This paper examines the influence of farmer knowledge upon decision making processes. Drawing upon the sociological debates around the ideas of reflexive modernity and biotechnology as well as from classic adoption and diffusion studies, I explore the influences upon farmers' use of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) corn. Utilizing survey data gathered from corn farmers in Minnesota and Wisconsin, I argue that farmers are ‘reflexive’ actors who actively negotiate between ‘expert’ and ‘local’ knowledges when deciding to plant Bt corn. Furthermore, I hypothesize that farmers are more likely to be influenced by their first‐hand or local experiences than by state or expert observations.

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The Zika virus in Brazil is often portrayed as emerging in and more severely inflicting the country’s impoverished coastal urban areas. However, the virus also impacted residents in wealthier and more rural areas. To understand how the Zika virus moved to seemingly less likely places, I bring political ecological approaches to health and disease into conversation with scholarly accounts of metabolic rifts. Making an incorporated comparison of the ways in which global finance and the Brazilian state shaped the relationship between urban and rural areas, I demonstrate how the era of modernist urban industrialisation resulted in the creation of more traditional spaces of Zika emergence in the country’s urban impoverished areas and the shift towards neoliberal agricultural extractivism resulted in the creation of seemingly more unusual spaces of Zika emergence in the wealthier less populated interior.

Moving from a neoliberal ideological testing ground to part of the purported new wave of Latin American socialism, the current Bolivian state has attempted to exercise greater control over its number-one-grossing export-its natural gas-and use the sector's profits to drive its program of socioeconomic change. While the state has been able to increase the government's take of the country's hydrocarbon rents, its ability to use its natural gas and associated rents to alter the country's socioeconomic trajectory has been limited by the path-dependent effects of Bolivia's neoliberal turn and the sociomaterial constraints of natural-gas extraction, transport, and use.