Spillover: Bird Flu & The Emergent Pandemicine / Boyce Upholt

Award-winning journalist Boyce Upholt joins me to discuss his article Will the Next Pandemic Start With Chickens?, published at The New Republic. 

Boyce begins his report, as well as this interview, by describing the troubling conditions in chicken facilities in Butler Country, Nebraska, and, by extension, across the industrialized world. This past spring, a highly deadly and contagious strain of avian influenza swept through bird and other animal populations. Considering the conditions described in his piece, there is a very real possibility of a spillover event occurring in the near future, leading to an influenza pandemic in the human population. Broadly, this discussion, while examining the real threat highly consolidated industrialized food production is having on human and more-than-human beings, explores the so-called First World's relationship with food, food production, and the ecologies we are inextricably tied to.

BIO:

Boyce Upholt is an award-winning freelance writer focused on the way we use and imagine the non-human world, and is the host of the re: WILD podcast. He covers, among other subjects, public lands, exploration, biodiversity, foodways, infrastructure, and the cultural history of ”wilderness.” His work has appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, the Oxford American, and many other publications, and has been noted in the Best American Science and Nature series. Boyce won the 2019 award for investigative journalism from the James Beard Foundation. He is currently working on a book about the Mississippi River—a history of what’s been done to it and travelogue showing the results.

Episode Notes:

Read Will the Next Pandemic Start With Chickens? at the New Republic.

Learn more about Boyce and his work at his website.

Listen and subscribe to his podcast re: Wild.

Music produced by Epik The Dawn.