Best of Technology Writing 2007 (4 of 124)

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COPYRIGHT
Best of Technology Writing 2007 by Steven Levy (Ed.). Copyright 2007 by the University of Michigan.
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KEVIN BERGER: THE ARTIST AS MAD SCIENTIST (CONT'D)

With Hudson River 2.0, she continues, we get "a view of nature where we're inside it, interacting with it, where urban forms are a part of nature and act as their own natural systems." It's a global view, informed by ecology, where city and country, humans and birds, exist in an interrelated dance. And right now, the dance of nature is a dangerous waltz with a deadly flu virus in the mix. Or so the birds in Jeremijenko's Whitney Museum piece are trying to tell us. Or would, if New York's real birds would cooperate by landing on the perches and triggering the voices. Given their reluctance at the moment, Jeremijenko, sitting on a window ledge in the gift store, her computer in her lap, has to intervene and manually play the bird voices for me.

"Tick, tick, tick. That's the sound of genetic mutations, of the avian flu becoming a deadly human flu," says a professorial male voice. "Do you know what slows it down? Healthy subpopulations of birds. Increasing biodiversity, generally. It is in your interest that I'm healthy, happy, well fed. Hence, you could share some of your nutritional resources instead of monopolizing them. That is, share your lunch."

Next comes a female voice. "You have such a strange relationship to ownership that holds across species. I'd like to suggest that we share the land and its productive capacity--the worms, the plants, the future generations of seeds, the nesting grounds. Do you think you own this too?" The haughty voice continues. "You know those mute swans now dying all over Europe? They don't normally migrate," she says. When it comes to bird flu and human deaths, "You're bringing it on yourselves. But that means you can fix it. The first step is to give me a little bit of that bar."

These are some brainy birds. They're telling us how the destruction of biological diversity is a crime against nature and increases the risk of disease. Jeremijenko explains that wild birds in Europe and Asia, fleeing ailing wetlands, are forced to roost near scummy ponds on farmlands, where they come in contact with infected chickens. Yet rather than preserving wild lands, she laments, the international response has been the "mass slaughter of millions of birds," which only fans the flames of the flu.

"The birds are arguing that the reason we have diversity in nature is to protect us against disease," she says. "The birds are arguing that if we were to address the problem effectively, with a systems-level view, we would increase the health of domestic and wild birds, and that would be our best protection." Her birds, she says, also remind us we don't live in plastic bubbles. "The greatest vectors of bird flu have been freeways, airports, and railways. People get on with infected birds, get off, and trade at stops along the way. It's human migration that is transmitting this disease, not the migration of wild birds themselves."

Jeremijenko always sounds like an excitable activist. But she does do her homework. A recent report by the United Nations Environment Programme concluded, "Restoring tens of thousands of lost and degraded wetlands could go a long way towards reducing the threat of avian flu pandemics." Ecologists at the University of Georgia, as reported by New Scientist, "have shown that killing wild animals with a disease like flu could actually lead to more infected animals, not fewer." The theory is that older animals build up immunities to disease and so killing them leaves the younger and more populous ones vulnerable. As for roads and railways leading to the outbreaks of bird flu, Nial Moores, director of the conservation group Birds Korea, says, "There is abundant evidence that poultry flu is spread over significant distance through the transport of poultry."

Jeremijenko's views about bird flu have also been informed by one of her brothers, Andrew, a physician, an epidemiologist, and the head of influenza studies at a U.S. Navy medical research facility in Indonesia, where the first human cases of bird flu were studied in detail. The naval medical center, which Scientific American called "the largest, most experienced and best-equipped avian influenza laboratory in the country," was shut down earlier this year due to ugly politics inside the Indonesian government, related to lingering resentment against the United States for backing the independence of East Timor, formerly controlled by Indonesia, in 1999.

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