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!ncredible Kerala? A Political Ecological Analysis of Organic Agriculture in the "Model for Development"
Get PDFIn 2010, the South Indian state of Kerala's Communist-led coalition government, the Left Democratic Front (LDF), unveiled a policy to convert the entirety of the state to organic farming within ten years; some estimates claim that approximately 9,000 farmers were already participating in certified organic agriculture for export at the time of the announcement. Kerala is oftentimes hailed as a "model for development" by development practitioners and environmentalists because of such progressive environmental politics (e.g., McKibben 1998). Recent scholarship from Political Ecology, however, has christened organic farming as a neoliberal project, and much like globalized, conventional agriculture (e.g., Guthman 2007 and Raynolds 2004). Drawing from fourteen months of fieldwork in Kerala between 2009-2011, I explore this tension between Kerala as a progressive, political "model," and globalized, corporatized organic agriculture. I utilize Kerala's experiences with organic farming to present another story about North-South relations in globalized organic farming. In contrast to recent Political Ecological work surrounding alternative food systems, I contend that organic agriculture can actually offer meaningful possibilities for transforming the global agricultural system in local places. Using Polanyian (1944) and Gramscian (1971) understandings of civil society and social change, I argue that Kerala's agrarian crisis of the 1990s, stemming from the commodification of Kerala's agrarian environment and the intensification of chemical-based, cash crop agriculture, stimulated an ecological countermovement in the late twentieth century. This crisis included several farmer suicides and pesticide-poisoning from Endosulfan. Kerala's civil society and political institutions actively developed this countermovement by relying on an existing institutional structure that supports redistributive reforms, and a history of political organizing by Kerala's Left. This ecological countermovement is now comprised of organic farming institutions (e.g., vanguard certification-centered bodies such as the Indian Organic Farmers Producer Company Limited (IOFPCL)) and policies (e.g., Kerala's 2010 Organic Farming Policy), that are re-embedding market-driven agriculture ecologically and socially. To augment my Polanyian analysis, I also utilize analytics from Global Commodity Chain and Global Value Chain scholarship, and rely on Cultural Political literature and the work of several Kerala scholars (e.g., Heller 1999 and Herring 1983), to argue that Kerala's organic farming movement is promoting the civic engagement of organic farmers in agricultural governance. Kerala's Organic Farming Policy, for example, represents an alternative form of state-led development that prioritizes local-level decision making. Finally, I explore the bifurcation of Kerala organic farming countermovement between proponents of Kerala's Organic Farming Policy and certified organic farming for export; each defines organic farming differently. I contend that this divide is not "natural," but the result of a conjuncture of agrarian cultural politics, an "imaginary" of Kerala as a biodiverse "hotspot," existing political priorities, and political economic and geographic changes in places like Wayanad District. This evidence illustrates that countermovements occur on and are shaped by terrains with history, and are far from monolithic. These findings also trouble the idealization of Kerala as a "model," and demonstrate that organic farming politics can take on different forms throughout the world, contingent on local and global factors and dynamics. I conclude, however, that Kerala's organic movement does not have a predetermined future: it is neither destined to be a "model" nor homogenized and conventionalized by the forces of globalization. Evidence from Kerala instead elucidates that organic agriculture can offer a valid critique of chemical-dependent capitalist agriculture, but not necessarily in the way that current Political Ecological thought would prescribe
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The Cultural Politics of Water Privatization in an Arab-Israeli Town
Get PDFFrom Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland, to Seth Siegel’s recent bestseller, Let There be Water, Israeli water development has preoccupied the Israeli and Jewish imagination. Traditional scholarship on water in Israel focuses on high politics and international relations; official policy and its associated techno-logics; or views water problems through a purely economic lens. My dissertation takes a “bottom-up” ethnographic approach to examining water politics. It offers a new framework for thinking about natural resources, and “nature” in Israel by demonstrating the role of struggles over “nature” in linking and shaping two processes that are often assumed to be separate and opposed: nation building on the one hand, and global capitalism on the other.Drawing on five years of ethnographic and historical research in Israel, my dissertation, The politics of water privatization in an Arab-Israeli town, argues that local struggles over access to water in the context of water privatization, reveals the contradictory relationship between nation building with its rigid delineation of territorial boundaries on the one hand, and global