ABSTRACT
This chapter examines new ways of producing and contesting environmental knowledge via the example of debates on pesticide use in the Global South. On account of growing environmental concerns, most industrial countries banned dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and other toxic substances in the 1970s. However, the pesticide industries shifted their sales of persistent pesticides to the developing world and expanded their use. While scientists studied the many effects of pesticide use, activists and newly founded transnational initiatives denounced the export of banned substances to the “third world”, calling attention to their immediate environmental and health impacts as much as to the fundamentally global nature of the pesticide problem. This chapter explores the background to the fierce contestedness of environmental knowledge in the Global South and outlines new strategies developed by organizations concerned about environmental destruction. These interventions not only reflected the shifting environmental discourse to global issues in the 1980s but also produced a specific form of evidence criticism.
