The front matter of our new book, Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm, is now available for free here.
It includes the book preface, editor and author bios, and a table of contents.
Click here to order the book direct, Or ask your librarian to order a copy for your local library or university.
Our new book, Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm, will be published in hardcover and as an ebook by Springer in August 2016.
The volume compiles five technical papers modeling the effects of neoliberal economics on the emergence of Ebola and its aftermath.
Neoliberalism is currently the world’s primary economic philosophy. It centers international relations around globalizing laissez-faire economics for multinational companies, promoting free trade, deregulating economic markets, and shifting state expenditures in favor of private property.
The multidisciplinary teams represented here place both Ebola Makona, the Zaire Ebola virus variant that has infected 28,000 in West Africa, and Ebola Reston, which is currently emerging in industrial hog farms in the Philippines and China, within a multi-plank modeling framework that assimilates globalization:
All the models presented are contextualized by socioeonomic geographies specific to outbreak locales.
Together the models suggest shifts in regional agroeconomics under the neoliberal doctrine, driving deforestation and monoculture production, destroying the ecosystemic “friction” with which local forests typically disrupt Ebola transmission.
The resulting collapse in such an ecological function accelerates pathogen spillover and propagation across the remaining host populations.
The failure on the part of current control efforts to assimilate such a structural context may render many emergency interventions, even an efficacious vaccine, dysfunctional.
The authors propose an alternate science of disease and an adjunct program of interventions useful to researchers and public health officials alike.
On a personal note, let me add here that I think there is some really mind-bending stuff in our new book, Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm.
We have here a parallax treatment of disease object and field, environmental stochasticity as an ecosystemic prophylaxis, and an agroecological logic gate for epidemic control,
We introduce a Black-Scholes model explicitly connecting agriculture’s economic margins to biocontrol, the observation the false dichotomy between emergency interventions and structural context may render even an efficacious vaccine dysfunctional in the field, and a socioeconomic geography of the emergence of Reston Ebola in conurbanized Filipino hog.
Yes, that’s right, Ebola in industrial hog (with broad implications for a growing hog sector in Africa).
Along the way we abandon SIR models for control theory because modeling pathogens as natural populations misses the point: As the tag line of my Farming Pathogens blog puts it, pathogens evolve in a world of our own making.
Appetite for Destruction: The Palm Oil Diaries, a new documentary by Michael Dorgan and Felicity Mungovan of Go Forth Films, explores the ecological and social effects of the industrial production of palm oil:
The palm oil industry has papered over vast swathes of the planet, much of it valuable and ecologically diverse. Forty million tonnes are produced annually, and it can be found in 50% of all packaged foods. Travelling from Cameroon, to Guatemala, to Colombia the doc investigates what has catalysed this new industry and the social and environmental impact of it’s exponential growth. This crafted doc questions whether palm oil is quite the Godsend that many initially thought it was?
I make an appearance in Appetite, talking about the connection the work in our new book Neoliberal Ebola makes between deforestation, oil palm monoculture, and the emergence of Ebola.
The film looks the must-see, my walk-on notwithstanding.
Neoliberal Ebola 