capitalist development on the other. I show how connections between processes of water privatization and ongoing discrimination in the realm of planning have come together in distinctive ways in Kafr-al-Bahar, the Israeli-Arab town where I conducted my research. These convergences are forged at the level of ordinary practices. I emphasize, in particular, the way that notions of "nature" are central to these processes and connections. For instance, I focus on alternative local water histories that residents have revived in the context of water cutoffs and indebtedness, and how they provide a framework for understanding, contesting and engaging with water privatization and the notions of nature that inform these policies. Such notions include taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of Arab political culture, of national service, and of market logic. The alternative water histories that residents have revived, challenge the national narrative about the nature of Kafr-al-Bahar’s relationship to water and to the nation. Such an approach to water politics in Israel advances emerging scholarship on the interconnections of nationalism with globalization in Israel by bringing it into conversation with geographical and anthropological literature on the cultural politics of nature and difference in Israel.Everyday water politics, homely as they may seem, are forcing front and center the issue at the heart of Israel’s current legitimation crisis; namely, the tensions between the values and institutions of liberal egalitarianism and the ongoing realities of dispossession, exclusion, and segregation
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Model City: Technologies of Government in the San Francisco Bay Area
No full textIn this dissertation, I explore how novel techniques of urban governance converged with new planning technologies to transform postwar space and politics in the San Francisco Bay Area. I argue that the terms and practices girding contemporary forms of government in metropolises like the Bay Area were forged through modeling and simulation initiatives undertaken by administrators and experts in the decades after World War II. After surveying the political landscape today, I trace a broad historical shift in the way cities have been understood and acted upon as governmental problems. In current policy discourse, cities are posited as complex systems amenable to market-driven forms of technological management. This formulation stands in contrast to earlier ones. Whereas governing authorities during the early twentieth century sought to secure social order in cities as physical forms by intervening in the built environment to mold moral subjects, contemporary administrators aim to optimize the performance of cities as feedback systems by promoting the conditions under which enterprising patterns of behavior might flourish. To account for this shift, I probe three postwar initiatives pursued in the Bay Area. Together, they helped constitute the grounds upon which market-based modes of urban rule now unfold: a concrete hydraulic model of the San Francisco Bay framed the metropolis as both a set of environmental processes and an object of regional governance; an effort to simulate the housing market in San Francisco on behalf of renewal rendered up the city as a racialized system of communication and surveillance; and the creation of a novel public science museum laid the groundwork for a pedagogical tool now deployed to shape the conduct of urban subjects. Examining the historical construction and political effects of these urban projects contextualizes the governmental scene today. While Bay Area administrators drew upon wider notions about the city as a managerial problem during the twentieth century, the metropolis itself has since emerged as a kind of neoliberal model. It is a global hearth for the technology industry and home to firms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter among others. It is also a burgeoning site of inequality and precarity. Though critical assessments of the region’s transformation abound, less attention has been paid to the political vision – the governmental reason – that animates it. This work highlights the historical conditions that continue to underwrite such a circumscribed and market-oriented picture of the world. In so doing, I hope it contributes to our collective ability to build a more just urban future
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Unmaking the Bomb: Waste, Health, and the Politics of Impossibility at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation
Get PDFThis dissertation explores the politics of waste, health, and remediation at Washington State's Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The most contaminated nuclear site in the nation, Hanford is engaged in the largest environmental cleanup in human history—legally required to implement protective measures that will remain effective for 10,000 years. Informed by eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and more than 100 in-depth interviews with Hanford workers, managers, and area residents, this project explores how nuclear remediation is made possible despite its inherent uncertainties. Through four empirical chapters, I make the case that nuclear waste is not socially inert, but distinctly productive. Just as above-ground weapons testing produced the official script for American nuclear disaster with its televised detonations and duck-and-cover drills, I argue that the contemporary spectacle of remediation works to re-define the terms of nuclear citizenship and national security in the face of the nation’s enduring waste. Thus, cleanup projects at former weapons sites like Hanford articulate a new social contract for nuclear threat in the post-Cold War era—one that defines the conditions of “livable” exposure and “acceptable” contamination, highlighting particular hazards while rendering others invisible
