As the possibility of bird flu increases, it's worth thinking of both the monster at our door and the other works he wrote at the time: late Victorian holocausts and planet of slums. Famine, poverty, deteriorating housing conditions, climate change, and pandemics all have a horrifying synergy
Mike Davis wrote The Monster at Our Door, a book on how we have created the ideal ecological conditions for a devastating avian flu pandemic. when Covid happened he wrote an update where he was like "this was practically a best-case scenario compared to H5N1." just something that fills me with dread

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