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Paper short abstract

Wastewater-based epidemiology has re-formulated drugs as an ecological concern. This paper asks what thinking at the scale of planetary ecology does for understandings of health, attending to the frictions that emerge as this concept entangles with the evidence-making practices of public health.

Paper long abstract

In 2001, environmental chemists at the US Office of Research and Development in the Environmental Protection Agency proposed the use of a “nonintrusive tool to heighten public awareness of societal use of illicit-abused drugs and their potential for ecological consequences.” Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has since become an important adjunct to established drug monitoring tools. Through its move from environmental science to drug policy, WBE has demanded renewed attention to the biotic dimensions of drugs as they entangle in their different environments, thus re-formulating the problem of drugs not only as a problem of human health, but as an ecological concern. This paper traces this move, attending to the frictions in ecological thought that emerge when concepts such as ‘the planetary’ and ‘the environment’ entangle in new ways through the evidence-making practices of the public health field, and highlighting tensions between the idiosyncrasies of situated knowledge practices and the scale of planetary ecological concerns. As ecological thinking breaks into drug policy via WBE technologies, what kind of idea of ‘ecology’ is being mobilised and upon what conceptual logics does it rely? How do particular understandings of ‘environment, ‘ecology’ and ‘the planetary’ entangle with – and, at times, become perversely transformed by – the conceptual logics at work in different sites? This paper opens up questions about the apparent transferability (and limits) of ecological thought, and how its translations through situated evidence-making technologies may work to curtail (rather than enable) genuine engagement with the urgent questions posed by our present planetary condition.