The Pesticide Creative Collective*

Introduction

The shifting geographies of the current global order need to be understood in their socioecological dimension. This has been largely addressed in relation to petro-fueled climate change and the urgency of its uneven consequences, but less analyzed in relation to the recent changes and jarring continuities in global chemical geographies. In this Intervention we discuss the highly uneven geographies of pesticides and their role in current fascist formations. In conversation with Alberto Toscano’s conceptualization of Late Fascism, we refer to current fascist formations as the historic and geographically specific materializations of a process of rising authoritarianism deeply rooted in colonial racial patriarchal capitalism. We argue that critical and radical geographies need to remain attentive to the role of pesticides in regimes of capitalist accumulation, alongside the new forms in which fear, security, health, doubt, knowledge and ignorance are being weaponized by the global far right. We use the specific case of the United States to question how ubiquitous, invisibilized and unevenly distributed toxicity is shaping current political formations.

Although fascism and explicit assaults on knowledge have underpinned antiregulatory moments globally, the US immediately comes to mind as a prime example of the articulation of denial and ignorance, nationalist Christian values and white supremacy and how they have been effectively gaining political traction. This has been brilliantly analyzed in relation to racism in the US in Laura Pulido’s work on climate denial and by Becky Mansfield’s work on fossil fuels and particulate matter. It is also at the core of Environmental Justice and Environmental Racism movements and scholarship. We have been studying it in relation to pesticide use and regulation. Our findings suggest a dramatic increase in pesticide use and the failure of regulation that speak to the global ubiquity of substances like the popular weedkiller glyphosate in soil, water, food and bodies. And while the global pesticide complex has changed in relation to a growing generics sector and an entirely new geography of production, critical geographers have not paid enough attention to it. The more recent spotlight given to pesticides in US public and official discourse offers an important opportunity to address some of these issues.

The subversion of toxicity concerns to a conservative, white-supremacist agenda is epitomized in the current MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement, a correlate of MAGA (Make America Great Again). MAHA under the second Trump administration works as a political device that articulates denial and ignorance and has put them to work under commodification of fear, conservative nostalgia and good old imperial masculinist entitlement. For that reason, MAHA is very effective in processing health and environmental concerns that were already voiced by scientists, communities, institutions and activists for decades by downplaying structural violence and commodifying the capillarization of fear. Such fears of exposure to harmful substances successfully become emotional fuel for fascist formations. Their battle has been against vaccines, food dyes and acetaminophen (paracetamol), largely evading key issues of pesticide use and regulation. We seek to counter the way in which pesticides, and the structural conditions under which their ubiquity and uneven geographies are forged, tend to disappear from current political analysis.

Plantations, Populism and Pesticides

In the rural US, and in many other agrarian contexts, like for example in Brazil and China, the dynamics of chemical-intensive agricultural development have led to landscapes that are increasingly disinvested, sparsely populated, and where social and environmental possibilities are constrained by a path-dependent process of agrarian development. Massive tracts of land are not oriented towards life or habitation, and instead the production of agricultural commodities through chemicals. Landownership is increasingly consolidated, even in many areas historically characterized by smallholder production. And in plantation and agro-industrial regions historically dominated by land concentration and production for export, there are processes of further consolidation, absentee ownership, and an increasing power of agrichemical companies and finance relative to rural communities. Forms of democratic and representative politics and governance sit in an increasingly incommensurable relationship with powerful interests of land monopolization, the dispossession and hollowing out of rural areas, and agro-chemical industry power.

Land consolidation, corporate takeover and a growing extractive frontier largely dependent on agrochemicals are part of current global processes of landgrabbing. The contemporary politics of pesticides, and agrochemical capital accumulation, may be fundamentally incompatible with the same liberal orders that have tried to regulate, manage, and harness the productive power of agroindustry. From this perspective, pesticides are at the very heart of the contradictions of liberal modernity, since productivist agriculture has also represented a means of deferring deeper structural contradictions around the hollowing out, marginalization and heightened vulnerability of rural areas, communities and livelihoods that attest to the failures of redistribution of wealth and power. For example, herbicides are treated as the solutions to “labor shortages” that are fundamentally racialized, gendered, and classed. Chemical-intensive monocultures are indispensable to sociospatial orders of accumulation and dispossession, and increasingly toxic landscapes become the destination for products of the same chemical complex that contributed to earlier rural economic and population decline. The contradiction between expanding toxicity and engineered rural decline, on the one hand, and the entrenched power of agrochemical and rural blocs, on the other, generates a feverish politics that reconfigures plantation and colonial politics for new rounds of toxic accumulation.

