The caption and the image are complex, complicated in their implications and entanglements with personal sensorial experience and the muddled definitions of the language we use to talk about the issues of contamination. The image seems straightforward, but caption questions the notions of 'tradition' in landscape practices, scalability in agricultural practices, and even the idea of cause and effect in the ways we tell the stories of deaths 'caused' by the fires. The caption, therefore, reveals all the unstable layers of ways-of-knowing upon which our epistemology of toxicity is built. What is 'traditional'? When does the notion of tradition become exploited in the name of destruction? How can we possibly discuss the 'benefits' of landmines, weapons of war? How do threats of violence function as safeguards against contamination? How does contamination of violence compare to conatmination of ecological destruction? Who benefits from which types of contamination? I am confronted with how much I don't know, how much is left unanswered, and how difficult it is to disentangle warfare, post-conflict, and contamination from one another.
The visualization and caption convey the mundanity of toxicity--the little fires that do not seem important yet are indicative of a much broader issue of "wildfires" as responsible for destroying hundreds of hectares of forest, not merely small patches due to traditional burning practices. That which is used as part of a traditional practice (fires) also has the potential to unleash devastation, as well as render certain groups of people scapegoats for the cause of the fires ("small" cattle owners). The visualization potentially points to the toxicity of narratives surrounding farmers and their traditional practices as propogated by the government and/or others managing the hegemonic discourse. The devastation of the Earth is thus rendered interconnected to the devastation of relations between people.