AlaskaDenise
In Memoriam
(This book sounds interesting, or at least the review sums up lots of what we discuss here. Has anyone read this?)
http://www.therecord.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=record/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1160776237857&call_pageid=1024322088706&col=1024322418133
(Oct 14, 2006)
PANDEMONIUM: BIRD FLU, MAD COW DISEASE AND OTHER BIOLOGICAL PLAGUES OF THE 21ST CENTURY
by Andrew Nikiforuk
One thing's for sure: If the apocalypse happens, we won't be able to say we were never warned.
There has been no shortage of books with gloom-and-doom prognoses for the 21st century. Indeed, the longevity of the genre -- going back to warnings about the population bomb, the coming anarchy and the great stock market crash of (pick a year) -- may have led to our developing a cultural immunity to their message.
Not only has the worst not come to pass, civilization's progress just seems to keep on rolling like a mighty SUV.
This hasn't silenced the critics, who continue to identify various horsemen of the apocalypse, from a fall in oil production (the Peak Oil scenario) to climate change and weapons of mass destruction. Usually these fears are seen as being interrelated in a global network of disaster.
And globalization, indeed capitalism, is to blame for a lot if you follow the analysis of books such as James Kunstler's The Long Emergency and now, Andrew Nikiforuk's Pandemonium.
Nikiforuk's argument that globalization plays an unwitting role in the enabling of pandemics takes two forms.
In the first place, he says, the increasing ease, speed and volume of global trade has increased microbial traffic. "Invaders prove that global trade is not just an innocent exchange of goods and gadgets but trade in every living thing," he writes. "Each economic enterprise provokes a commensurate biological transaction."
In addition, a global economy leads to what Nikiforuk calls "the Wal-Martization" of life, so that local distinctions are erased and life becomes more homogenous and vulnerable.
The industry standard pigs and chickens bred on factory farms, for example, have weaker immune systems and are more susceptible to viral outbreaks -- which when they come, have catastrophic results due to overcrowding and the genetic uniformity (that is, genetic weakness) of the population.
As Nikiforuk makes clear, economic interests are in the driver's seat and global trade is doing more than just providing a free ride for biological invaders. The profit motive has been a great aider and abettor to a host of up-and-coming plagues, since the immense biological costs of global trade end up being shunted on to consumers and taxpayers anyway. And in a discussion of the government response to mad cow disease in Britain, France, and Canada, Nikiforuk explains how "commerce invariably prevailed" in any balancing of public and private corporate interests.
After newsy and informative chapters on topics such as bird flu, mad cow disease, cholera, anthrax, and even the danger of visiting your local hospital (they aren't as hygienic as they smell), Nikiforuk ends with a nightmare epilogue describing the "next pandemic" -- complete with the dead being "burned in industrial-size pyres."
Can such an end be avoided? The best preventive medicine to the disease of globalism, he writes, is self-reliance and "living local," a "return to personal and local virtues that question bigness and power."
Unfortunately, it will likely take the kind of enormous human disaster foreseen here for us to change our ways.
.
http://www.therecord.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=record/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1160776237857&call_pageid=1024322088706&col=1024322418133
(Oct 14, 2006)
PANDEMONIUM: BIRD FLU, MAD COW DISEASE AND OTHER BIOLOGICAL PLAGUES OF THE 21ST CENTURY
by Andrew Nikiforuk
One thing's for sure: If the apocalypse happens, we won't be able to say we were never warned.
There has been no shortage of books with gloom-and-doom prognoses for the 21st century. Indeed, the longevity of the genre -- going back to warnings about the population bomb, the coming anarchy and the great stock market crash of (pick a year) -- may have led to our developing a cultural immunity to their message.
Not only has the worst not come to pass, civilization's progress just seems to keep on rolling like a mighty SUV.
This hasn't silenced the critics, who continue to identify various horsemen of the apocalypse, from a fall in oil production (the Peak Oil scenario) to climate change and weapons of mass destruction. Usually these fears are seen as being interrelated in a global network of disaster.
And globalization, indeed capitalism, is to blame for a lot if you follow the analysis of books such as James Kunstler's The Long Emergency and now, Andrew Nikiforuk's Pandemonium.
Nikiforuk's argument that globalization plays an unwitting role in the enabling of pandemics takes two forms.
In the first place, he says, the increasing ease, speed and volume of global trade has increased microbial traffic. "Invaders prove that global trade is not just an innocent exchange of goods and gadgets but trade in every living thing," he writes. "Each economic enterprise provokes a commensurate biological transaction."
In addition, a global economy leads to what Nikiforuk calls "the Wal-Martization" of life, so that local distinctions are erased and life becomes more homogenous and vulnerable.
The industry standard pigs and chickens bred on factory farms, for example, have weaker immune systems and are more susceptible to viral outbreaks -- which when they come, have catastrophic results due to overcrowding and the genetic uniformity (that is, genetic weakness) of the population.
As Nikiforuk makes clear, economic interests are in the driver's seat and global trade is doing more than just providing a free ride for biological invaders. The profit motive has been a great aider and abettor to a host of up-and-coming plagues, since the immense biological costs of global trade end up being shunted on to consumers and taxpayers anyway. And in a discussion of the government response to mad cow disease in Britain, France, and Canada, Nikiforuk explains how "commerce invariably prevailed" in any balancing of public and private corporate interests.
After newsy and informative chapters on topics such as bird flu, mad cow disease, cholera, anthrax, and even the danger of visiting your local hospital (they aren't as hygienic as they smell), Nikiforuk ends with a nightmare epilogue describing the "next pandemic" -- complete with the dead being "burned in industrial-size pyres."
Can such an end be avoided? The best preventive medicine to the disease of globalism, he writes, is self-reliance and "living local," a "return to personal and local virtues that question bigness and power."
Unfortunately, it will likely take the kind of enormous human disaster foreseen here for us to change our ways.
.