Courting catastrophe
Calgary investigative journalist Andrew Nikiforuk’s first book was The Fourth Horseman: A Short History of Epidemics, Plagues, Famines and Other Scourges. His latest, Pandemonium: Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease, and Other Biological Plagues of the 21st Century, explains how globalization is risking the health of individuals and whole societies through unchecked development. He talked with Graham F. Scott about deadly bananas, the beetle that ate British Columbia and life in the age of “unending emergency.”
BY Graham F. Scott
This: Why are people so fascinated by disaster?
Nikiforuk: People are fascinated by disaster the same way they are intrigued by car crashes. Disasters elsewhere strangely reaffi rm life out of the disaster zone. Although natural disasters have always shaped the species and its amazing resilience, we have entered a new age where man-made disasters can be more potent, destructive and longer-lasting than natural ones.
This: I think most people, when talking about plague and disease, tend to think of it as a fairly medieval concept, and your book shows that these kinds of catastrophic diseases are actually a very contemporary concern. Do you think we have a short memory when it comes to plague?
Nikiforuk: Well, people don’t have very much memory of anything tragic. What I’m arguing in Pandemonium is that the real dangers we face from a public health point of view are not always going to be on that scale. It’s more a guerilla war we’re fighting. The term I really like is one used by an ecologist in the 1950s, and that is what we have to deal with here are really a string of unending emergencies. One day it’s SARS and the next day it’s avian flu, and the next day it’s something else.
This: With the choices we’ve made about urban living and high-speed, high-volume industrial production, our society seems like the perfect breeding ground for these kinds of diseases.
Nikiforuk: We’ve created an economic culture that is incredibly insecure from a biological point of view. You cannot concentrate people and livestock in urban areas without inviting a lot of disease exchanges. When you increase poultry production in Asia at the same time that population is increasing, and at the same time the movement of poultry is increasing, we shouldn’t then pretend to be alarmed when avian flu breaks out. We created the conditions for all of that.
We invented this bizarre idea that people in Europe should be eating chicken raised in Thailand. For most of human history on this planet, people have eaten for the most part locally, and that changed with the Industrial Revolution and with the advent of fossil fuels. It’s this idea that, thanks to cheap energy, we can move anything—any food or any animal or any person, anywhere, at any time. Global trade means just that: it’s global trade in all living things, and there are consequences that come with that. We shouldn’t be surprised at the high level of emergencies that we have regarding our food supply. Whether it’s contamination of animal feed with dioxins and furans, or salmonella or other bacterial agents, or whatever the case might be, you cannot move food around the planet without industrializing and concentrating the organisms that go with it.
This: And yet, a lot of people eat safely a lot of the time.
Nikiforuk: I would argue that we don’t. We live under the illusion that we are eating safely all the time. We pick up a banana and say, “Gee, this is a safe thing to eat.” And we forget that the fungicides used to raise those bananas in monocultures in Central America are killing or maiming a lot of the people raising those bananas. There’s this disconnect between what we eat and the consequences of what we eat on the local environment. And because so many of us eat things that are coming from far away, we’re not aware of the biological connections and the biological impact of our eating habits. So if most of us were to sit down and think seriously about what we eat and the consequences of our eating habits, most of us would be appalled. We would be morally shaken by the fact that we’re polluting waterways, we’re destroying other people’s lives, we’re eroding soil, we’re transporting deadly organisms, we’re helping to spread antibiotic resistant organisms in livestock, and on and on it would go. But we have lost that basic connection with our food, just as we’ve lost the basic connection with our source of energy. And when civilizations and societies do that, they set themselves up for some pretty powerful tragedies.
This: Is that why something like SARS, when it happens, comes as such a jarring shock to us?
Nikiforuk: I suppose it is. SARS was actually a ridiculous affair. We’re talking about fewer people than 50 who actually died in North America, around 800 in Asia. It was largely a horror show for medical folks, because it spread so rapidly in hospitals. And Canada went bananas over SARS. Yet at the same time in Montreal, we had an outbreak of C. difficile, which killed more than 2,000 elderly patients in Montreal’s hospitals. And there was hardly a headline about them. Which I find very odd, because what we had in Montreal was a disaster. What we had with SARS was an unfortunate illustration of poor global hospital hygiene. And yet one got a lot of attention and the other didn’t.
This: One thing I heard several times during the SARS outbreak in Canada was that it was “like a movie.” Are people not disaster-literate?
Nikiforuk: No, because we’ve had nearly two generations who’ve really had no experience of any real disaster. They really have no idea of what tragedy is on a massive scale, and so they’re not very good at recognizing it. And let’s face it: SARS was a piddly tragedy. It was a small event in the scheme of things.
