Agenda

Environmental Justice and the Politics of Health
Pesticides and intimate connections between agriculture, toxic exposure, and health

Lecture by Prof. Grettel Navas
(Universidad del Chile)

Thursday 16th April
Room L1 at Tesa 4 (San Basilio), Venice | 16.00

Environmental Justice and the Politics of Health

Environmental justice scholarship has long demonstrated that environmental harms and health risks are unevenly distributed, affecting mostly racialised and impoverished communities worldwide.
In response to these environmental and health inequalities, people often organise and protest in response. Toxic contamination from industrial processes, waste management, or agricultural chemicals frequently produces health concerns that reshape the dynamics of environmental mobilisations and challenge conventional definitions of conflict outcomes, given the persistence of pollution across temporal and geographical scales.
Building on this tradition, this talk will examine the relationship between environmental justice and health through the lens of environmental conflicts, highlighting how struggles over land, resources, and production systems increasingly manifest as disputes over bodily integrity and collective well-being.
Within this broader landscape, pesticides play a particularly significant role. Industrial agriculture has become increasingly dependent on chemical inputs, expanding the reach of what can be understood as a global pesticide complex embedded in contemporary food systems.
Farmers and rural workers often find themselves caught in a pesticide treadmill, where ecological pressures, market demands, and agrarian political economies push them toward repeated chemical use despite mounting health risks.
This dynamic produces a profound contradiction: pesticides may sustain short-term agricultural productivity and livelihoods while simultaneously exposing farmers, workers, and surrounding communities to toxic substances that undermine ecological and human health.
Drawing on political ecology, critical agrarian studies, and empirical research across Latin America, this keynote reflects on how environmental justice struggles illuminate the intimate connections between agriculture, toxic exposure, and health.
It argues that confronting environmental health conflicts requires rethinking food systems, knowledge production, and agrarian policies in ways that place collective health and ecological sustainability at the centre of environmental justice agendas.