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Abstract

As climate change and biodiversity loss dismantle the world's ecosystems, we are becoming a planet of weeds. The spread of invasive plant species poses acute challenges to human and non-human life, threatening biodiversity, economic livelihoods, and human health. In anthropology, there has been an embrace of the concept of “weediness” as generative in recent years, both as a way to think through unexpected flourishings amidst the ruins of capitalism, and to challenge an anthropocentric view of vegetal value. However, in contexts where the spread of invasive plant species threatens livelihoods, lifeworlds, biodiversity and ecosystems, there is an urgent need to take seriously the negative consequences of weedy proliferation, something that is perhaps best achieved through a vegetal political ecology approach. This paper traces recent developments in anthropological and social science scholarship related to invasive plants and the techniques used to control them. Literatures investigating the role that weeds play in the social world, across anthropology, geography, critical plant studies and related disciplines are brought into conversation with toxicities literatures to think about how the histories and futures of weeds and their control sit in (and shape) landscapes and bodies in uneven ways.

Keywords

Weeds invasive plant species vegetal political ecology colonialism toxicities

Introduction

As climate change and biodiversity loss dismantle the world's ecosystems, we are becoming a planet of weeds. The spread of invasive plant species poses acute challenges to human and non-human life, threatening biodiversity, economic livelihoods, and human health (Atchison and Head, 2013; Neale and Macdonald, 2019; Schuster, 2021; Simkovic and Nelson, 2019; Stoett et al., 2019). In Australia, there are now more than 500 taxa (species and genera) of introduced plants which have been declared noxious, with 32 species listed as Weeds of National Significance. Weeds are a leading driver of biodiversity loss globally and given Australia's status as an island populated with endemic species found nowhere else in the world, weed control is a pressing issue, with the combined annual costs of weed control for government and industry on public and private lands in Australia approximating $AUD 5 billion (Hafi et al., 2023; McLeod, 2018). Weed control is a significant focus in a variety of settings, including the agricultural industry, domestic gardens, rangelands, and protected areas. Shaped by landscape legacies and imagined futures, weed control projects provoke questions about what kinds of landscapes environmental managers and landholders seek to cultivate and to preserve, what types of plant life are worthy of protection, and what kinds of collateral harms may emerge as a result.

Social scientists interested in multispecies worlds and the Anthropocene have begun to turn their attention to weeds in recent years (Bubandt and Tsing, 2018; Head, 2017; Tsing, 2019). A significant portion of this scholarship has been dedicated to critiquing the demarcation between invasive and native plant species, and destabilizing the concept of the “weed” itself. In anthropology, some scholars have framed “weediness” as a kind of generative idea, a way of thinking through unexpected flourishings in the ruins of neoliberal capitalism (Bubandt and Tsing, 2018; Doiron, 2023; Schuster, 2021; Stoetzer, 2022; Tsing, 2019). Flourishing may not look how we humans expect it to, these scholars suggest, and it may not serve human purposes, but it can offer us pathways out of the mess we are currently in – conceptually, if not materially. Thinking about weeds has generated important critiques around how and why particular non-human species are valued, and how the designation of plants and animals as belonging or not is frequently tied to economic interests. However I am interested in weeds for their role in the social world outside of their function as a useful metaphor. I am interested in what weeds – and, importantly, the human efforts to control them – do in the material world, and how the impacts of weeds and weed control sit in landscapes and bodies in ways that are uneven. There is a rich body of scholarship that addresses this in terms of agro-industry – scholarship that explores the impacts of different herbicides and pesticides on farm workers, owners, and neighbours, as well as the impact of ingesting herbicides and pesticides in the food that consumers buy (Adams, 2023; Guthman, 2019; Hetherington, 2020b). There is also important scholarship that investigates what weeds mean in the context of domestic gardens (Doody et al., 2014; Myers, 2019).

But weed control also happens outside of agriculture, monocropping, and the domestic garden. In northern Australia's savanna landscapes, for instance, weed control happens across protected areas, Aboriginal land, and rangelands (the author; Bach et al., 2019; Head and Atchison, 2015a; Head and Atchison, 2015b). Livestock graziers control weeds in order to protect their pasture; conservation and land management workers control weeds to protect biodiversity values and the visual amenity of places that the public visits expecting to encounter a ‘natural’ ‘native’ landscape; Aboriginal traditional owners control weeds as an expression of caring for country, and cleaning up the landscape, akin to the use of fire (the author; Bach et al., 2019; Bach and Larson, 2017). Weeds and their control play a part in narratives and imaginaries, and they loom large in the day-to-day management of the land in place.