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Thieves of Patria: Vertical Politics in Plurinational Bolivia
Get PDFIn this dissertation, I offer a materialist account of the relationship between nation, nature, and political economy in Bolivia. Using the history and politics of Bolivia’s tin “mining cooperatives” (cooperativas mineras) as a window, I rethink key concepts in political economy in relation to the matters of mining: strata and resource, mountain and class, tin and labor, machine and value, and dynamite and state. In so doing, I argue that the political economy of resource extraction in Bolivia cannot be understood outside of either the matter of nature or the historical intertwining of nation, race, and gender. Colonial encounters of rock and laborers created the conditions of possibility for the consolidation of capitalist extraction, and these histories are key to understanding the political formations of the contemporary era.Understanding these formations is politically pressing beyond Bolivia. Since the 2005 election of Evo Morales, the country’s first Indigenous-identifying president, Bolivia has been hailed as a place of hope for progressives convinced that that the future of a world mired in economic, social, and environmental crisis depends on Indigenous political thought and action. In 2009, Morales ushered in a groundbreaking constitution that transformed the country from a republic into a “Plurinational State,” a change that signaled a reorganized relationship between the state and Bolivia’s many Indigenous, Afrobolivian, and intercultural nations and peoples. Given all of this, it might be assumed that resource extraction has been retooled to align with the goals of Indigenous territorial autonomy. To the contrary, the Bolivian state retains control over all subterranean resources, including but not limited to minerals and hydrocarbons, marking a vertical limit on Indigenous sovereignty. Through both direct and indirect involvement, the state has strengthened its control over the subsoil, often at the expense of surface-level communities.Plurinational Bolivia is thus characterized by a tension between state-led (and state-authorized) resource extraction and a commitment to decentralizing resource governance in a way that prioritizes Indigenous territorial rights. Mining cooperatives embody this tension. With connections to both agrarian and market economies, these associations of small-scale miners have been involved in both defining the contours of the plurinational constitution and writing mining laws that facilitate resource extraction. Just as importantly, they have a long history of being in-between subjects, perpetually caught between both class categories of worker/peasant and racial categories of Indigenous/mestizo (mixed race). They have fallen on the outside of successive Bolivian nation-building projects, including this plurinational one. Usually interpreted as a conservative group that rose from the ashes of the country’s once famously progressive miners’ unions in the 1980s, cooperativistas are discursively figured as internal outsiders, a group of not-quite-rights whose very presence threatens the stability of national imaginaries. They are the fault lines of the Plurinational State, and following them allows me to rework political economy in ways that take seriously the material legacies of nation building and the production of social difference. Drawing on over eighteen months of ethnography with small-scale tin miners, much of which was spent underground, as well as extensive archival research and over one hundred interviews with scientists, engineers, politicians, and activists, I argue that geosocial formations, forged in the vertical contact zone between miners and rock, perpetuate resource extractivism even in the context of putatively Indigenous nation-building. Bolivia’s subterranean was produced as a national ‘public’ space in the 20th century, imbued with masculinist and mestizo dreams of progress, and these nationalist ideals remain sedimented in the matter of the subsoil. These ideals shape cooperative miners in ways that reverberate on the surface when they take to the streets or run for political office. By tracing the influence of material nature and buried places on the more familiar terrain of resource extraction and contestation, this project rethinks the boundaries of political economy in Latin America and beyond
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Racial Reverberations: Music, Dance, and Disturbance in Oakland after Black Power
