 When
I was a teenager, Scientific-American magazine published a 'game of
life' by John Conway. In those days before computers, the simple
algorithm presented a graph-paper model of emergent complex behaviour,
in which, if you had too many 'people' too close together, some of them
would die of overcrowding, and if you had too few, they would die of
isolation. No matter how you arranged the starting population, it would
finally either achieve a cyclic stasis or die out altogether (unless
you allowed, unrealistically, for a world of unlimited space).
The results are remarkably similar to what happens in real populations. There are, to use the now-famous expression, limits to growth.
Exceed them, and the population goes into collapse, either following a
normal curve or until some new self-sustainable stasis is reached. If
the collapse is too severe or too prolonged, the species becomes
extinct.
In our modern world, we keep trying to change the rules
of the game in our favour. We have developed antibiotics and hygiene
practices to try to defy the diseases that specifically target
overcrowded species like ours. We have learned to steal resources from
future generations to prolong today’s population spiral, a staggering
population explosion that is utterly unsustainable. We may delay the
inevitable a while longer, but nature always bats last, and no species
can defy her astonishingly complex and effective self-regulation
mechanisms (or the laws of thermodynamics) forever. The longer we drag
out our unsustainable growth, the more severe the correction that will
take place to restore stasis, and the greater the risk of total
extinction. The bigger we get, the harder we will fall.
Two of the most amazing and adaptable creatures on the planet are bacteria and poxviruses. Despite the antibiotic (literally, anti-life)
chemical soup we soak ourselves and our habitats in, bacteria remain
greater in total biomass on this planet than humans (they're the only
species that can claim that honour). Bacteria have an astonishing
ability to mutate quickly to become immune to anything we can throw at
them. They exist in the hottest deserts, the coldest places on the
planet's surface and far underground where gravitational pressure makes
life impossible for other creatures. They are far more resilient and
diverse than our species.
Poxviruses exist for virtually every
animal species on the planet, and some of the more prolific species
have many different poxviruses, each designed by evolution to target
only that one species. As the population density of that species rises,
the contagiousness and ability of poxviruses to thrive both increase
exponentially. Were it not for mosquito poxviruses for example, the
world would be covered in swarms of mosquitoes thick enough to block
the sun and render most species (including us) quickly extinct. As part
of the delicate balance and interconnectedness of life, we owe our very
existence to poxviruses. We have, in thanks, eradicated the only
currently-known poxvirus targeted at our species: smallpox. We did it
by inoculating billions of humans, by contaminating them with the cow
poxvirus. The bovine pox is not targeted at us, so it does us no harm,
but it is close enough to the smallpox virus to give us immunity to the
latter. How long it will take for a new human poxvirus to emerge, or
for some latent strain of smallpox (buried underground, where anthrax
also lies, or deliberately released by some antisocial person) to
discover a whole new generation of uninoculated victims, we do not
know. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.
Much
of the current attention of pandemic planners is focused on the
influenza virus. Like poxviruses, most influenza viruses are targeted
at specific species, and do best where the populations are horrifically
overcrowded and homogeneous (no genetic diversity). The modern factory
farm with hundreds of thousands of weakened (through lack of sun,
exercise, freedom and other essentials of life), nearly-identical
animals crowded into an obscenely small area and subjected to horrific
daily stress provides an absolutely perfect breeding ground for such
viruses. That's the role of viruses in nature, after all – to weed out
unnaturally overpopulated creatures and bring the ecosystem back into
healthy balance. And voilà – poultry flu.
Although
viruses rarely make the jump from one species to another, they are very
adaptable creatures, and such jumps will occur as random events as the
species looks to identify other overcrowded creatures. The more
interactions between an infected species and another species, the more
opportunity for such a jump to occur. The huge amount of handling of
poultry by humans is an open invitation for such evolutionary
transformations, and the risk is compounded by the fact we now move
poultry from place to place around the globe as often as we move
people. As volume and distance of travel of infected creatures from one
overpopulated area to another increases, the risk of
cross-contamination and inter-species infection rises exponentially. We are just asking for it.
So it is no surprise that scientists now predict that the next flu
pandemic is overdue and will probably be the result of evolutionary
advances enabling easier spread from poultry to humans and then from
humans to other humans.
Our solution is to pre-emptively kill
hundreds of millions of healthy birds (often gruesomely, but arguably
we are at least and at last putting them out of the misery of their
horrendous caged lives), and to inject and soak the poultry in other
toxins that will encourage even more rapid mutation of bacteria and
viruses to forms that are immune to the worst poisons we can invent.
Our anti-life inventions will wipe us out long before they will render
'germs' extinct. An alien watching all this from afar would conclude we
had taken leave of our senses.
One of the most remarkable
results of the excessive use of antibiotics is a new strain of
bacterial infections generally referred to as MRSA: methicillin (and
orthocillin)-resistant staph bacteria. MRSA infections are usually
controllable through isolation of sick patients, but they're highly
contagious and have caused fatalities, especially in patients
undergoing surgery, and flesh-eating disease. Our predictable response
to infections that resist the most inexpensive, safe and popular
antibiotics is to prescribe more expensive, less safe antibiotics. But
now even the second level of more unpleasant antibiotics – vancomycins
– has been trumped by new bacterial infections (called VRSA and VRE) that are resistant to them too. And to make matters worse, many common bacteria like e.coli and salmonella have now evolved an enzyme called ESBL that makes them immune to known antibiotics as well. Nature always bats last.
If
that weren't enough, nature is also working on an even more ingenious
way to bring our numbers back under control. It’s called a prion, and
unlike bacteria or viruses, prions aren't even alive. They're a kind of toxic evolutionary protein that is also, surprise,
species-specific. Mad cow disease (BSE) is caused by one kind of prion,
and sheep scapie by another. These are horrible diseases, quite
contagious within species. And, surprise,
they also sometimes make the jump from one species to another. There is
compelling evidence that a variant of Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease (vCJD)
is caused by the same prion that causes BSE. That's why we've recently
added tens of thousands of healthy cows to the list of slaughter
victims in our mindless effort to prevent an epidemic of vCJD. Until
very recently we have been casually feeding ground-up waste products
from cows to other farmed animals and even pets (creatures that would
not, in the wild, eat cows), increasing the likelihood of inter-species
prion transmission. The problem is, because it's not alive, we can't
kill prions with antibiotics or anti-anything.
Nature has quickly moved ahead of us in this baseball game, and our
casualties and costs in a losing cause are already massive.
I
could go on, but I think you get my point. In our fight against
diseases, we remain blindly convinced that medicine and technology are
somehow going to keep us ahead of the game indefinitely. Such a belief
is pure theology, and flies in the face of any rational study of
science and history. Sooner or later we must drastically reduce our
numbers and concentration, and the numbers and crowding and ill-health
of farmed animals, or nature will do it for us, in ways that will be
increasingly unpleasant the longer we delay. I think most of us
appreciate this instinctively, 'in our bones'. Whether we have what it
takes to act on that voluntarily, to overcome our foolish pride, is
another matter.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