In this paper, I trace developments in anthropological and social science scholarship related to weeds. I seek to bring literatures that investigate the role that weeds play in the social world, across anthropology, geography, critical plant studies, and related disciplines, into conversation with toxicities literatures to think about how the histories and futures of weeds and their control sit in (and shape) landscapes and bodies. I argue that any consideration of weeds and weediness must take into account the impacts of weed control, particularly in terms of herbicide use, and that the impacts of weeds and herbicides can be productively investigated in the same frame. As such, I advocate for bringing a vegetal political ecology (Fleming, 2017) into conversation with work on toxicities to investigate the interrelations between plants, agri-biopolitics, and herbicides. A vegetal political ecology, according to Fleming, encourages analysis that “shows the impact of plantiness on human-plant encounters” and “links this impact to resource politics and other broad environmental contestations” (2017: 27). As noted by Argüelles and March (2022), such an approach is particularly well-suited to scholarship on weeds, because while the designation “weed” may be an arbitrary category, the invasive characteristics of some plants render their impacts wide-ranging and destructive. In thinking about weeds, I suggest that a vegetal political ecology should explicitly engage with the impacts of herbicide usage, on landscapes, ecosystems, non-target species, human bodies, and livelihoods.

I take as my starting point historian of science scholar Hannah Landecker’s (2024) reminder that to consider something an “unanticipated consequence” a whole host of masking and obscuring must be done; elements of material and empirical histories must be ignored. This is relevant, not just in terms of the use of toxins, herbicides, and pesticides for weed control which impact non-target species and ecosystems in hard-to-quantify ways, as well as bodies that are gendered, racialized, and classed and made to “count” less than others (Guthman and Brown, 2016), but also in the sets of circumstances that allowed for the proliferation of invasive plant species in the first place. As important empirical histories of specific invasive plants reveal, the spread of many now-problematic species was “no accident” (Cook and Dias, 2006; Frawley, 2014; Head and Atchison, 2015b; Mastnak et al., 2014; Neale, 2019; Neale and Macdonald, 2019). When consequences are framed as unintended, or unanticipated, it obscures the sets of values, practices, ideas, bodies of knowledge, biases, assumptions and priorities that coalesced into decisions in which a particular intended outcome was considered more important than other possible, probable, or risky outcomes. It is the work of social scientists to dig into these factors and facets to explore how it is that we got here.

I begin with an overview of how anthropological scholarship has dealt with the role that plants play in social worlds, before discussing how the categories of ‘native’ and ‘invasive’ plants have been understood in the social sciences. I then proceed with a critical and partial review of how ‘weediness’ has been employed by anthropologists as a productive metaphor and concept. I argue that while ‘weediness’ be a generative concept, it is vital that anthropologists take seriously the material impacts of weeds and their control, which brings me to a discussion of herbicide use, toxicity, and agri-biopolitics. I close by arguing that drawing on STS scholarship on toxicities, in conversation with a vegetal political ecology framework, is an important counterpoint to the recent embrace of ‘weediness’ in anthropological and environmental humanities scholarship.

Anthropology and plants

In recent years, the social sciences have undergone what has been referred to as a ‘plant turn’; a response to the recognition that plants had long been considered the domain of the life sciences, leaving the social role of plants undertheorized. As philosopher Marder (2013: 2) writes, plants “have populated the margin of the margin, the zone of absolute obscurity undetectable on the radars of our conceptualities”. To Marder, “the logic of vegetal life” (2013: 2) has remained unaddressed for the majority of the history of Western philosophical theory. There is a sense that plants are considered too different from humans for any shared social world to be conceivable, and yet, all animal life – including humans - is directly dependent on plant life for our very existence. In their ability to “eat the sun”, plants “drive the carbon cycles of the planet” (Head et al., 2015: 403) that are necessary for all other life on earth. As Myers (2019: 146–147) writes, “we are only because they are” . Just as the boundaries between humans and animals have been disturbed and dissolved by the multispecies turn in anthropology, so too are plants coming into the view of critical social theory, with recognition that they are a life form we humans are inextricably entangled with.

