[By David W. Low] -- Australian biosecurity programs are seeking to offer us more and more security, often starting with the smallest of creatures, insects, which are also most diverse and abundant group of animals on Earth. In this article, I interrogate the National Fire Ant Eradication Program and the world of one specific insect, seen in its isolation. Queensland biosecurity agencies are forcing citizens to become alarmed at their own ignorance and poison red fire ants to make us secure. But does this messages of fear also offer a promise? To guide the argument, I engage with the term ‘terrorist ‘and apply the term to the National Fire Ant Eradication Program.
I need to begin by noting that the text in the ant program sign copied here draws explicitly from slogans that are also used by Australia’s Department of Home Affairs on its national security website. The national security website advises citizens to identify potential terrorists, and to, “report suspicious behaviour”.
As is the case with ant program sign, the national security agency provides us with a hotline number to report our suspicions to:
Embedded within the ant sign, therefore, is an important contradiction. A terrorist insect is a danger that might strike us at any time, and at a location we cannot predict in advance. Terrorists do not invade in an orderly, predictable manner. Terrorist do not aim to conquer, but rather to disrupt. The fire ant sign makes this explicit. Our constant vigilance is the solution to the terrorist threat.
Another way to decode the sign, however, would be to say it is announcing the government’s failure to secure our safety. The entailed reference to our defeat by the subterranean terrorists is both intentional and strategic. Biosecurity by definition 'fights a war' that is impossible to complete and, therefore, must go on forever under conditions of eternal community vigilance. As the USA has discovered, at great cost, fighting an eternal war against terrorism is an un-winnable war. Success is always deferred to an impossible future free from all terrorism. The terrorists always remain latent in their potency. A war on terror is necessarily endless.
Note too that because we cannot predict when or where terrorist ants might strike, the existence of the latency we seek to impossibly eliminate forces upon us another necessary assumption. We are forced to assume that the intention of the terrorist ant is malevolent, rather than strategic or serving a national interest we can erect tariff barriers against. The belief we are supposed to adopt is that terrorist ants can strike anywhere (and at any time) for totally wild and irrational purposes; that’s why there is a hot-line to report sightings.
We offer hospitality to the ants unintentionally. We create bare soils with our pesticiding, we denude our home of vegetation to create oven-like temperatures the ants find comfy.
Much like the derelict, vacant spaces we leave amenable to ant occupation, the goal of extermination necessarily means the ant has no value either; its loss is therefore not grievable (Butler, 2016). A terrorist by definition is a being that cannot be domesticated by our reason, nor mourned for when dead. For example, pests according to dominated Australian mores cannot be eaten or found useful. This is why the Invasive Species Council have been morally outraged by the recent ABC program, Eat the Invaders.
I next want to point out some important environmental difficulties with the invasive species 'final solution’ for ants.
Biosecurity rhetoric seeks to create security through self-closure and, therefore, refuses participation in ecology. After all, armies have no time to dwell on the energetics of their enemies, other than as a means to understand how to kill them. The landscape is a battlefield … do not get in the way.
This battle irony runs deep. A literal army of ecologist is employed in Australia to fight a war against plants, animals and insects, usually by ignoring the vitality and hospitality of ecology. Ecologists have become pest exterminators.
As largely a pest eradication industry, ecology has also become the natural ally of pesticide manufactures. But the alliance between the army of ecologist and the pesticide industry is never stated. Secrecy is necessary. The interdependence is intentionally unstated to prevent anyone from seeing the hidden nature of the arrangement.
My analysis suggests, therefore, that ecology is largely an anti-terrorist profession and ecological societies are sub-branches of the pesticide industry -- an industrialised Counter Invasion Agency (CIA) for ants.
My reader might object; surely ecology is a profession that makes manifest living biological processes and is therefore noble? True on both counts, but my analysis here suggests that the higher purpose of ecological nobility is now displaced and has become an errant method for repressing our terror of nature via poisoning.
Modern ecology’s central task, then, is to help us pass from peaceful coexistence (non-violence) into a chemically enabled and violent protection of fixed interests (biosecurity). Included in my scope are the chemically curated artefacts we call ‘national parks’, ‘nature reserves’, ‘biospheres’, and so on. All become a battle ground for a chemically enabled fight against invasion.
So, if we can perhaps accept that militarised biosecurity agencies essentially function within a war mentality that mobilises ecology to the task of eradicating the disruptive latency of nature, biosecurity also seeks necessarily to eradicate (make irrelevant) the natural immunising capacity of the ecosystems themselves.
