Abstract
Now the Pathogen Has Spoken: Commentary 1
I first encountered the ideas that Julie Guthman presents in Wilted in 2015, in a talk she gave at the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers conference. She spoke to the title Can the pathogen speak? riffing off of Timothy Mitchell’s (2002) subversive, mosquito-centered reworking of Gayatri Spivak’s famous question about the voice of the subaltern. In her talk, as in her subsequent book, Guthman placed a small number of fungal agricultural pathogens at the center of an account of the Californian strawberry industry. She told compelling stories of the conjoined social and ecological processes that led to the emergence and spread of plant disease. She documented how plants and their pests shape people, focusing on how modern projects of repair create new disease situations, and revealing the impossibility of ‘magic bullet’, technofix solutions to the endemic pathogenic problems of agricultural intensification.
That was 2015. After the talk, we mingled in the sunshine in the gardens of the Royal Geographical Society largely untroubled by viruses. By the time Wilted was published in 2019, we had been given warning of the disruptive power of zoonotic agricultural pathogens. Mike Davis (2005) warned of bird flu as the Monster at our Door, Rob Wallace (2016) cautioned that Big Farms Make Big Flu, and Steve Hinchliffe and his colleagues (2016) had completed their investigations of the Pathological Lives of intensive animal agriculture. Celia Lowe (2010) had described the Viral Clouds of H5N1 and SARS and avian and swine flu were well on the radars of biosecurity experts. But few anticipated how swiftly and dramatically a virus like SARS-CoV-2 might change the world.
In the short space of time since Wilted was published, we have all become familiar with the geographies of a pathogenic virus and what it curtails. This accelerated experience of getting to know viruses raises the stakes for reading this book. I imagine, like me, many readers will look for a guide to the present. They will find it, but they will also discover a book that already seems to be about a fast-receding past. With this in mind, I will briefly highlight some themes that seem most prescient for giving voice to pathogens in the COVID present.
The first relates to the theory Guthman offers of disease causation and spread. Like the authors detailed above, she explores disease as emergent from the globalizing assemblages of intensive agriculture. These assemblages are technological and multispecies and expose the bodies of diverse organisms to antibiotic chemicals. Modern strawberry farming, like other modes of producing plant and animal life in the Plantationocene, configures relations of intimate and intense proximity that enable the rapid evolution, exchange, and proliferation of viruses, fungi, and bacteria, a few of which may become pathogenic. The key point here is that these types of diseases are rarely due to some thing that comes from an unsanitary, distant, or exotic outside. More commonly, they come from within: they are endemic to the intensive agricultural assemblage.
As Eben Kirksey (2020) has recently observed, this theory of immanent causation is politically important when it comes to speaking for COVID-19. Early and (at the time of writing) still prevalent accounts of what Donald Trump wants us to know as the ‘China virus’ placed its origins in the exotic alterity of a Wuhan ‘wet market’: a site frequently marked by the ‘primitive’ and ‘disgusting’ practice of keeping and consuming the flesh of rare and charismatic animals like pangolins. As with the efforts that Guthman documents by Californian strawberry growers to brand novel plant pathogens as ‘Japanese’, this COVID origin story links disease to foreign agents engaged in primitive practices. It thus deflects attention from endemic problems to justify nationalist and xenophobic restrictions. But Kirksey argues, as the origins of COVID-19 become better known, and when we compare COVID-19 with similar zoonotic viruses like SARS, it seems much more likely that the virus comes from hot spots created by intensive animal agriculture (see also Brown, 2020; Vaughn, 2020). Yes, diseases have hot spots, but these hot spots can be ‘over here’, as much as they are ‘over there’.
Alongside an analysis of disease causation, Wilted also explores the historical practices through which scientists, engineers growers overcame the hydrological, chemical, and microbiological obstacles to strawberry production. It traces how they then tried to repair the assemblage they created to tackle the new problems it came to generate. Here, Guthman draws on my own work (Lorimer, 2017) on the biopolitics of managing nonhuman life to distinguish antibiotic and probiotic approaches to agricultural pest control. The former simplifies ecological systems and seeks to eradicate unneeded or unwanted lifeforms. The latter uses life to manage life: introducing new species to control pests, to build ecological resilience, and to maintain productivity.
Guthman demonstrates how the fungal pathogens that threaten strawberry production were ‘solution problems’ (cf Goldstein, 2018) produced by the excessive application of antibiotic approaches – like chemical soil fumigation – that over time so degraded the microbial and biochemical quality of the soil that they created the ideal conditions for fungal proliferation. She documents the limited success of like-for-like chemical substitutes before examining contrasting experiments with probiotic agroecological approaches like biological control and diverse crop rotations. She traces both their ecological efficacy and their economic limitations given the costs of land and labor in California.
We can find evidence of, and advocates for, both types of approach in responses to COVID-19. But antibiotic repair solutions are in the vanguard. The world is awash with antimicrobial fluids, masks and gloves proliferate to limit microbial reproduction, and the race is on for a vaccine that will train the human immune system and thus tame the virus. At the same time, it is becoming clear that the factors that cause zoonotic viral outbreaks are often indexed to the excessive application of such antibiotic approaches. As Steve Hinchliffe and his colleagues (2016) have observed, large numbers of immunocompromised animal and human bodies living in the dense concentrations necessary for cheap meat cannot be secured indefinitely with antibiotic drugs and exclusion zones. A range of critics are now suggesting that more ecological approaches will be required to dial down the risks of zoonotic pathogen emergence and spread. These need to move beyond ad hoc practices of repair toward a more profound transformation in human–environmental relations.
Where Wilted is less of a guide to the present, and where the recent past begins to look so distant, is in the epistemic importance afforded science and scientists. Guthman has made an editorial decision to follow the science, in ways that are exemplary of the Science & Technology Studies informed models of agricultural political ecology she has pioneered. We learn of university and corporate scientists who are closely entangled with, and shaped by, commercial interests. In making their pathogens speak, these scientists have interests, but they share a strong epistemic respect for the evidentiary practices of the field sciences. New plant varieties, technologies, and chemical are proposed, tested, and made subject to field trials. Trust is placed in scientists and their knowledge practices. The same cannot be said for some of the most prominent domains that have come to shape responses to COVID-19, at least in the United States. As far as I could tell, no one important in Wilted is proposing injecting bleach into strawberries to get rid of the fungus. Such figures no doubt exist to advise Californian agriculture, but they are not prominent.
Reading this book in mid-2020 in the anxious, uncertain, and highly mediated world of lockdown helps highlight the alarming epistemic diversity that marks this moment of crisis. This pathogen has now been spoken for, extensively, but in a cacophony of different and dissenting voices. In her accessible yet incisive writing, Guthman demonstrates the vital role that critical social science can play in enabling citizens to navigate the politics of knowledge production and in helping people to make complicated everyday decisions informed by robust evidentiary practices.