Fostering ignorance to maintain public support: New Zealand’s 2002–2004 urban aerial pesticide spraying operation over Auckland

ABSTRACT

Over the last six decades pesticide use has grown profoundly, leading to numerous health and environmental problems. Public acceptance of pesticide use has been central to its growth, and social scientists have traced this acceptance to safety perceptions surrounding pesticides. However, less has been said about the processes leading to those perceptions. To shed light on such processes I analyzed New Zealand’s 2000–2004 eradication operation against the Painted Apple Moth, an invasive species from Australia, which involved repeatedly spraying densely-populated urban areas over a period of 29 months. To better understand how public acceptance was nurtured for this operation, I analyzed the government’s million dollar communications campaign about the operation, which included press releases, fact sheets, and advertising. The analysis reveals government officials used numerous tactics to produce and maintain safety perceptions about the pesticide, including: 1) portraying the pesticide as harmless to humans; 2) appeals to ignorance; and 3) using rhetorical tactics to neutralize inconvenient knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Pesticide use
• environmental health
• risk perception
• sociology of ignorance
• and uncomfortable knowledge

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tracy Perkins, Lauren Richter and Alise Cappel for their detailed reading and extensive feedback on earlier drafts, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Manuel Vallée

Manuel Vallée, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology and Criminology Department, at the University of Auckland, where he has won teaching excellence awards in 2015 and 2020. He teaches: 1) Environmental Sociology; 2) Sociology of Science & Technology; 3) Sociology of Health, Illness and Medicine; 4) Global Issues and Sustainable Futures; and 5) Research Design. Besides his interests in the social construction of pesticide use and production of ignorance, he researches curriculum greening in the tertiary sector, the environment’s absence in mainstream coverage of disease, as well as factors that increase student engagement. He also co-edited Resilience, Environmental Justice and the City (2017).