectors’ who must ‘prove’ that the impacts of herbicide pollution on humans and the environment are real. Those who control the interest of science are defending the uncertainties regulators overlook when herbicides are registered. The dominant regulatory actors do not find it in their interest to research less risky methods, so the science is left “undone” (Frickel et al. 2010). The chemical dangers in our garden are multiplied in the name of ‘safety’.
Non-chemical paths to weed control are systematically being underfunded, marginalised, or actively attacked as ‘anti-industry’. Seen in the present context, we can perhaps also recognise that low environmental impact weed controlling methods are being feared and devalued because they are less dangerous, and therefore, less valuable as social currency. Herbicide pollution reduction is a dangerous business for businesses.
Using poisons to create safety creates dangers for those dependent on contexts created by those who have more power. Industry wishes to continue to use herbicides in this manner and to be protected from ‘them’. ‘They’, however, are us, and we have attempted to show in this article how a recognition of the social construction of herbicide pollution might offer paths to a more responsible method of working with weeds. ${imageDescription} Comment
Carolan, M. S. (2008). Democratizing knowledge. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 33(4), 508-528.
Fisher F. (2006). Response Ability: Environment, Health and Everyday Transcendence. Vista: Melbourne.
Frickel, S.; Gibbon, S.; Howard, J.; Kempner, J.; Ottinger, G. & Hess, D. J. (2010). Undone science: Charting social movement and civil society challenges to research agenda setting. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 9(1), 83-96.
Hoffman, K. (2013). Unheeded science: Taking precaution out of toxic water pollutants policy. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 38(6), 829-850.
Trauger, A.; Sachs, C.; Barbercheck, M.; Kiernan N. E.; Brasier, K. & Schwartzberg, A. (2010). The object of extension: Agricultural education and authentic farmers in Pennsylvania. Sociologia Ruralis, 50(2), 85-102.