In that sense, plantation-colonial regimes are fundamentally authoritarian-fascist. They underwrite relations of production that are profoundly destructive and cannot maintain an organic base of support. Despite a trend of chemicalization, mechanization and ostensible democratization and a shift away (in some cases) from the most egregious forms of exploitation, these relations are maintained by concentrated ownership or power through relations of debt over massive swaths of land. The conflict is accentuated between a small rural elite and agrochemical companies, on the one hand, and increasingly urban people of rural provenance, on the other hand, even as countries are committed to development and production models based on productivist agriculture. As such, we see a return to plantation-colonial fascist formations, on a different scale, embraced by agrochemical interests.

In this context of rural disinvestment and ascendant right-wing populism, conservative blocs and the pesticide industry across diverse geographies advance a pesticide agenda that entrenches corporate power and reproduces toxic inequalities. In Europe, the withdrawal of the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Regulation (SUR), which had committed to halving the use of pesticides by 2030, and the substitution of the Green Deal with the Industry Deal, exemplifies how far-right actors have been lobbying towards chemical deregulation to privilege corporate interests over ecological and human health. These dynamics extend to the maintenance of highly hazardous pesticides, as governments defend their continued circulation despite long-time struggles by social organizations, including the Pesticide Action Network (PAN), while simultaneously blocking attempts to restrict their export to the global South. Such practices consolidate a toxic trade that concentrates the use of highly hazardous pesticides in peripheral areas and sacrifice zones, deepening the uneven distribution of chemical harm, even within high-income countries.

As Marion Werner has analyzed, the current geometries of the multipolar world shape a toxic trade that is not limited to circular North–South dynamics, but is very much enmeshed. While high-income countries continue to profit from toxic trade and, in some cases, double standards, as a recent investigation by Public Eye has shown, the changing geographies of pesticides production and consumption signal the urgency to better account for the important differences among countries and within regions.

In multilateral agreements, we can see how these pressures from industry and far-right groups are evident. At the 2025 Rotterdam COP-12, parties once again refused to list some of the most hazardous substances, such as chlorpyrifos, paraquat, and methyl bromide, while conceding only to the inclusion of carbosulfan and specific fenthion formulations, a selective outcome achieved after governments blocked consensus. Meanwhile, at the 2025 Stockholm COP, parties agreed to list chlorpyrifos for global elimination under Annex A; yet, they simultaneously granted 22 use exemptions, more than three times the number recommended by the scientific committee, a move that represented a concession to industry, departing from a science-based review. Authoritarian regimes have also actively dismantled regulation and monitoring infrastructures, undermining the very capacity of states to evaluate risks and monitor exposure, as seen under Bolsonaro and the “ruralista” bloc in Brazil, Chavez-Robles in Costa Rica, Milei in Argentina, and analogous right-populist regimes.

MAHA’s Contradictions

In the United States, meanwhile, pesticides are back in the news. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaigned against Big Agriculture, promising his army of “MAHA Moms” to stop exposures to glyphosate and other pesticides. Instead, Republicans have sponsored a bill to prevent states from doing their own health assessments, regulation or labeling, and limiting Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations to the human health assessments done every 15 years: a process one of Kennedy’s most prominent supporters called “the biggest joke in American history”. What this moment has to say politically however goes well beyond the rise of the MAHA movement or run-of-the-mill Republican deregulation. What is under attack is a sense of health as something that is public, something that is knowable. Instead, what we are getting is a new eugenic common sense, where every individual is responsible for producing their own purity—a purity that is of course unachievable for most people along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality and ableness. Such an idea of purity attests a dangerous reconfiguration of the relationship between the body, the home and the nation—a fertile ground for fascist formations.

While the anti-vaccine elements of the MAHA movement have been the most vocal and visible, the MAHA argument has also been about food safety, making strong arguments against highly processed foods and pesticides, and making claims about the corporate capture of knowledge regarding the harms of these chemicals. With this point about corporate capture we agree! Yet as the MAHA agenda has taken shape in the Trump administration, it is clear that the anti-vax agenda is moving ahead, while attention to pesticides and Big Ag has fallen by the wayside.

In the first months of the Trump administration, leading up to the May 2025 release of the MAHA Report (called “Make Our Children Healthy Again”), it was widely predicted by supporters and detractors alike that RFK Jr. would use the report to mount “a war on pesticides”. Indeed, the problem of corporate capture featured strongly in the report, and pesticides were among the topics of a section on the “cumulative load of chemicals in our environment”. Yet despite describing the problem, it leaned into the industry spin term “crop protection tools”, emphasized that farmers depend on pesticides and that no changes should impact them, and claimed regulatory successes. In these and other ways, the report pulled its punches on pesticides. The follow-up MAHA Strategy, released in September 2025, was even weaker on pesticides: “we were heard”, said the CEO of CropLife America, which is the pesticide lobby. MAHA has been captured by agricultural and petrochemical corporate interests. As a result, MAHA is going to lead us to a world with more toxic exposures and more infectious disease.