Get PDFThis dissertation explores historical and ongoing contests over the production and policing of the public cultural landscape in Oakland since World War II. Recently, these struggles have surged to the center of local and national concerns about gentrification and displacement through impassioned conflicts over longstanding Black-centered cultural practices like barbecuing, drumming, and dancing in public. Indeed, these attempts to regulate Black collectivity and conviviality resonate with the rapid arrival of privileged residents, companies, and real-estate speculators in the city since the Great Recession, all of which has uprooted working-class communities of color, especially African Americans. As this study reveals, however, this process is at the same time much more complex and entrenched than the notion of gentrification as an emergent mode of urban restructuring suggests.In this text, then, I argue that the current moment in Oakland resounds with what I call racial reverberations—looping patterns of racialized dispossession, cultural (re)production, and resistance that disturb bounded notions of time and space. This consideration of racial reverberations causes me to attune to sound, music, and dance as sites of an emancipatory spatial politics of pleasure, on one side, and a repetitive liberal drive to repress “disturbances” to the raced and classed order of the city, on the other. Further, in contrast to linear narratives of urban change, whether in terms of development or decline, this approach attends to the recursive and looping nature of racial and spatial politics in Oakland and other U.S. cities. I thus trace the politics of racial reverberations in Oakland through a sequence of what I call socio-sonic arrangements—or epochal configurations of race and urban space, cultural production and policing, that remix rather than replace the relations that precede them. This, I argue, reveals the enduring ways that attempts to rid the city of “disturbances” serve to perpetuate norms of liberal reason and liberal racism that, while seemingly “race neutral,” drive anti-Black dispossession and spirited resistance. The text is split into three sections. The first section (Chs. 1 and 2) traces changes in Oakland’s socio-sonic arrangements before and after Black Power. It argues that, after World War II, Black migrant youth found themselves mired in geographies of racial segregation and assimilation that resounded in the Oakland Blues. In response, they remixed the call for Black Power into a new sound—what I call, after Rickey Vincent, the Beat—that disturbed the choreographies of public culture administered by Oakland’s Jim Crow. Then, in the 1970s and 80s, the Black Power revolt accelerated the rise of the city’s Black political and economic elite at the same moment that disinvestment, drug-related violence, and other intersecting crises introduced a deep sense of insecurity. Mayor Lionel Wilson thus implemented new modes of regulation meant to secure the precarious “quality of life” in working-class communities of color. In the process, Oakland underwent a shift in the object of policing from “Negro” to “nuisance,” especially “noise,” in ways that tended to condemn and control the emancipated youth cultures of the Beat. In the next two sections, the orientation of the text switches from time to space as it charts the socio-sonic arrangement associated with this apparently race-neutral mode of what I call governing through nuisance across a series of interrelated cultural sites. The second section (Chs. 3 and 4) reveals that, in the 1990s, Oakland solidified this new regime of policing through a moral panic about the disturbances of “hyphy” rap and illegal car parties called “sideshows.” The anti-sideshow campaign led to a reorganization of the optics/sonics, tactics, and relations of policing in ways that echoed out to surround young people of color—in particular, young Black men—as they circulated across the city’s recreational landscape to spaces like cultural festivals. The third section (Chs. 5 and 6) then demonstrates that, as a regional economic resurgence put local reinvestment within reach, Oakland’s leaders staked their development aims on the revival of the city’s nightlife. At the same time, the rising popularity of rap—linked, in the minds of some club owners and regulators, to the violence of local drug economies and recklessness of sideshows—led to an increased focus on techniques of security. In this context, regulators sought to manage the tension between the drive to attract crowds and the increased securitization of the night through what I call frequencies of government, which made Downtown Oakland’s “renaissance” a site of racialized dispossession, as well
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Land, Family, Body: Measurement and the Racial Politics of US Colonialism in Haudenosaunee Country
No full textThis dissertation explores the racial politics of measurement in US colonialism in the portion of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) homelands today territorialized as upstate New York. Since the last thirty years, Indigenous peoples who live in North America have been figured within health disparities research as a singular race of people, and specifically as a race suffering from greater rates of disease and premature death. This project traces the ways that metrics and measures of racial difference as a biologically-relevant attribute among Indigenous people have been a technique of power in US colonialism. Informed by archival research in four archives, personal interviews, critical review of scientific publications, analytical reflections on Native texts, and participant observation, I argue that these measures constitute figures of Indianness which naturalize colonial dispossession through the construction of Euroamerican reason and order. In a triptych of three chapters, I make the case that these colonial processes of subjectivation construct a “Indian” figure