The caption highlights interesting aspects about toxicity and its measurement. Some arguments which could be ethnographically fleshed out--the idea of knowledge about the terrain shaping the knowledge about toxicity is a compelling one--could this be an argument about multispecies encounters where human knowledge about toxicity emerges in relation to nonhuman materialities like the height of the root, etc.?
The image is created by the ethnographer. It shows a lush green forest, which seems counterintuitive to the kind of toxicity and contamination in the place. It also shows two humans in the forest, standing at two different locations, and seemingly separated spatially--a forest and a clearing. It would be interesting to highlight the toxicity at play through the image some more. Is there a way to show the liminality of farm vs wild, and contamination vs decontaminated spaces across the space and in terms of depth?
This visualization and the caption elicits the complex terrain of toxicity in Fukushima. The ethnographer probes into the ways in which scientists understand and measure toxicity, as well as the way in which the definitions become specific to the place and terrain. It would be interesting to know more about what the significance of wild vs farmed plants is in understanding toxicity.