I saw a bus in London the other day with an advert for the film Contagion on it. I haven’t seen the film but I have seen the trailer and the striking thing for anyone who loves nature is this:
“Character 1: Is there any way you can weaponize the bird flu? Is that what we’re looking at?”
“Character 2: Someone doesn’t have to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that.”
Oh great! In this season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and runny noses we are going to be told that the birds are out to get us.
The figures from the World Health Organisation suggest that in the last nine years, across the whole world, bird flu has killed enough people to fill a large cinema. Maybe the figures are gross underestimates. However, to put the 331 confirmed bird flu deaths (over nine years) in context, 1.26 million people die across the world in traffic-related accidents every year. And when they aren’t killing us, those cars are pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But which scares you the most – bird flu or climate change?
I rather like the look of this film, Life: a cosmic story, which has just won a prize in the Jackson Hole Film Festival. I think we can be fairly certain that a documentary about the wonders of life in the universe will be less watched than a fictional account of a pandemic on Earth. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that we go to the cinema for fiction rather than fact, and to be scared rather than delighted. That’s OK provided we leave leave the messages of Contagion on the floor with the spilled popcorn.
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Mark you’ve hit the nail bang on the spot with these statistics for relative death rates from traffic accidents and bird flu. If we could get the BBC and other story telling organisations to put some hard facts like these against all health and animal scare stories the world would be a better place. Clearly the death rate from traffic is unacceptable but we all accept it. Why do we worry so much with all the trivial ways that 7 billion people can die when climate change prompted mega death is staring us in the face?