[Mb-civic] MUST READ: Disease takes wing - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Disease takes wing

By James Carroll  |  February 20, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

IF BIRDS are not a friend to the human species, where in all of nature 
is friendship to be found? Each day come more reports of the dispersal 
of diseased poultry and fowl, moving from east to west, Asia into 
Europe, and alarms begin to sound.

The grandeur of winged migration has become a niche for deadly disease. 
With the threat of avian flu comes a change in the way the flight of 
birds must strike the human eye.

In describing the conviction that life is good, and that the 
transcendent sources of all existence are benign, poets have again and 
again settled on the metaphor of the bird. In Genesis, the Creator 
''hovers" over formlessness with, in the phrase of Gerard Manley 
Hopkins, ''bright wings." The flutterings of the wings themselves evoke 
the creative breath of God, which is why, in Christian iconography, the 
Holy Spirit is rendered as a dove.

The author of Deuteronomy, in expressing the benevolence of the Most 
High, writes, ''Like an eagle watching its nest, hovering over its 
young, he spreads out his wings to hold him, he supports him on his 
pinions." Jesus is remembered in Matthew as longing to gather the people 
''as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings."

But what if the hen has a virus? The wings can cast a shadow.

In the sagas of plagues and pestilences, the role of the infecting agent 
has been played, in the past, by creatures that seem somehow suited to 
such villainy -- rats, fleas, spiders, crawling things. Birds seem of 
another order, never more so than at the time of year approaching now. 
When we see a V-shaped flight of migrators, beating from south to north, 
our hearts will follow in the lift of our eyes. The songs of birds, 
their wondrous patterns in the air, the astounding calculations that 
allow whole flocks to move as one creature, the pairing off that invites 
a romantic anthropomorphism, the defiance of the law of gravity, their 
simple, uncomplicated goodness -- all of this makes them the harbingers 
of heaven. If we look up when we want to picture that place of ultimate 
hope, isn't it because the birds are there already? Why else do we 
imagine angels with wings?

But, wondering what infections might be aloft, will we now feel a kind 
of betrayal? The reports of cases of human infection that have so far 
occurred include stories of poultry farmers who were vulnerable because 
they lived so intimately with their birds, especially in the cold when 
the creatures were brought inside. The required slaughter of birds has 
been an economic, but also a personal catastrophe for many.

Yet if there is betrayal here, might it go the other way? Birds have 
given us so many metaphors that we must ask if this threatened malady is 
not yet another? Abstracting from the actual origins of avian flu, can 
we recognize, perhaps, a message from the natural world? Health workers 
are properly rushing to reinforce the great divide that separates the 
human species from the animal realm, to keep avian flu avian. But hasn't 
that divide itself become a problem?

In the developed world, the birds we eat come to us wrapped in 
cellophane, ''processed," by which we mean denatured. Conditioned air, 
bottled water, screened sun, polluted dirt, changed climate -- we speak 
of nature as if we are not part of it.

The deep memory of Genesis posits a human dominion over nature, but the 
banishment from Eden indicates an alienation from it. Today, the 
so-called environment is discussed as if it is a surrounding bubble, 
like a space capsule that can be replaced when it is trashed.

Judging from our reckless disregard, we humans seem to imagine that we 
can have a destiny independent of the earth on which live; even that 
word ''on" suggests the problem, since the truth is that we humans are 
the earth. It is more than where we come from, where we go. Indeed, we 
get our name from ''humus," the word for earth. Did we think we could 
forget that and not suffer for it?

If the worst case unfolds, and the dreaded transmission mutations occur, 
avian flu might be taken as nature's revenge for the human despoiling of 
the planet. The best case will be that this outbreak came as a timely 
reminder that the health of humanity and the health of nature, including 
beloved winged creatures, are the same thing.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/20/disease_takes_wing/
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