The wider point, though, is that while the MAHA enthusiasts seem surprised that this administration is failing to address pesticides, critical scholars should not be. First of all, it is hard to imagine that Trump would take up a strong regulatory stance, and especially one that requires controlling the petrochemicals or the Big Ag industry. Even before the MAHA report was issued, it was clear that there was pushback from inside the Trump administration. MAHA folks somehow expected to get regulation out of the most anti-regulatory and pro-oil/chemical regime possibly ever. This anti-regulatory, pro-petrochemical stance is especially prominent in the EPA (its tagline is currently “Powering the Great American Comeback”), which is precisely the institution that would have to commit to regulating pesticides. It is increasingly clear that the US is a petro-state: not only it is the world’s largest oil and gas producer, but petro-reality is promoted as a civilizational necessity and a way of legitimizing empire and warfare. It is a central element of both the country’s cultural politics and its imperial history.

While this is nothing new in the US, this political moment is different in the coordinated effort to make those harms unknowable, and the politics of purity and patriarchal restoration that is replacing actual knowledge. The first Trump administration invested heavily in what Becky Mansfield called “deregulatory science”—remaking the process of scientific analysis of risk to justify not having to restrict chemicals that otherwise show evidence of harming human health. The process was expensive. Scientists and the public were not fooled. This time around they have abandoned the pretext. The entire EPA Office of Research and Development was eliminated. The scientists who determined PFAS or “forever chemicals” cause cancer and lead causes childhood neurological damage are gone. Without this scientific capacity, it will be almost impossible for the EPA to issue new health-protecting regulations. The US Supreme Court just allowed the Trump administration to rescind $2 billion in research grants. In July of this year, the National Cancer Institute announced it will be able to fund less than half of its normal grants. The list goes on. The strategy this time is to simply make it very, very difficult to have a source of truth or authority that comes from a trusted institution. Instead, the Trump administration asks people with real concerns, including in their own base, to trust in authoritarian yet charismatic figures and individual virtues to protect them.

This is the classic fascist play—dismantle trusted institutions, destroy independent sources of truth, and instead ask people to put their faith in the individual’s ability to protect themselves and a broader militarization project that effectively mobilizes fear against migrants, queer and trans people, and populations racialized as non-white. These two sides of the fascist coin need to be understood in their inseparability. To secure MAHA support, an industrial-extractivist coalition absolutely thrives on the fixation of bodily politics on things that are not structural and are not about the redistribution of land and power, such as vaccines, organic produce and dyes, hitched to the core of right-wing and conservative coalitions attacking immigrants’ rights, trans and queer people, feminist and other social movements’ gains, all lumped under the “woke ideology”.

MAHA embraces the entire idea of well-being (health and wealth!) as the result of individual choice, so that your well-being is treated as a sign of your willpower, which then defines your worthiness. And this worthiness is written on the body in terms of health—which is equated with masculinist, racist, cisheteronormative, ableist and fatphobic notions of beauty. This is where MAHA’s white nationalist—eugenic—elements become so clear. In other words, the utter contradiction and dissonance of wanting regulation yet choosing Trump is possible because of the individualizing, consumer-focused, and racist-nationalist tendencies: that is, not just individual control, but the protection of me and mine, defined narrowly. There is no concern here for farmworkers or chemical producers or fenceline communities or the health of other people’s children. There is only a concern for individualized protection, one that reinforces the proprietorship logic of controlled and bounded toxicity (on which see Alyssa Paredes’ forthcoming essay, “Plantation Liberalism”). And this individualized protection is premised on the maintenance of the highly uneven geography of exposure to pesticides and other dangerous chemicals.

Deregulation

“I did my research” is part of the repertoire included in the script of MAHA and conservative conspiracy theories; it turns into a self-indulgent epistemological strategy to deny science, facts, questions, debates, data, and the need for complex answers to the pungent health problems caused by pollution, pesticides, and big industries. The strategy relies on seeking arguments that only resonate with fears and truths aforementioned; each argument builds up over the previous one a sort infallible “new science” that takes no questions, only the manufactured certainties that reply to the urgency of a form of health knowledge to protect “my family, my sons and me” as if people existed isolated of their environments and institutional contexts.

