Title: Pesticide occlusion and harm: An ecosemiotic analysis
Abstract: Pesticides are designed by chemists to target and kill unwanted organisms that are inconvenient to our human priorities. As such, pesticides are designed to secure our lives by killing other lives. The deployment of toxic death in this sense is a technology of power through which governments legitimise toxic violence, not as an exception, but as a normalised ‘way of life’ (Mathur, 2022).
In this article, I will argue that the normality of our killing with pesticides has become dysfunctional in Australia. Further, I will suggest that the harms that are entailed with this normalised use of death by poison have become largely invisible to us. We have been inoculated to the dangers of pesticides by an administrative milieu that is carefully nurtured by the pesticide industry. As a result, Australians now mistakenly accept that it is possible to live safely within a cloud of toxic pesticides. In addition, our trust in the safety of toxins is being maintained via a system of assurances that are embedded within regulatory agencies that are controlled by vested interests. Our pesticide regulators have been captured by the pesticide industry (Clayton Utz 2023).