FRAGMENTS FOR A POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 38

The birds and the bees: a contemporary parable of
invasive ecologies
In 2005, the reported cases of avian influenza virus H5N1 in Asia initiated yet
another media panic about Australia's unprotected shores. The Australian warned
that 'migrating birds from Southeast Asia could bring the deadly bird flu to
Australia' (Wilson and Powell, 2005: 3). The then Health Minister, Tony Abbott,
dismissed the risk of poultry infection as low because 'our flocks are kept under
very different conditions' in comparison to Southeast Asia and China (cited in
Wilson and Powell). By 2009, after further reported outbreaks of bird flu in Asia,
the Howard Government invested $114 million to purchase 2 million treatments
of Tamiflu to counter the possibility of a bird flu epidemic (even though the
Howard Government had destroyed 1.6 million Tamiflu doses that year, which it
had bought in 2004 to counter the media panic about a potential swine flu
outbreak). 7
Jeff Ironside, Chairman of the Australian Egg Corporation, was quick to use the
panic to attack the smaller, free range poultry farms since, as he argued, large farm
organisations had stricter biosecurity measures. However, Earl Brown, a virologist
at the University of Ottowa, suggested that it was in fact larger farms that were
more at risk: 'High-intensity chicken rearing is a perfect environment for
generating virulent avian flu viruses.' Indeed, the 2005 UN Taskforce on the bird
flu concluded that one of the root causes was 'farming methods which crowd huge
numbers of animals in a small space', in other words, factory farming. As Brown
pointed out, viruses in wild birds tend not to be dangerous whereas viruses entering
high-density animal populations (e.g. poultry factory farms) provide ample
opportunity for the virus to mutate into something more dangerous, especially
when factory farming has reduced the genetic diversity of their animals through
selective breeding. In other words, precisely the kinds of factory farming practices
(intensive livestock operations based on selective breeding and indoor rearing)
developed initially by the West during the Agricultural Revolution and further
intensified in the Industrial Revolution (see Overton, 1996: 111). Such intensive
farming practices were subsequently transported to its colonies and later to
'developing' (read: postcolonial) countries as part of international aid programmes
to stimulate the modernisation of the non-West.
This history, however, is obfuscated by these kinds of panics that tend to paint
the non-West as a breeding ground for viruses, a ground zero for disease outbreaks.
Film serves as a significant cultural vehicle for circulating this geopolitical epidemic
imaginary, by which I mean how the globe is imagined in terms of viral outbreaks
and risks. Epidemic panics become inspirations for films like Contagion (2011), in
which the US Centers for Disease Control feature as the hero, saving the world
from the outbreak of a mutant swine flu virus. In its closing flashback sequence,
the film pins the virus on Chinese deforestation and the unsanitary practices of
Chinese farming and food handling.
Contagion joins a list of epidemic disaster films and television shows since the
1970s - films like Outbreak (1995) and Pandemic (2009) as well as television series