“I did my research” emphasizes distrusting science and institutions, but does not question interlocking systems of oppression and structural violence and does not problematize what is causing societal and environmental health problems. In that regard the MAHA rise of fascist unknowing makes it impossible to arrive at a meaningful, actionable regulatory truth. Regulations are presented as the culprit, the cause and the object of anger of their “I did my research” discovery journey. Meanwhile, the production, mobilization and weaponization of fear are effectively serving to destroy common and public tools to fight back for the possibility of living in healthy environments. Actionable regulatory truths are the product of broader struggles and community articulations against corporate interests within and beyond the state. Precisely what the MAHA movement and official governmental reports are making impossible.

Kennedy portrays himself as a civil rights advocate and environmentalist. Health and vitality are his slogans and the mantras of the MAHA movement. Probably his most important role in the administration is being part of a politics of erasure of institutions, scientific support to decision making, regulation and social investment. But such politics of erasure requires branding, which seems to be one of the key cultural products used by this administration using media figures in health issues to make their policies palatable for their audiences. One of the emotions mobilized is a conservative nostalgia that gets more traction in contexts where rising inequalities, rampant violence and heightened environmental destruction create a generalized sense of no-future. In absence of a future to aspire to, attachment to a fictional glory associated with US imperialism, settler colonialism and white supremacy becomes preeminent. Conspiracy works as a cultural product that harnesses public distrust in government, institutions and science towards a particular project of deregulation alongside repressive state power.

The figure of Kennedy recalls that prestige, tragedy, grief and drama which work together as an effective mobilization of political emotions. As the structure of feeling evokes conservative nostalgia and sutures MAHA to MAGA through a longing for a glorious fictionalized past of US dominance and bodily vigor. For Kennedy, this fiction hinges on nostalgia for the 1960s as an imagined pinnacle of US global power and domestic vitality and bodily health. The particular brand of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time environmental attorney born into the liberal Kennedy political dynasty, provides a veneer of bi-partisan common sense and anti-systemic truth-telling despite his proven record of falsehoods and MAHA’s consistent knee-bending to agribusiness interests whenever there is a semblance of conflict. The last element that configures this character and the echoes of the MAHA movement is their cult of vitality, linked to trends associated with biohacking and the idea that the rules of nature can be bent to “Man’s will” with enough resources and wealth. The fantasy of living in space is one of the key aspirational elements of the new mediatic techno-billionaires, pharaohs in their own right, and highly legitimized among MAHA people. In Kennedy, eugenics and obsessive self-optimization are now conjoined with a hollow discourse targeting whatever threat to bodily and collective vigor is du jour that emerges, ranging from legitimate concerns (pesticides and processed foods) to important health tools (vaccines) to the very foundations of regulatory knowledge and decision making (epidemiology, toxicology, and public health research). If it is chaotic and seemingly incoherent, the eugenicist and individualizing logics, and the ways MAHA is conjoined with the fascist elements of MAGA, determine its political form and significance.

Conclusions

In a recent piece, Verónica Gago and William Callison develop the notion of “the chainsaw international” to conceptualize the spreading logic of economic sacrifice met with spectacles of revenge that has come to characterize the current authoritarian rise across Latin America, the US, Canada and Europe. In their words, “As the chainsaw logic spreads, it strengthens the grip of an increasingly international politics of patriarchy, racism, plunder, and violence”. Without a doubt, current fascist formations flourish from widespread precarization, ongoing dispossession and deepened historical vulnerability. In this Intervention, we argue for a critical geographic analysis that remains attentive to the environmental dimension of current global transformations. In tracing current political discourse around pesticides, we insist on the need to study and disrupt the highly uneven chemical geographies of exposure, risk, harm and death, deflecting the idea that these are individual issues, but rather understanding their place within larger structures of power and domination. A better comprehension of the emerging global geographies of pesticide production, use and regulation offers opportunities for solidarity across and within the global South and the global North.

*The Pesticide Creative Collective are a group of international scholars and artists working in collaboration to grapple with the epistemological and political challenges of what it means to live with death-producing chemicals and the worlds they constantly destroy and recreate. We are part of the Pesticide Research Network which gathers scholars involved in pesticide research, convened by Becky Mansfield (Ohio State University), Marion Werner (SUNY Buffalo), Annie Shattuck (Indiana University Bloomington) and Christian Berndt (University of Zurich), since 2022 (see https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10492-w).

Featured image: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes remarks at an event announcing the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) Commission, Thursday, May 22, 2025, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian.) Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/202101414@N05/54539007057/

This is the sixth essay in our “Critical Geographies of the Shifting World Order” series; for more, see https://antipodeonline.org/2025/05/29/critical-geographies-of-the-shifting-world-order/