In anthropology, plants have emerged in recent years as an important focus because they “do things” (Galvin, 2018: 243) in the social world. While plants have generally received less attention than animals in multispecies ethnography, Galvin advocates for “more fulsome attention to human-plant relations” (2018: 234). Indeed, human-plant relations have been garnering more and more scholars attending to the agency and sentience of plants and forests (Gibson, 2019; Kohn, 2013), critically exploring the nexus of plant life, labour and capital (Chao, 2022a; Hetherington, 2020b; Stead, 2019), and examining attempts to transform, preserve and patent plant life itself (Chacko, 2022; Chapman, 2018; Foster, 2018). Yet, even prior to the ‘plant turn’, plants have figured significantly in the intersection of social and ecological research, particularly in the fields of ethnobotany and economic botany. Many ethnobotanists have worked towards translating or making legible local or traditional knowledges pertaining to biological resources, sometimes with the aspiration of drug development. As Hayden points out, “the study of plants and knowledge about their use has a long and complicated legacy in which resource extraction has unquestionably played a prominent role” (2003: 30). Plants play a role in the social world as resources which have the potential to draw capital and be developed by pharmaceutical companies. However plants also can be read as agents which have the capacity to disrupt imaginaries of their potential uses and economic value; for instance, many plants which were imagined as potential “blockbuster” drugs have resisted co-option by behaving in unexpected ways during the drug development process (see, for example, Foster, 2018).

While scholars like Hayden and Foster are interested in the social impacts of bioprospecting, in their research plants emerge as important social actors; sometimes fulfilling the requirements of bioprospectors to be effective, safe, and unique, and sometimes not. Indeed, as Stoetzer points out, it is extractive processes themselves which have “profoundly shaped botanical knowledge production and the relations between plants and people” (Stoetzer, 2022: 60). This is evident, not just in the use of plants in drug development, but in the histories of botanical gardens (Myers, 2019; Stoetzer, 2022), the birth of scientific forestry (Scott, 1998), the creation of plantation agriculture (Chao, 2022a; Rudge, 2022), and monocropping more broadly (Hetherington, 2020b). In these various human-plant entanglements, knowledge, labour, land and resources are extracted from local, indigenous and enslaved peoples for the expansion of empire, development of industry and creation of capital (Hetherington, 2020a; Williams, 2021).

Some scholars have embraced the term “Plantationocene” to describe our current epoch, highlighting the significance of these human-plant entanglements in terms of climate change and planetary collapse. As Chao writes, “the Plantationocene draws attention to the perduring (il)logic of human mastery, discipline, and control in and through which particular plants and particular people are rendered productive, exploitable, or disposable under plantation regimes” (2022b: 167). In considering these questions of where power is located, and whose material interests are being served at the expense of others, I find it helpful to frame the orientation of this kind of work, as Argüelles and March (2022: 45), following Fleming (2017), do, as a “vegetal political ecology”. Plants are, as Myers points out, “the substance, substrate, scaffolding, symbol, sign and sustenance of political economies the world over” (Myers, 2017: 125).

In a related vein, Kregg Hetherington argues that “agriculture has always, to some extent, been biopolitical” (2020a: 683). That is, human and vegetal life are entwined in ways that serve particular structures and infrastructures (like the development of capital); both plants and people are bound up in the state's ability to “make live or let die” (Foucault, 2007; Hetherington, 2020a). Various humans and plants are impacted in ways unequal and uneven; in Hetherington's research in Paraguay, farmworkers and the rural poor are exposed to herbicides by large agribusiness corporations who operate with impunity, and at the same time these herbicides target weeds that grow amongst the herbicide-resistant soy crops (Hetherington, 2020b). Soy is made to live, the weeds are let to die, just as capital is made to live while the rural poor are let to die, both directly through exposure to toxic herbicides, and indirectly, as in the case of pesticide drift destroying neighbouring crops and impacting on the ability of small-scale farmers to make a living (Schuster, 2021). Similarly, Atchison and colleagues point out that biopolitics shapes weed control in contexts outside of agriculture when, as in attempts to restore or rewild landscapes, “making native trees live involves making others die” (2024: 6).

Nativeness and invasiveness: Categorizing plants

For some time now, social scientists have been concerned with problematizing the ways in which plants are categorized, ordered, and valued. In particular, many scholars have critiqued the native/invasive binary, drawing attention to the social bonding practices that inform concepts that may be taken for granted by many people as biological or intrinsic (Barker, 2008; Doody et al., 2014; Head, 2012; Kull and Rangan, 2008). As Head rightly observes, “the absence of a fundamental biological meaning for the concept of nativeness is the most remarked-on feature of the concept as discussed in the humanities and social sciences” (2017: 2).

