ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Irresponsible Questions?” Activist Criticism of the Global Pesticide Trade during the 1980s and 1990s

• In Event: Activist Epistemics and Artefacts 3

English Abstract

This paper examines new ways of producing and contesting environmental knowledge through the lens of debates on pesticide use in developing countries since the 1980s. In particular, I explore the interplay of diverse bodies of knowledge and political strategies in a controversy that was both academic and political in nature. Because of growing environmental concerns, most industrial countries had banned DDT and other toxic substances in the course of the 1970s. The pesticide industry, however, shifted its sales of persistent pesticides to the developing world. For this panel, I take up the concept of counterknowledge via the example of lay criticism of the global pesticide trade by the Pesticide Action Network (PAN). Founded in 1982 in Malaysia, PAN acted as an international coalition calling attention to environmental and health impacts as much as to the fundamentally global nature of the pesticide problem. Drawing on anti-pesticide material from the 1980s onwards, I outline strategies to raise awareness on environmental destruction and health hazards in developing countries. Rather than questioning scientific evidence, PAN and other pesticide critics used official findings to support their own arguments but also called for consideration of other factors: pesticide misuse, lack of protective equipment, and the problem of storage and disposal of pesticide waste were pivotal, they argued, to the pesticide problem in developing countries. These interventions not only reflected the shifting environmental discourse in the 1980s but also produced a specific form of expertise.

Author

• Sarah Anja Ehlers, Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany