Trade Pests and the People: Epistemologies, Governance, and Encounters in Conflicts over the Eradication of California’s Agroeconomic Threats

This dissertation takes a political ecology approach to track how eradication—the removal of all species of a targeted population in a contiguous area—has become embedded in regulatory responses to introduced insect species; in turn, it shows how eradication as a trade concept—and the freedom from pests it implies—shapes epistemologies of determining pest absence and presence, governance across diverse landscapes, and human encounters with pest control methods. In order to protect the top agricultural export economy in the United States, state and federal agricultural regulatory agencies enact projects to eradicate introduced insect species from California’s cities, suburbs, wild spaces, and croplands. While most of these eradication projects go unnoticed by the general public, some have generated significant public conflict. Such conflicts open the black box on the practices and implications of regulating across diverse constituents and landscapes specifically to protect California’s position in domestic and international agricultural commodity markets. To analyze how eradication has been practiced in the United States, when it generates conflict, and how conflicts play out epistemologically and spatially, the dissertation employs descriptive statistics, historiography, and a phenomenological framework. To describe how eradication has been defined and practiced over time, the dissertation uses data from the Global Eradication Database, an open source project. To illustrate the phenomenon of the extremely controversial eradication project, the dissertation draws on interviews, archival material, and regulatory documents related to projects to eradicate: (1) the Mediterranean fruit fly (Ceratitis capitata) by spraying malathion from helicopters in Los Angeles (1981-1996), (2) the light brown apple moth (Epiphyas postvittana) by spraying a pheromone slurry from airplanes over Santa Cruz and Monterey (2007-2010), and (3) Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica) by spraying a trio of conventional pesticides in yards of a Sacramento suburb (2011-2016). Three key findings emerge from the dissertation. First, the variability of how eradication has been defined and practiced contributes to public controversy. Second, in order to move agricultural commodities out of infested areas as quickly as possible, regulatory agencies constrain their assessment of pest absence and presence spatially and temporally. Third, while eradication projects are designed to mitigate increased pesticide exposures in industrial agricultural areas (and the structural violence associated with their use), I show that highly controversial eradication projects render the slow violence of California’s industrial agricultural regions visible in novel ways by translocating the violence into urban and suburban spaces