The categorization of plants as ‘native’ or ‘introduced’ relies, instead, upon a temporal threshold that can be problematic. For instance, in Australia, the temporal threshold is considered to be European colonization of the continent, with species present prior to this considered as ‘native’ and species arriving later considered to be ‘introduced’. However, the logic of such a temporal threshold in Australia is dubious, particularly if we consider colonization to be a structure, not an event (Wolfe, 2006). Furthermore, this temporal threshold recognizes neither the multiple temporal ‘frontiers’ of colonization in Australia, nor the agency of First Nations people in Australia in terms of species distribution (Martin and Trigger, 2015; Trigger et al., 2010). In Australia, the assumption that colonisers were encountering a natural, native landscape worked to erase the thousands of years of cultivation of plant life and ecosystems by Aboriginal people through fire regimes and agriculture (Gammage, 2012; Pascoe, 2014). Such erasures are important because they fed into the legal fiction of terra nullius which was used to rationalize dispossessing Aboriginal peoples of their land, expropriating their resources, and violently settling the continent now known as Australia. Some species, such as the dingo (Canis familiaris), which were introduced by Aboriginal people prior to colonization confound categories, classified in some contexts as ‘native’ species and in others as introduced, revealing the arbitrariness of such categories and thresholds (Crowther et al., 2014; Queensland Government, 2016). Many scholars have critiqued the correlation of nativeness with belonging. In the Australian context, scholars have detailed a variety of situations in which such a correlation does not stand up to scrutiny, particular in relation to whether Aboriginal people consider a particular plant or animal to “belong” in their homelands or not (Bach and Larson, 2017; Martin and Trigger, 2015; Pyke et al., 2021; Trigger, 2008).

Holding in mind Cattelino's provocation to “not just break down or destabilise categories but rather analyse what sustains them, and with what political and economic effects” (2017: 131), it becomes clear that studying weeds and their control also means taking seriously the role that the ongoing unfolding of colonization plays in both the distribution of species, and in shaping human-plant relationships, historically, now, and into the future. As Reynolds notes, “invasion does not happen in a vacuum, but rather in particular sociopolitical and ecological contexts” (2022: 1640). In a related vein, Robbins (2004) has argued that invasion is related, not just to the characteristics of an “invasive species”, but also to the characteristics of the landscape that is being “invaded”. As he writes, “some species tend to be invasive; some landscapes are, or can become, more invadable” (Robbins, 2004: 140). What makes a landscape “invadable” is, as Robbins (2004: 151–152) notes, a combination of ecological, economic and social factors, including the degradation of ecosystems as a result of colonialism and extractivism.

In light of the critiques of categories like “native”, “introduced”, and “invasive”, it is pertinent to also consider what is meant by the term “weed” itself. Geographer Qviström has argued that “weed is not a botanical concept; rather it is defined as any plant in the wrong place, and therefore a problem or at the very least a plant of no value” (2007: 272). Bubandt and Tsing define weeds simply as “organisms that proliferate without human planning” (2018: 2). They suggest that the term “weed” need not be a negative ascription, saying that “the weeds we identify may be good or bad to the humans amidst whom they thrive. Although they are unplanned, they may become resources for humans; alternatively, they may hamper resource utilization—or both” (Bubandt and Tsing, 2018: 2). The concept of “weed” works as a kind of metaphor, then, used to describe species that are out of place, and more broadly, to indicate a landscape that is disordered, and a landscape of shifting dynamics.

‘Weediness’: A productive, yet apolitical metaphor

“Weediness” as a metaphor appears in a variety of contexts, even in instances where scholars are not necessarily talking about plants at all. All sorts of things can be “weedy”, including, for instance, viruses (Nading, 2014), and decolonial practices and ethics (Henry et al., 2023), among others. Weediness is an enduringly useful way to think and speak about entanglement – it gestures at the porosity of boundaries, at the flawed binary opposition of nature and culture, and at the ways in which bringing different things into community with each other can yield unexpected results. Tsing (2019: 33) uses the term “weeds” to describe “the organisms that take over after human disturbance”, including, but not limited to, plant life. And of course, “weediness” can be used to describe invasive plant species while at the same functioning as a broader metaphor to gesture at something being unruly, uncontrolled, or laid to waste.

