Knowing that the meat industry contributes significantly to climate change, and that climate change in turn is driving increasingly frequent emerging infectious disease events and increasing the transmission of infection diseases, such as those that are affected by flooding (like cholera) and mosquito populations (such as malaria and dengue fever), I thought it was interesting that outbreaks of COVID-19 were occurring in meat plants. Not only this, but the majority of human pathogens originate in animals, including, probably, SARS-CoV-2. A circularity seemed to be emerging, and I read a lot about pathogen ecology and evolution, the links between infectious disease emergence and transmission and climate change, and the details of exactly why the meat industry produces so many greenhouse gas emissions.
One takeaway for me, and a focus of my Disaster Mobilities essay on Hurricane Laura in Haiti and Louisiana, is the importance of conversations about climate change, and the role of the media. All of the ways in which current systems and structures are resulting in climate change, creating and exacerbating inequalities, need to be communicated. In the case of the meat industry, people should talk about where their meat comes from, and what the animal, human, and environmental costs might have been. In terms of climate change, populations in high income countries should acknowledge that they have contributed far more to climate change than those in less developed countries, who are now experiencing the consequences in extreme climate events. |
gifs / felix sandoe
dissertation title Occupational health and infectious disease in the meat processing industry: An exploration of the "mystery" of COVID-19 transmission within meat processing plants essay title Hurricane Laura: Differential mobilities of people and knowledge in Haiti and Louisiana target audience WhatsApp users commentary My creative knowledge translation project expresses some of the links between my climate mobilities essay and my dissertation, which analyses outbreaks of COVID-19 in meat processing plants. When meat plants closed due to COVID-19 outbreaks, disrupting supply and demand chains, millions of animals couldn’t be slaughtered and were instead culled across the UK and United States, to stop them from growing so big that they developed health problems, or to avoid the financial cost of keeping them alive longer than anticipated. The strangeness and sadness of this situation is hard to comprehend. Cresswell (2014) captures it well, describing the dairy industry as “the story of the imposition of techo-social space-time onto the animal world”.
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So what better way to communicate climate change mobilities than with with one of the most mobile forms of communication: the GIF. GIFs are not only mobile in that they move in their own small space, but they are continually mobile in flows of global communication, attached for example to WhatsApp or Facebook messages.
I checked out the available climate change GIFs and the selection is not good. Aside from motivating images of Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough, and Bernie Sanders, options are limited. So I have made some climate crisis and mobilities GIFs, linking to my dissertation and disaster mobilities essay. All the drawings are my own. I hope that they can be attached to WhatsApp messages, sent from teenagers to grandparents, between United Nations officials in the build up to a climate summit, and maybe even sent by mistake to an unsuspecting recipient who then has to pause and think about what they have just seen. |