Nowtopian

I finished reading Mike Davis’s “The Monster at the Door” this weekend. An impressive book, extremely informative, and one that definitely gets an immediate entry into the “Sky is Falling” Hall of Fame. Sheesh! The biggest question I came away with is not if or how there will be a global pandemic that will kill (maybe hundreds of) millions, but why hasn’t it already started? That’s a question plaguing a number of scientists and researchers Davis sources in his book, too.

Davis is at his best when he puts the obvious terror of a super lethal pandemic into the context of the banal trajectory of capitalist development: the ever increasing densities of humans and animals, overlapping in turn with what’s still left of the wild, often mixed in our urbanized concentrations. An interesting insight I didn’t already know: apparently HIV has been definitively traced to humans eating “bush meat” in Africa (i.e. chimpanzees in this case). The crashing fisheries along the coasts of Africa and Asia are leading to a huge increase in industrialized meat making (highly concentrated factories of chickens and pigs) AND rampant exploitation of remaining mammals in the wild, hence more “bush meat.” The radical expansion of hosts for influenza viruses goes hand in hand with this, not to mention other lesser known viral agents in the bush meat (like HIV); all of this new mixing of humans and animals and diseases, combined with the generally underemphasized abysmal state of mega-slums in most parts of the world, set the stage for an inevitable pandemic. Throw in the systematic destruction of existing public health infrastructure, and the abject failure to take seriously the need for a global approach to public health, and you can’t feel anything but a bit helpless in the face of what we can hardly avoid… pandemic lethality as a natural event.

I already knew that the avian flu was something to take seriously. I blogged about it in passing some months ago. There are a number of worthy sites to keep track of, where bloggers and news outlets are tracking the paths of various flu outbreaks. The H5N1 site seems to be a guy up in Vancouver who is doing a great job of sifting through enormous daily flows of information. Bird Flu Today is a more graphic heavy digest of news from near and far. And the Flu Wiki is an attempt to make full use of the new “power” of the wiki form to bring together hundreds of observers and analysts to share the latest on this worrisome topic.

In one of those whimsical and mordant displays of dark humor that daily life is so good at producing, I spent my afternoon yesterday at the 5th annual Green Fest here in San Francisco. It is unquestionably the most self-congratulatory event you can attend hereabouts. Everyone is just glowing with self-righteous moralism, perusing in the mall of correct shopping, getting endlessly patted on the back by other attendees, speakers, and vendors.

Continue reading Monster at the Door, Gardens on the Roof