In his work in Panama, Carse (2019) found that when people described landscapes as “weedy”, they were drawing attention not only to the proliferation of unwanted plant life, but also to government neglect. As Carse writes, for many of the people with whom he worked, “weediness indexes state disinvestment and global disconnection” (2019: 98). In these conversations, weeds and weedy landscapes could function as a way to draw attention to conditions that were otherwise difficult to make legible and explicit; the sense among locals that since the transfer of power from the United States to Panama in this particular region, they were being neglected socially and economically, as well as ecologically through the material decay of these spaces. Abandonment of physical spaces, now overrun with weeds, was read by locals as continuous with their own abandonment (Carse, 2019: 110–111). In Australia, there is a tendency among Aboriginal traditional owners to perceive places overrun by weeds as abandoned, sick or “down”, with a related sense that weeds indicate that the country, and the ancestral spirits who dwell there, are not being cared for adequately (the author; Bach and Larson, 2017). In a somewhat similar vein, Bocci found that the spread of lantana in the Galapagos Islands indicated to some people, not just a threat to the endemic and endangered species that dwell there, but also “a sign of the accelerating degeneration of the human and natural fabric of the Earth – the end of the world” (2019: 7–8). Weediness, then, can refer to a transmutation of the idea of “matter out of place” (Douglas, 2003) in the wake of disruption in a broad and sprawling sense.

Carse writes that, “unruly plant life thrives in the spaces left behind” (2019: 100–101), however, for some scholars, these “spaces left behind” are generative, rife with possibilities for “feral proliferations” (Tsing et al., 2019). Indeed, in her work on ruderals, Stoetzer (2022: 47–48) discusses the new forms of life and “unlikely communities” that emerged in the “world[s] of rubble” left in Berlin in the wake of the second world war. Aligned in many ways with the provocation to consider weediness as generative, Stoetzer writes that, “ruderals capture a sense of both wonder and horror… in this ecology of unexpected neighbours, the story is never singular but always consists of multiple strands. And one does not know beforehand whether it will be a story of destruction or flourishing” (2022: 57). Similarly, Schuster (2021: 592) points out that while weeds may be “difficult companion species to live with”, it is within “weedy” landscapes that alternative possibilities and futures may be found. Doiron (2023), too, writes of the possible rewards of learning to live with weeds, even ones that are frequently thought of as “invasive” and “maligned”. However, it is important to note that in some circumstances, the costs of living with weeds are greater than in others. Some of the “unanticipated consequences” (Landecker, 2024) of the spread of weeds have more damaging material impacts than others, for economies, ecologies, and bodies – both human and non-human.

The concept of “weediness” or learning to live with weeds provides a useful way for thinking through some of the issues involved in restoration or rehabilitation projects. For Doiron (2023), embracing weediness aligns with Shotwell's (2016) provocation to reject purity as an ideal. Indeed, Shotwell's (2016: 4) reminder that “there is no pre-toxic Eden that we can to return to” is a worthy consideration for questions of weed control, as it problematizes the ideal of a pristine baseline. In a practical sense, even if returning landscapes to their pre-colonial status was the goal, gaps and failures in biodiversity monitoring – in the past and today – make this an impossibility. However, more than that, and similar to the problem with the temporal threshold of nativeness, “baselines” themselves can be a problematic idea (Trigger, 2013).

Doiron (2023: 602–603) points out that restoration ecology is bound up with processes of colonialism and Indigenous dispossession in complex and multifaceted ways. One of the ways that this becomes clear is through assumptions around Indigenous land areas functioning as sites of pristine nativeness, the so-called “last refuge perspective” (Kirwan & McCool cited in Cattelino, 2019: 137, emphasis in original), which Cattelino asserts serves to reify Indigenous peoples and places as “things of the past” (2019: 137). As Atchison and colleagues point out, environmental management practices like weed control and rewilding “involve ‘value judgements’ and invoke human actions (including human withdrawal), based on ideas about how those landscapes have been or are damaged, altered or made dysfunctional by humans” (2024: 10). Whether proponents of rewilding employ the “last refuge perspective”, which situates Indigenous peoples as primordial, “noble savages” that function as a counterpoint to the ills of modernity, or consider all humans to be, in some way, polluting or damaging for environments (a perspective most famously critiqued by Cronon (1996)), neither position – taken to its logical conclusion – provides much guidance about how to live with changing environments. An embrace of “weediness” can, then, be a way to move away from unhelpful categories and stultified notions of what a valued or preferred landscape should look like.

