ABSTRACT
Agricultural pesticide drift has become an increasingly frequent and controversial issue at the urban-agriculture interface, particularly in the wake of the large-scale drift incidents. This chapter examines the ways in which actors politically construct scale in order to legitimize and, in other cases, contest regulatory inaction in the face of ongoing pollution, illness, and injustice. The conflict over California's pesticide drift pivots around highly competing notions of the very nature and extent of the problem. The chapter draws more explicitly on the strand of the politics of scale literature that analyzes how actors strategically engage scale-based discourse in order to frame an issue in a particular way to effect change, whether to legitimize or to challenge existing power asymmetries. The dominant framing of pesticide drift is one in which the scale of the problem has been manipulated in a way that particularizes pesticide drift into a series of discrete, isolated, and local incidents.