This core destructive insight of modern biosecurity is therefore that toxic force can replace ecosystem processes. Chemical force, or put another way, modern ecological insight, provides us with lethal chemical vaccines to protect us against nature herself.
As is well-known, an immunisation or vaccine is a prophylactic treatment, meaning it is administered to healthy individuals as a preventative measure to avoid contracting a disease. Immunisation does not treat or remove an existing infection.
The ant sign I have reproduced in this short article is a component of a biosecurity action in Queensland that is in fact baiting a vast area around a currently ‘infected ant zone’. The ant program is baiting prophylactically. Our government ant ecologists hope to create an 'immunised zone' and then work inwards from this immunised zone to permanently remove the actual ant infection.
The problem with the above logic is that vaccines work by stimulating an immune system. The patient develops a natural resistance against a specific pathogen. It is not a passive process, but rather, it involves an active resisting back by the treated organism, the force of which is created from within.
In the present case, the ecology of the immunised area is not considered active by the ant program. The ant program merely aims to kill ants with chemical weapons. However, this also makes the development of an ecological ant immunisation system impossible. Without natural arising immunisation as an aim, a chemical application is not an immunisation.
In the above sense, then, the ant program has adopted a prophylactic strategy that chemically attacks ecosystem for no specific purpose. The idea of our landscape developing a natural immunising potency is thought to be irrelevant to our understanding. The consequence is that environmental management is made completely dependent on the continuous applications of chemical toxins that are worse than useless as they pollute our shared environment.
Note that the above blind logic is also applied to the central ant 'eradication zone' in Queensland. Within the central eradication zone, any pretence at immunisation was long ago abandoned in favour of chemical bombardment whenever a rogue terrorist ant is detected, which is now often. The applications of eternally persistent PFAS pesticides fipronil and indoxacarb are used to poison the unpredictable terrorising ants who have buried themselves underground in hidden tunnels.
Ant eradication and containment have both failed. The ant is now endemic to the infected zone and residents in the prophylactically treated zone are unwilling to be poisoned when there are not even any ants on their properties. Thousands of Queensland residents are protesting about being unnecessarily poisoned via arial bombardments delivered by the fire ant program.
Generalising, the ant is no longer a terrorist, but rather, an inhabitant. The ant has successfully immunised itself to be resistant to us. Raze Queensland to the ground to find the last hidden ant?
Under the above conditions, the natural immunity of the landscape is being ignored in favour of biosecurity unknowns, or ‘eradication hopes’. The threat is that every part of Australis is latently capable of being contaminated by invading terrorist pests. This means that every ecosystem is also potentially suspect because everywhere is helpless against the terrorism of ants. Thus, when we report suspicious ants, we are in fact reporting a hospitable host to terrorists, that is, we are reporting an environmental traitor we call home. This is why within the frame of biosecurity, no ecosystem can be assumed to be secured. Constant vigilance is necessary. In this sense, the more biosecurity secures us, the more unsafe we become.
The continuous and sustained application of chemical killing agents is thought by the ant program to be our most viable solution to the terrorism of ‘pests’. But it is a double bind. What is literally ‘capable of life’ is being kept alive via a constant stream of chemical pollution that eliminates life. The ant program is in its effect an auto-immunity disease.
My deconstruction is complete. My conclusion is that the ant sign tells us that the life we are in can no longer be adequately distinguished from the life that is negating or ‘invading’ it. As such, ants are now terrorists who want to terrorise us. The fire ants did not come with a plan, at least, not one the ant program understands. The ant program, ironically, refuses to think like an ant. There is no empathy for ants, which makes ants a perfect object for our violent projections.
My analysis has also hopefully revealed why our biosecurity programs finds it necessary to install roadside signs advising citizens to be on their guard and to report suspicious ant behaviour. There is no longer anyway to tell which ant is friendly, and which is not. Our landscape’s ecological hospitality to life is at an end. As a consequence, ants are now spectres that cannot be totally removed without also poisoning ourselves in the process.
We need to dissolve the biosecurity dysfunction and learn to live with ants by using our knowledge of ecology. We can build out ants, we can introduce living barriers they do not find hospitable, we can allow predators to manage their numbers, we can redirect them to where they do no harm … the possibilities for living with ants are endless.
Reference
Butler, J. (2016). Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Verso: London.
Article: WeedsNews6797 (permalink) Categories: :WeedsNews:red fire ants, :WeedsNews:ants, :WeedsNews:biosecurity Date: 8 April 2025; 4:38:50 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time
