Dionysus Undone: A Brief Institutional Ethnography on Pesticide Use
By Richard Birch
SCEN1401 Environmental Science
Professor Gamroth
This work Copyright (C) 2005 Richard Birch
Preface:
This short paper was an assignment for my Environmental Science elective class. We were required to compose a brief statement disclosing our stance on pesticide use. Knowing full well that this is a science course, I asked the professor if I could tap into sociological ideas on this topic. She seemed very interested, addressing the fact that sociology is a science as well. In my research I discovered a specific form of social inquiry called Environmental Sociology, which is the study of the effects human interaction has on the natural environmental world. I was intrigued by it and chose to take a risk and do this paper, rather than merely spouting out scientific data on the topic. The empirical data, for all sides of the argument seem almost to be relentlessly stuck on the "what is" of pesticide use, rather than the "how has pesticide use come to be existent?" discourse. In other methods of inquiry, Environmental Sociology could be a premise for further grounds and modes in the growing theories developed in Quantum Sociology. In my current research on sexuality and gender social theory, any ideas relating to quantum particulars and the social are a welcome transgression. Already some ideas have come to mind about sexual social theory from reading on environmental pesticide use, as weird and unrelated as this may sound. First, the natural environmental is full of asymetiricalities. It is completely imperfect, and wonderfully so. It is refreshing to think about how the structure of social knowledge that lends itself heavily to ideas around the manipulation of the environment relates so strongly to discursive thought on the nature of expressive individuality, sexual and asexual consciousness, and the naturality/unaturailty of engendered homoeostasis. Secondly, pesticide use, as unbeknown to me is yet to be socially theorized in the rhetorical sense. Yet it can easily be compared to the nature of oppression and subordination to any natural/unnatural physical social existence. When people are measuring their experiences in the natural environment, especially in accordance to their physical knowing of their place in it, it is very much a phenomenology. To posit an account of one's knowing of their physical world is a phenomenological recognition of their connectivity to the natural world. Thus, something as intrusive and dialectically opposing to the health of living things as pesticide technology is what binds one to their environmental phenomena. That is the nature of my paper. That was the standpoint from which a social inquiry had to be trajectorized in the midst of the rational, normative, textbook ideas of pesticide use.
Dionysus Undone: A Brief Institutional Ethnography on Pesticide Use.
I am drawn to cultural concerns that discuss the effects human behaviour has on the natural environment. When we examine the physical effects of utilizing chemical pesticide technology, we are also looking at interactions between society and the physical surroundings that encompass aggregate ecosystems. People are also part of these ecosystems in both habitat and labour contexts. Knowing the effects human interaction has on the natural environment is not complete if it does not entail an understanding of the social processes that have directed the nature of pest control industries and cultural attitudes for generations. It is a very different knowing of the environment. It is a knowing built around an environmental sociological questioning of how social institutions such as corporations and the government have shaped how we perceive the natural world we dwell in. By using a method of institutional ethnography, particularly that of corporate institutions, one can arguably uncover and possibly even undo socio-environmental oppression in a postmodern world. For human pesticide poisoning is not merely an issue of physical and environmental health, it is also directly related to global processes of cultural oppression.
Pest control technology and its use have been existent since the beginning of agriculture itself. However it wasn’t until after the introduction of DDT in a post World War-Two era of early globalization and postmodern capitalist development, when serious health risks to humans were first recorded and documented (Knight, 2003). It was during this period when society first started to become more aware of the global human health risks exposure to pesticide products bring. In more recent years, awareness of the risks of pesticide poisoning have been significant in developing countries, especially when looking at the health of small farm and agricultural workers whose pesticide use has been largely unregulated by government and corporate institutions (Jansen, 2000). International debate on the merits and potential for globally harmonized regulation of pesticides is still sluggishly divided on issues of product control, research of alternatives, funding, and consumer education. Yet decades after human capital and environmental exploitation was first addressed, growing commercial demand for superior agricultural food products in the developed world has resulted in more advanced and hazardous insecticide chemicals being shipped to the developing corners of the globe, where the need to control insect population increases annually (2000).
Yet we do exist in a world where alternatives have been developed for commercial use. One of the most preferred and highly promoted forms of alternative pest control comes under an umbrella category known as Integrated Pest Management or IPM. This is a classification of control technology, where typically combinations of organic and chemical methods are used to reduce the utilization and permeation of harmful pathogens in the environment. The goal is to limit damage to environmental, economic, and social structures at the macroglobal level (Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, 2000).
