No fly zone? Spatializing regimes of perceptibility, uncertainty, and the ontological fight over quarantine pests in California

Abstract

For nearly 40 years, California has been periodically gripped by controversies over government efforts to protect agricultural trade by eradicating invasive insects in cities. The analysis focuses on one thread that has linked and stabilized these controversies: disagreement over whether or not the local population of invasive insects is already established and thus ineradicable. Examining the controversies over programs to eradicate the Mediterranean fruit fly in the Los Angeles basin (1980 to present), light brown apple moth on California’s north coast (2007–2010) and the Japanese beetle in the Sacramento Area (2011–2016), I describe two competing models for understanding invasive insect populations. Through a comparison of these regimes of perceptibility, to borrow Michelle Murphy’s term, I demonstrate the importance of temporal and spatial scales in determining pest presence and absence. Further, I argue that the dominant regulatory regime of perceptibility, the Multiple and Recent Incursion (MRI) model, constructs certainty in trade relationships by re-establishing production areas as pest-free through the insistence that the insects are invasive, out of the ordinary, and temporary. The competing regime of perceptibility, the Sub-Detectable Established Local Population (SELP) model, challenges the construction of certainty on which the MRI both relies and helps produce. In doing so, I show that the SELP model threatens California’s position with trade partners but also opens up possibilities for new agro-ecological and political arrangements.