Professor Guthman's paper discusses the public debates that took place over the use of two different soil fumigants of great interest to California's highly important strawberry industry.  As is typical with battles over environmental regulation, industry argued that livelihoods were at stake while activists argued that lives were at take. Less typically, both sides invoked farmworkers as the population of concern. In this paper Guthman brings to bear a relatively new literature on surplus populations and disposability to trouble the distinction both sides made between lives and livelihood.