However, before any significant interest can experience sizable momentum in this direction, what first needs to be affected are global processes and cultural attitudes towards pesticide use. Furthermore any alterations to pest control technologies, sciences, research, and product marketing will only take place if master narratives of capitalist productive order alter global ruling relations of power. As published by both the Canadian Labour Congress and the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the primary social group in both Canadian and International units of analysis, which are the most likely to experience chronic health problems from long-term pesticide use are agricultural workers (2000). Yet this environmental sociological knowing is still negated by the fact that what is more important than the health of farm workers in both domestic and developing cultures, is the perfect shade of red on an apple from Blue Mountain, or the absence of predator insect populations in coffee bean fields in Colombia, South America. I myself am of the consumer regime who demands the same quality and the same essence of natural production; and thus I am also of the same problem of pesticide use and of the institution of corporate ideology which assigns some to fields where they are poisoned. Pesticide use and the erasure of natural environmental species and ecosystems is the postmodern equivalent to the colonial erasure of the histories of earlier societies through European settlement of North America during the 1500’s, 1600’s and so on. It has been produced through the fracturing of human existence from the natural environment in a consumerist techno-capitalist society. As the Canadian institutional ethnographer Dorothy Smith wrote, “the very organization of the world that has been assigned to us as the primary locus of our being…is determined by and subordinate to the relations of society founded in a capitalist mode of production” (Smith, 1990). Before any real change can occur in the use of pesticides, changes to cultural attitudes regarding the use at the human level must first be constructed.
References:
Jansen, K. (2000) Making Policy Agendas For Safe Pesticide Use: Public and Private Interests in Technology Regulation in a Developing Country. London, UK: The European Inter-University Association on Society, Science and Technology. Retrieved May 17, 2005 from www.esst.uio.no/posti/workshops/jansen.pdf
Knight, C. (2003) Right To Know: Maine Agricultural Workers and Pesticide Safety. Lewiston, ME: Service Learning Project. Retrieved May 17, 2005 from http:// academic.bowdoin.edu/environmental_studies/ service_learning/dissemination/carly.pdf
Smith, D. (1990). The Conceptual Practices of Power. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. (2000) Pesticides: Making the Right Choice for the Protection of Health and the Environment. Retrieved May 18, 2005 from http://www.parl.gc.ca/InfoComDoc/36/2/ENVI/Studies/Reports/envi01/18-ch11-e.html
SCEN1401 Environmental Science
Professor Gamroth
This work Copyright (C) 2005 Richard Birch
Preface:
This short paper was an assignment for my Environmental Science elective class. We were required to compose a brief statement disclosing our stance on pesticide use. Knowing full well that this is a science course, I asked the professor if I could tap into sociological ideas on this topic. She seemed very interested, addressing the fact that sociology is a science as well. In my research I discovered a specific form of social inquiry called Environmental Sociology, which is the study of the effects human interaction has on the natural environmental world. I was intrigued by it and chose to take a risk and do this paper, rather than merely spouting out scientific data on the topic. The empirical data, for all sides of the argument seem almost to be relentlessly stuck on the "what is" of pesticide use, rather than the "how has pesticide use come to be existent?" discourse. In other methods of inquiry, Environmental Sociology could be a premise for further grounds and modes in the growing theories developed in Quantum Sociology. In my current research on sexuality and gender social theory, any ideas relating to quantum particulars and the social are a welcome transgression. Already some ideas have come to mind about sexual social theory from reading on environmental pesticide use, as weird and unrelated as this may sound. First, the natural environmental is full of asymetiricalities. It is completely imperfect, and wonderfully so. It is refreshing to think about how the structure of social knowledge that lends itself heavily to ideas around the manipulation of the environment relates so strongly to discursive thought on the nature of expressive individuality, sexual and asexual consciousness, and the naturality/unaturailty of engendered homoeostasis. Secondly, pesticide use, as unbeknown to me is yet to be socially theorized in the rhetorical sense. Yet it can easily be compared to the nature of oppression and subordination to any natural/unnatural physical social existence. When people are measuring their experiences in the natural environment, especially in accordance to their physical knowing of their place in it, it is very much a phenomenology. To posit an account of one's knowing of their physical world is a phenomenological recognition of their connectivity to the natural world. Thus, something as intrusive and dialectically opposing to the health of living things as pesticide technology is what binds one to their environmental phenomena. That is the nature of my paper. That was the standpoint from which a social inquiry had to be trajectorized in the midst of the rational, normative, textbook ideas of pesticide use.
Dionysus Undone: A Brief Institutional Ethnography on Pesticide Use.