However, an unproblematic embrace of undifferentiated “weediness” is not without its pitfalls. Critics of the recent focus on “weediness” have, as observed by Paredes, suggested that much of this scholarship is apolitical, with such scholarship framed as “intellectual projects that detract from the transformative politics necessary in a moment of unrelenting ecological crisis” (2021: 71–72). Other critiques around multispecies ethnography in general are also relevant here, namely in that in studies of human-animal relations, difference within the “human” side is (or at least, has been) flattened, frequently coded as White, Euro-American, and middle class and that multispecies ethnography runs the risk of not engaging adequately with colonial and imperial histories where some people were violently framed as “less-than-human” (Ives, 2019). Although undoubtedly useful, the concept of “weediness” as a generative metaphor, as a way to think of entangled lives and possible liveable futures, only gets us so far in situations where living with, managing and seeking to control weeds shape human and more-than-human lives in ways both violent and banal. As such, I argue that scholarship that investigates what weeds do in social worlds should engage in a “vegetal political ecology” (Argüelles and March, 2022; Durand and Sundberg, 2022; Fleming, 2017), alongside Hetherington's “agri-biopolitics”, in order to move away from the use of weediness as a metaphor, shifting the focus to material conditions and effects, structures and infrastructures, and the location of power.

Weed control and toxicity

Where weeds impact on the material world, threatening livelihoods and ecosystems, they become the targets of concentrated campaigns of control. The reasons for targeting specific weeds are diverse, related to the particularities of ecologies and economic concerns. In agricultural monocropping, for instance, weeds, such as palmer amaranth (Amaranthus palmeri) in the United States (Ward et al., 2013) and ryegrass (Lolium rigidum), wild radish (Raphanus raphanistrum) and wild oats (Avena fatua) in Australia (Llewellyn et al., 2016) reduce the yield of crops, with economic ramifications. In rangelands, livestock farmers target weeds that impact on pasture, make it difficult to traverse landscapes, and – in some cases – present a threat to livestock through the toxicity of the weeds themselves (DiTomaso, 2000). In protected areas, weeds can outcompete native species and impact on ecosystems in problematic ways. For instance, in my own ethnographic research inside national parks in Australia's remote Cape York Peninsula there are targeted campaigns to control gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus), because this species contributes to hotter and more out-of-control wildfires than would occur otherwise (Neale, 2019; Neale and Macdonald, 2019), and olive hymenachne (Hymenachne amplexicaulis), because this swamp-dwelling weed outcompetes native species and threatens the sensitive wetland ecosystems that it colonises (Clarkson et al., 2012). Across rangelands, protected areas, and agricultural crops, weeds are most commonly killed through the application of herbicides. While mechanical processes for controlling weeds exist, the intractable issue with weeds is one of scale. In many places, the landscapes are too vast, the infestations of invasive plant species too large and entrenched, and the resources afforded by governments and landholders too sparse for mechanical control to be an effective method. Further, in agricultural settings, the development of herbicide-resistant crops (such as Round-Up Ready soy) has contributed to an increase in the application of herbicides (Benbrook, 2016). The chemical make-up of these herbicides differs across time and space, as do the capacities of farm workers, park rangers and landholders to manage the risk of their exposure to herbicides (Shattuck, 2019). However, the risks of exposure to herbicides are communicated, experienced, and borne in ways that are asymmetrical and shaped by infrastructures of power.

Toxicity is a fact of life the world over; as Murphy (2017: 497) influentially argued, we are all living in a form of alterlife, that is, “life already altered, which is also life open to alteration”. This stance is concomitant to the approach of taking our entanglement with chemicals seriously by “thinking chemically” (Landecker, 2019), while also holding in mind that the “legacy” of chemical entanglement is not only material, but is brought into being through social and cultural processes, through governance and control (Boudia, 2021). Human entanglements with herbicides bring into view a range of the issues that appear in the literature of toxicities, and a vegetal political ecology that takes seriously the role of invasive plant species in the social world must also consider the impacts of controlling these plants, on landscapes and on bodies.

