In the Guano

When I read a while ago that bird flu on a mink farm in Utah could spark a human pandemic, it was all so ominous and awful that it served as my doomscrolling circuit-breaker for the day. I couldn’t help thinking about the forty-odd N95s in my cupboard, which I’d figured would last a few more Covid infections and DIY dust-mask jobs. Might need some more sooner rather than later. Human lives are being treated as abstract and hypothetical by everyone involved, thanks to years of increasing mistrust in science. But if the risk of triggering a pandemic is more than a tiny fraction of a percent, compensating one farmer to avoid it should be a no-brainer. The article sympathises that it’s his “life’s work that he’s seeing be destroyed”, but the world is full of stories of characters who sacrificed themselves; sacrificing the farm you’ve built in order to save thousands of a lives is an easier way to become a hero. Solar power is quietly becoming bigger than nuclear. The slow, deliberate…

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