I am drawn to cultural concerns that discuss the effects human behaviour has on the natural environment. When we examine the physical effects of utilizing chemical pesticide technology, we are also looking at interactions between society and the physical surroundings that encompass aggregate ecosystems. People are also part of these ecosystems in both habitat and labour contexts. Knowing the effects human interaction has on the natural environment is not complete if it does not entail an understanding of the social processes that have directed the nature of pest control industries and cultural attitudes for generations. It is a very different knowing of the environment. It is a knowing built around an environmental sociological questioning of how social institutions such as corporations and the government have shaped how we perceive the natural world we dwell in. By using a method of institutional ethnography, particularly that of corporate institutions, one can arguably uncover and possibly even undo socio-environmental oppression in a postmodern world. For human pesticide poisoning is not merely an issue of physical and environmental health, it is also directly related to global processes of cultural oppression.
Pest control technology and its use have been existent since the beginning of agriculture itself. However it wasn’t until after the introduction of DDT in a post World War-Two era of early globalization and postmodern capitalist development, when serious health risks to humans were first recorded and documented (Knight, 2003). It was during this period when society first started to become more aware of the global human health risks exposure to pesticide products bring. In more recent years, awareness of the risks of pesticide poisoning have been significant in developing countries, especially when looking at the health of small farm and agricultural workers whose pesticide use has been largely unregulated by government and corporate institutions (Jansen, 2000). International debate on the merits and potential for globally harmonized regulation of pesticides is still sluggishly divided on issues of product control, research of alternatives, funding, and consumer education. Yet decades after human capital and environmental exploitation was first addressed, growing commercial demand for superior agricultural food products in the developed world has resulted in more advanced and hazardous insecticide chemicals being shipped to the developing corners of the globe, where the need to control insect population increases annually (2000).
Yet we do exist in a world where alternatives have been developed for commercial use. One of the most preferred and highly promoted forms of alternative pest control comes under an umbrella category known as Integrated Pest Management or IPM. This is a classification of control technology, where typically combinations of organic and chemical methods are used to reduce the utilization and permeation of harmful pathogens in the environment. The goal is to limit damage to environmental, economic, and social structures at the macroglobal level (Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, 2000).
However, before any significant interest can experience sizable momentum in this direction, what first needs to be affected are global processes and cultural attitudes towards pesticide use. Furthermore any alterations to pest control technologies, sciences, research, and product marketing will only take place if master narratives of capitalist productive order alter global ruling relations of power. As published by both the Canadian Labour Congress and the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the primary social group in both Canadian and International units of analysis, which are the most likely to experience chronic health problems from long-term pesticide use are agricultural workers (2000). Yet this environmental sociological knowing is still negated by the fact that what is more important than the health of farm workers in both domestic and developing cultures, is the perfect shade of red on an apple from Blue Mountain, or the absence of predator insect populations in coffee bean fields in Colombia, South America. I myself am of the consumer regime who demands the same quality and the same essence of natural production; and thus I am also of the same problem of pesticide use and of the institution of corporate ideology which assigns some to fields where they are poisoned. Pesticide use and the erasure of natural environmental species and ecosystems is the postmodern equivalent to the colonial erasure of the histories of earlier societies through European settlement of North America during the 1500’s, 1600’s and so on. It has been produced through the fracturing of human existence from the natural environment in a consumerist techno-capitalist society. As the Canadian institutional ethnographer Dorothy Smith wrote, “the very organization of the world that has been assigned to us as the primary locus of our being…is determined by and subordinate to the relations of society founded in a capitalist mode of production” (Smith, 1990). Before any real change can occur in the use of pesticides, changes to cultural attitudes regarding the use at the human level must first be constructed.
References:
Jansen, K. (2000) Making Policy Agendas For Safe Pesticide Use: Public and Private Interests in Technology Regulation in a Developing Country. London, UK: The European Inter-University Association on Society, Science and Technology. Retrieved May 17, 2005 from www.esst.uio.no/posti/workshops/jansen.pdf
Knight, C. (2003) Right To Know: Maine Agricultural Workers and Pesticide Safety. Lewiston, ME: Service Learning Project. Retrieved May 17, 2005 from http:// academic.bowdoin.edu/environmental_studies/ service_learning/dissemination/carly.pdf
Smith, D. (1990). The Conceptual Practices of Power. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. (2000) Pesticides: Making the Right Choice for the Protection of Health and the Environment. Retrieved May 18, 2005 from http://www.parl.gc.ca/InfoComDoc/36/2/ENVI/Studies/Reports/envi01/18-ch11-e.html
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