that is dismembered from land, from family, and from one’s own body. First, I show how the units and technologies of land survey—developed and practiced in the late 1700s in post-Revolutionary United States in order to form heritable land-as-property—materialized anti-Indigenous concepts of self and place as the basis of Euroamerican settler governance. My second chapter analyzes how Thomas Indian School (1855-1957) administrators and other personnel produced a Euroamerican sense of order and “care” vis-à-vis discursive practices of health-making, as they surveilled Haudenosaunee children’s mobilities, sexualities, and kinship relations in the US colonial project of dispossession by way of assimilation. Third, I show how mid-1900s racial blood serology research done in Haudenosaunee communities—aimed at defining Indianness through biogenetic measures—aligned with state development projects that enacted forms of termination and relocation by other means in upstate New York. Each chapter addresses how these colonial techniques of power shape the textures of Haudenosaunee lives and sovereignties as they are reckoned and refused. This dissertation suggests that the ethical demands of healing and wellbeing in Native communities extend beyond these racializing measured differences and colonial bureaucracies, to upend and refuse a range of discursive practices that mark Indigenous people as damaged
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There Are No Black Italians? Race and Citizenship in the Black Mediterranean
Get PDFOur current moment is characterized by the largest global mass migrations of people in recent history and the resurgence of explicitly racist, xenophobic nationalisms. In Italy, post-2008 economic stagnation and the southern European refugee emergency have laid bare the endurance of ethno-nationalism and the production of new racial essentialisms in a supposedly “post-racial” state. Italy is home to almost 1 million children of immigrants who were born in Italy but lack legal citizenship, as well as hundreds of thousands of refugees who endure state-sanctioned and extrajudicial forms of everyday violence. Black youth born and raised in Italy, whose struggles to be recognized as Italian are met with endless legal and de facto obstacles, are at the forefront of a new wave of activism against racialized citizenship, the violence of Fortress Europe, and the unspoken whiteness of Italian identity. Their efforts have crystallized around a movement to reform Italian citizenship law toward jus soli, or right of birthplace citizenship. But these activists are increasingly faced with the impossibility of de-racializing the Italian nation, as new racisms are reproduced within the presumably colorblind category of “citizen.” I argue that the fraught task of disentangling race from nation has generated new forms of anti-Blackness and racial differentiation that do not adhere to a neat inclusion/exclusion binary, and has also inspired Black Mediterranean diasporic political formations that look beyond the nation-state.This project is based on sixteen months of multi-sited fieldwork conducted over five years with Black activists across northern and central Italy, and employs multiple research methods: interviews, policy analysis, participant observation, virtual ethnography, and archival research. My work draws on Black diaspora studies, postcolonial theory, and critical human geography, and represents the first in-depth study of Black youth political mobilizations in Italy. While there exists extensive research on first-generation immigrants and refugees who traveled from Africa to Italy, there is a lacuna in the literature with regard to the experiences of Black youth who were born and raised in Italy. But rather than asking whether Italians of African descent have “integrated” into a supposedly bounded and homogenous Italian nation, I focus on the ways they have become deeply entangled with the ambiguous process of re-defining the legal, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries of Italy. While some scholars have argued that European nation-states entirely preclude the incorporation of Black subjects, I instead show that the boundaries of Italianness are currently being reworked in relation to attributes such as cosmopolitan hybridity, economic productivity, and local cultural fluency. In particular, the historic precariousness of Italian “whiteness” in relation to northern Europe has created a unique opening for Black activists to expand the definition of Italianness via older ideas of Italo-Mediterranean mixedness. Yet these renegotiations have also generated deeply racialized distinctions between “assimilable” Black citizens-in-waiting and “non-assimilable” Black refugees. The precarious inclusion of Italian-born Black youth has thus become predicated on the extent to which they can be differentiated from Black refugees based on their capacity to “revitalize” the Italian nation.Scholars of the Black diaspora have long argued for understandings of race, citizenship, and belonging that are not confined to national boundaries. My research extends these formulations beyond the Atlantic to consider Black diasporic imaginaries and resistances to nationalist racism in the Mediterranean. The Black Mediterranean, I argue, is a contemporary limit case where colonial legacies, neoliberal migration management, and sedimented anti-Blackness have come together to produce both new forms of exclusion and new practices of transnational solidarity
