Giovanni Prete

Public conviction with no scientific evidence: undone popular epidemiology and the denunciation of the health effects of pesticides in a French apple-growing region

ABSTRACT Popular epidemiology refers to processes in which a group of individuals collects, produces, and analyses heterogeneous data, in order to prove the negative effects of specific economic activities or infrastructures on their health and the environment. Despite the attention they receive, social movements that engage in popular epidemiology seldom come into being and, if they do, are often abandoned before they achieve their goal. This article draws on a qualitative sociological investigation carried out in a French region, where for many years, the development of industrial agriculture has led to concerns regarding the impact of pesticides on the population’s health. It describes the emergence of a protest movement and analyses the factors that encouraged this movement to accept a certain level of uncertainty regarding the toxicity of pesticides and to devote few resources to scientific activities. More generally, this article suggests that taking into account the national structuration of environmental movements and their legal contexts is crucial to understanding popular epidemiology processes and the relationship between social movements and science.

Governing by ignoring

Large areas of uncertainty still surround the relationship between environmental exposure to toxic materials, on the one hand, and human health, on the other. Several historical accounts have recently shown that this state of ignorance is not only due to the complex nature of the interactions between toxic agents and human bodies. Most of these accounts cast light on the strategies set up by big corporations to hide the dangers of the toxic materials they use, sell or dispose of in the environment. The cases of tobacco smoke (Proctor 2012), global warm-ing (Oreskes and Conway, 2010) and toxic chemicals (Markowitz and Rosner, 2003) provide evidence of these strategies contributing to the “social production of ignorance” over environ-mental health issues. Until now, these accounts have tended to focus on how industry draws on specific networks of scientists, politicians and experts in regulating agencies to produce doubts about the harmfulness of their products. These approaches tend to limit the role of governing bodies to that of organizations “captured” by private interests (McGarity and Wagner 2008). In so doing, they overlook the fact that for governing bodies, ignorance can have a value in and of itself. For instance, it helps the contemporary state to reduce complex issues (Scott 1998) so as to make them “governable” (Foucault 2004). Recent environmental health studies support this thesis. The cases of indoor air pollution (Murphy 2006), of pesticides’ effects on bees (Kleinman and Suryanarayanan 2013), and of the consequences of human exposure to chemicals in the soils of post-Katrina New Orleans (Frickel and Vincent 2007), show that ignorance is a useful resource for the control of toxic chemicals in the environment. [First paragraph]