Despite growing public awareness of the toxicity of herbicides, and widespread campaigns to have particular substances banned, the agricultural chemical industry has long held tight to the (un)truism that “the dose makes the poison” (Guthman and Brown, 2016). Such a conviction serves to transfer the onus of responsibility around safety and risk onto individual people – farmers, farm workers, domestic gardeners, agronomists and other practitioners (Shattuck, 2019). In her work on public understandings of glyphosate in the United States, Adams (2023) traces the history of industry-funded research and the ways in which the agricultural chemical industry has worked to sow the seeds of doubt about the toxicity of glyphosate. As she notes, “facts do not make consensuses; people do, by holding some kinds of evidence close and others distant, by following the traces of harm to their resting points in organs, tissues, soils, urine samples, laboratory rats, and peer-reviewed journals” (Adams, 2023: 106). Indeed, when pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals are actually banned, it is largely the result of public outcry and pressure, rather than due to the science itself. This, perhaps, is self-evident, given that most of these substances were developed explicitly to be toxic towards particular forms of life (Adams, 2023: 23–24).

For many farmers in a variety of settings, the perception that the science around herbicide risk is “unsettled” contributes to an ongoing comfortability with using herbicides – even in situations where farmers’ own observations seem to indicate that their weeds are becoming increasingly resistant to herbicide applications, as is the case with herbicide resistant palmer amaranth (Bain et al., 2017; Müller, 2021). In her work on Saskatchewan farmers’ understandings of glyphosate resistance, Müller (2021: 166) found that even when faced with negative impacts emerging from glyphosate applications, and the necessity of using more and more of the poison to achieve the same result as in previous years, the farmers tended to defer to “the authority of expert opinions” which would allow their farming models to remain unchanged. This is despite highly publicised campaigns about the toxicity of glyphosate, known commonly by its industry name Round-Up, including legal cases in the United States in which Bayer (the company that now manufactures Round-Up) was forced to pay reparations to people who had used the herbicide and later developed non-Hodgkins lymphona (Adams, 2023). Many people choose to live with the toxicity that comes with exposure to herbicides, though access to knowledge, along with the distribution of risk and the option to exercise choice, is uneven.

Agri-biopolitics and herbicides

There is a rich and ever-expanding literature that gets to the heart of agri-biopolitical concerns: how the control of the unwanted plants that proliferate among plants-as-resource impacts unevenly on different bodies, depending – in many cases – on geography, race, gender, and occupation. As Hendlin writes, “chemical exposures and the costs of ecological destruction have nothing to do with a generalized Anthropocene. Chemical biotoxicity burdens are raced, sexed, gendered, and age-specific in their effects” (2021: 182). It is a point echoed by a wide range of scholars that those who stand to benefit the most from the use of toxic chemicals are those with the least proximity to the associated risks (Blanchette, 2019; Boudia, 2021; Hendlin, 2021; Murphy, 2017; Packer, 2021). That is, the “unanticipated consequences” (Landecker, 2024) are borne by only certain bodies, and harms are not distributed evenly. In weed control in a variety of settings, certain people are made to bear the brunt of the risk of chemical exposure in the name of capital. Sometimes these people are farmworkers, such in Guthman and Brown's (2016) work on the application of fungicide in California's strawberry industry, where Mexican employees are positioned in the “buffer zone” between farms and neighbours in order to detect (sensorily, bodily) when there are incidents of pesticide drift. These farmworkers are treated as “necropolitical subjects”, similar to the so-called “biorobots” sent in to clean up in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl (Guthman, 2019; Petryna, 2013). As Guthman (2019: 147) writes, such workers are “generally racially marked subjects whose future is not protected because of the existence of surplus populations – those willing to step in and work when others are used up – as well as legacies of colonial racialization that have made such bodies ideologically less important or even threatening”. In some instances, people are employed to control weeds outside of the industrial farm, such in the case of the campaign against noogoora burr in Australia's Kimberley region in the 1970s, when many Aboriginal people were employed to use Agent Orange against the weed with little protective equipment and no information about the risks of chemical exposure provided (Head and Atchison, 2015a: 175). Sometimes these people simply live in proximity to areas where pesticides and herbicides are being sprayed, both farms (Hetherington, 2020b) and forests (Norgaard, 2007). These people may be small-scale producers themselves, who experience herbicides as both a risk to their health, and a way to reduce their labour, improve their profits, and make economically precarious lives more liveable (Shattuck, 2021; Stein and Luna, 2021).