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Cargo Cult: Logistics, Labor, and the Secret Life of Supply Chains
Get PDFThis dissertation examines the contemporary labor politics and colonial history of the global logistics industry, focusing primarily on the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. It argues that logistics is not a recent technical innovation born of midcentury containerization, but rather a global political project with roots in early modern empire, whose material and conceptual infrastructure emerged through centuries of maritime conquest, racialized labor regimes, and territorial expansion. Moreover, it contends that logistics should not be understood as a neutral or purely economic system for the movement of goods, but rather as a mode of governance—a way of doing politics with technics—aimed at organizing space, time, and subjectivity in service to capital accumulation. Drawing on 14 months of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork with longshore workers at L.A./Long Beach, interviews with key industry actors, and archival research spanning three continents, the dissertation brings together empirical investigation with historical and theoretical analysis to suggest that today’s logistics industry functions as a kind of cargo cult: an ideological formation obsessed with optimization, fixated on the commodity form, and haunted by the colonial past it seeks to obscure. In framing logistics this way, I aim to unsettle dominant narratives of technological progress and economic rationality, and to foreground instead the hidden histories, violences, and contestations that continue to shape global supply chains in the present.
The dissertation consists of an introduction, three chapters, and a brief coda. Chapter one examines a conflict between L.A./Long Beach dockworkers and the shipping company Maersk over automating Pier 400, the largest container terminal in the Western Hemisphere. It argues that rather than replacing longshore labor outright, port automation displaces and conceals labor, and thus functions as a ruse. Chapter two offers a material genealogy of containership design to show how imperial logics are embedded in logistical infrastructures. Through archival work tracing the bulkhead from ancient China to the British Empire to South Korean shipyards, the chapter theorizes logistics as a colonial formation. Chapter three explores how automation transforms the sensory experience of longshore work. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s notion of the “distribution of the sensible,” it argues that logistical technics discipline perception in ways that produce both disorientation and new forms of political subjectivity, including worker paranoia. The coda speculates on these findings, outlines some lacunae, and describes directions for future research
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Risky Subjects: Vulnerability and uncertainty in the global pesticide boom
Get PDFPesticide use and exposure have reached a truly planetary scale. Pesticide dependence is a defining feature of modern agrarian capitalism, and is growing rapidly in low-income countries. Yet the debates on pesticides, development and health have continued on broadly similar terms for more than 50 years. In this dissertation, I outline the changes in the global political economy of pesticide use in the last twenty years, including changes in the production of off-patent pesticides, and drivers of increased adoption rooted in longstanding processes of agrarian change including expanding global commodity markets, rural-urban migration, and rising consumption in the global south. Understanding what this shift mean, and evaluating its consequences, requires thinking differently. I use a case study in Lao PDR, until recently one of the world’s lowest per-capita pesticide users, to try to chart a different path through these debates, interrogating narratives of development, risk and uncertainty. In a part of the country where maize and herbicides have completely transformed the countryside, I use oral histories, interviews, surveys and agroecology to look at the relationship between modern agriculture, intensification, precarity, and deforestation as old forest-based safety nets were ploughed under for monoculture maize production. I interrogate the diverse -- and divergent -- set of partial knowledges among pesticide users, and ask how pesticide applicators’ direct experiences of toxicity both reinforce and transgress the dominant model for ‘safe use’ of pesticides. Drawing on contextual understandings of risk from feminist science studies and political ecology, I understand how users grapple with risk and uncertainty in ways that produce patterns of unequal exposure on the local level, that produce a class of ‘risky subjects’. I also follow a community-based biomonitoring program and follow the controversy over the data they produced. I use this controversy to illuminate a larger one. Debates about what counts as harm, what evidence is valid, and what science is adequate proof have a history almost as old as chemical agriculture itself. The domain of imperceptibility surrounding exposures, the geographic disparities in terms of the ability to make impacts visible, and the disciplinary ‘tracks’ that limit what kind of evidence count, make it very difficult to produce enough scientific certainty to know the magnitude of the problem
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