ABSTRACT

When a young boy died from apparent pesticide exposure in Paraguay in 2003, the environmental changes incurred by agricultural expansion suddenly became a massive political disruption. The case is instructive for ANT for at least two reasons. On the one hand, it demonstrates how situations become eventful, and, by extension, how mere things become matters of concern. It suggests that attention to the temporality of such things helps us to see how publics are generated around environmental harms. By highlighting some recent theoretical crossings between ANT and Jacques Rancière, this essay helps to explain how much effort it takes to make certain things public, and helps to see the role of activists and criminal courts in that effort. If the history of environmental problems in the 20th century has taught us anything, it is that the creeping harms of late industrialism are very hard to make visible. This essay suggests that ANT’s recent engagements with contemporary environmental politics have much to tell us about why this is so. In doing so, it also offers ANT a way of heeding more carefully the delicate line that separates the uneventful from the eventful.