This: Have we learned any lessons from that experience?
Nikiforuk: No, I don’t think we have, really. It’s funny, it’s taken Canada a long, long time to address this problem of hospital-acquired infections. And we’re way behind almost every other country in the world. We’ve been slow to address it and we’ve been slow to monitor it. I would say Canadians by and large are slow adapters and slow learners.
This: In the epilogue to Pandemonium you talk about “the Next Plague,” and offer some predictions about what we might call the Big One.
Nikiforuk: The Big One—well, a lot of people predict it’ll be avian flu. Personally, I don’t think it will be. We’ll probably have a massive global flu epidemic, but with fewer fatalities. I don’t think that’s the one we have to fear. My gravest concern would be for the release of an engineered organism, with very high mortality, and that would take a long time to bring under control. I think it’s inevitable. We have the technological ability to engineer organisms with phenomenal mortality rates, much higher than you would find in a normal biological organism.
This: How would you say we should be confronting issues like these?
Nikiforuk: My prescription is on a number of levels. First of all we’ve got to recognize that globalization is not providing us with biological security, and that globalization will merely send at us an unending string of biological emergencies. This is due to the global trade in food, the global trade in food products, the global trade in livestock, all of which are industrial highways for biological agents. And so the obvious solution is instead of eating food from all over the planet, we should be eating food that is raised locally. And if we do that we’re certainly going to cut down on fossil-fuel emissions, and at the same time it should improve the quality of our food and reduce the opportunities for biological contamination. If we did that, we would really have a tremendous public health impact on all this other stuff that we are trying to deal with in terms of vaccines and drugs and emergency plans, which are all really just admissions that globalization is making the world more and more insecure.
This: You said in an earlier correspondence that “great catastrophes are like soil erosion: slow and insidious.” What do you mean by that?
Nikiforuk: One of the great catastrophes that has taken place in Canada recently is the advance of the mountain pine beetle out of British Columbia. Here’s an organism, a native insect that, thanks to climate change and thanks to really poor forestry practices in British Columbia, has exploded. It’s created all kinds of economic, political and social pandemonium in B.C. It’s jumped the Rockies and is now threatening to eat its way across the boreal forest in Canada. This is a disaster in the making.
This: It sounds as if it’s a disaster already.
Nikiforuk: Well, most people in the interior of British Columbia would say it is a disaster. I mean, they’re looking at 80 percent mortality of mature pine in an area the size of Sweden. That’s a disaster. But anywhere in the country you can find similar disasters unfolding. The state of Lake Winnipeg is a disaster that is slowly unfolding.
The degradation of that lake, which has taken place over the last 20 years, is phenomenal. And this is a lake that, thanks to climate change and agricultural pollution, could possibly lose half its fish species in the next 20 to 25 years. Well, that’s a disaster in the making. We have the phenomenal melting of the Arctic taking place, that’s a slow-moving disaster. Climate change is a classic case of a slow-moving disaster. A great many scientists would now argue that it’s really not that slow. I mean, we’re seeing exponential changes in Arctic and glacial environments that are beyond the pale—stuff that nobody’s seen before. But because it’s taken place over 10 to 25 years, and the cumulative impacts have been poorly recorded, we haven’t given it the weight that it deserves.
That doesn’t mean we should sit down and be paralyzed and despair. It means to say, “Look, something significant is happening in our backyards, we should pay attention to it and we should have a plan to address it.” And one of those plans has to be okay, we need a plan to deal with carbon fossil-fuel production in this country. And secondly, we need an adaptation plan. Because the evidence from the Arctic suggests that climate change is going to change the planet so quickly that we’re going to need to change the way we live on this planet if we want to survive as a species.
This: You’ve touched on an awful lot of problems here. Is there any good news?
Nikiforuk: I think the good news is that ordinary people recognize that by and large our political leaders have chosen to ignore or deny a lot of major issues. Ordinary people are uncomfortable with the state of things. They know things are not going well. Most everyone has, at one level or another, begun to experience one of these strings of unending emergencies. If you’re a cattleman, you’ve had to deal with mad cow disease. If you’ve got an elderly mom or dad, you’ve had to deal with hospital-acquired infection of some kind. You’ve probably had to deal with some kind of food emergency or food warning at some point. The full weight of it has not been addressed by our political leaders, but I’m quite hopeful that ordinary people have recognized that we need to change the way we’re living.
This is the antithesis of the globalization message, which is to be mobile, eat anything, live anywhere and think globally. And, if anything, globalization has seemed to reinforce the notion for me that being modest, being humble, living locally and eating locally, is a good way to sustain the species.