For many people who face the risks of pesticide exposure, there is no option to live a life free of contamination. Agard-Jones writes how for the Martinican people with whom she works, there is a sense that there is “nothing to be done”, given the limitations on their ability to escape exposure to the toxic insecticide chlordecone which contaminates their island, food, and waters, revealing the ways that Martinican bodies are “connected to commodity chains, to uneven relations of colonial/postcolonial power, and thus to world systems” (2013: 191–192). Toxicity, as Nading (2020: 210) rightly observes, is at once site-specific, emerging from particular empirical histories and events that manifest in specific places in specific ways, but more broadly is related to global processes of imperialism, colonialism and economic exploitation. In a similar vein, Liboiron and colleagues remind us that “structures define toxicity” (2018: 333). Many of the patterns seen in the distribution of risk and harm in terms of herbicide exposure echo those evident in other forms of environmental exposures, and other kinds of contaminations. Whether it is the impacts of nuclear testing or accidents (Byrne, 2023; Petryna, 2013), contamination of lands and waters in the name of resource extraction (Hoover, 2017), or in the application of herbicides, pesticides and other toxins to unwanted plants, exposure to toxicity has cascading effects on bodies and landscapes; effects that are (importantly) sometimes not made legible for years, decades, or generations, and sometimes escape explicit attention altogether (Liboiron et al., 2018).

Part of a vegetal political ecology that takes up some of the work of defining toxicities, then, is to dig into and interrogate, not only the way that harms from toxic herbicide exposures are obscured, but also to trace the particular ways that harms framed as “unanticipated consequences” (Landecker, 2024) came to be. The questions, for me, in taking up a vegetal political ecology are: how and why are certain weeds targeted? How does weed control sit in landscapes and bodies in ways that are uneven? And, importantly, whose material interests get to matter?

Conclusion

Thinking about weeds and their control can help us to think about complicity and care, about accountability and the dispersal of responsibility, and about what is obscured when we talk of “unintended” or “unanticipated” consequences. Considering what unexpected flourishing may occur through “weedy” processes allows us to imagine how to live with the weeds that we can never truly eradicate. What “living with weeds” means differs in different places. Living with weeds may continue to demand processes of weed control, whether this occurs through the spraying of chemicals, use of fire, or mechanical weeding practices. It may entail finding productive uses for weedy plants, and transforming ideas around what a preferred landscape should look like. However, the fact remains that some weeds are easier to live with than others. Some weeds choke waterways, poison livestock, outcompete native species, and increase the risk of devastating wildfires. In these instances, an approach that seeks to explore the ways that weediness can be generative may not adequately address the very real threats that weeds can present to biodiversity, livelihoods, lifeways, and life itself.

Instead, I argue that a vegetal political ecology approach may allow us to bring together the pragmatics of weeds and their control – the ways that plants are categorized, understood and related to, and the material and economic conditions that have contributed to the spread of weeds and their control – along with a consideration of the impacts that both weeds and their control have on bodies and landscapes; impacts that are always distributed unevenly. Weeds have material impacts on livelihoods, lifeworlds, biodiversity, ecologies, and sensitive places that demand response and action, and at the same time weed control brings people and landscapes into contact with toxic chemicals, the impacts of which are difficult to disentangle, make legible, and name. A vegetal political ecology can, I believe, help us hold these things together in frame.

Highlights

The social sciences have undergone a ‘plant turn’ in recent years, though the literature on human-plant relations is still emerging

Some anthropologists have embraced the concept of ‘weediness’ in order to think about unexpected flourishings in the Anthropocene

Taking a ‘vegetal political ecology’ approach allows analysis of the destructive impacts of invasive plant species

A ‘vegetal political ecology’ approach, with literature on toxicities, enables analysis of how impacts sit unevenly in bodies and landscapes

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This paper was developed and drafted during a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Oulu as part of the VisitANTS Biodiverse Anthropocenes project. The paper was further developed in discussions with colleagues at the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia-funded workshop ‘Planet of Weeds: Invasive Plant Species, Coloniality and Planetary Health’. It has benefited from the feedback, support, and guidance of colleagues including Timothy Neale and Emma Kowal, and from the generous engagement of the three anonymous reviewers.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Mardi Reardon-Smith

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In the weeds: Thinking through anthropological and other social science approaches to invasive plant species and their control

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Anthropology and plants

Nativeness and invasiveness: Categorizing plants

‘Weediness’: A productive, yet apolitical metaphor

Weed control and toxicity

Agri-biopolitics and herbicides

Conclusion

Highlights

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References