Something really big is about to happen when pigs sprout wings and fly – at least that’s what we’ve been told. The sudden world-wide pandemic of swine flu, in which a mix of pig and bird flu virus has spread to people and hitched a ride on the world’s fleet of AirBus jets and Boeing 757s comes as close to flying pigs as we are likely to see.
The flu pandemic of 1918 killed 40 million people, 2 percent of the world’s population of the time. For many its arrival confirmed the hypothesis of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), the British scholar who advanced the highly pessimistic theory that the size of the world’s population would be kept under control by the effects of disease, pestilence, famine and war. This idea maintained its currency until the latter part of the 20th century, when a combination of factors rendered Malthus’ ideas obsolete: antibiotics and the green revolution.
The green revolution, a combination of selective plant breeding and the widespread availability of man-made nitrogen fertilizers, supported the growth of earth’s human population from a level of 2 billion in the year 1900 to 6 billion in the year 2000. It is estimated that 2 million of this increase was a direct result of increased food availability. Artificial fixed-nitrogen fertilizer (created by the Bosch-Haber process) was developed in Germany in support of its WWI munitions effort, but eventually, as documented in The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager, it transformed agriculture. Today, it is obesity not starvation that is increasing in the world. Ironically, world hunger is a by-product of poor transportation, corruption, greed and inadequate storage facilities, not food production.
An industrial agricultural model dominates world food production, both plant and animal. Manufactured pesticides, antibiotics and artificial fertilizers, as noted by author Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, fuel this industrial model and create monocultures of both modified plant species and densely packed stockades and warehouses of livestock raised for human consumption. Such monoculture is a perfect “Petri-dish” environment, and creates favorable conditions for new plant and animal disease vectors wherein quickly spreading, drug-resistant viruses and bacteria mutate rapidly. If and when these disease organisms cross the species border to human beings, the risk of pandemic arises. This has been true of the Bird Flu in Asia and the dramatic rise of drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis.
Assuming the media hype is warranted, no vaccine is developed and the Swine Flu kills 2 percent of the human population, 120 million people will perish over the course of 12–24 months. This is a staggeringly high number and in human terms, unprecedented. As our own populations have become larger and more densely packed, human society has also become a monoculture of sorts, the perfect vector for new illnesses – physical, emotional and cultural.
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, the inmates of a mental institution are revealed as decent, sane and virtuous, while those running the institution (like Nurse Cratchett) reveal their cruelty, insanity and lack of virtue. In some strange way, this topsy-turvy Cuckoo’s Nest arrangement is playing itself out in the way we humans have chosen to run the entire world, sacrificing health and decency for short-term profit and power. Swine flu, I’m afraid, is just another symptom of how cuckoo we really have become.
