Those who are as unconditionally for globalization as others are against it can at least agree on a three points: that it's happening, that it's impact is yet immeasurable, and that it's intensifying. Each faction also shares the tendency to focus on the effects of the obvious: worldwide flows of capital, cultures, commodities and people. And so, what is overlooked by nearly all is what's literally invisible about globalization-- until it's visibility becomes a threat to everyone, everywhere.
Yet, the closest frame of reference to what may be called bioglobalism, the inevitable flow of microscopic and other living organisms that comes with globalization, may be bioterrorism more than globalization itself. The devastating consequences imported and invasive plants can have on local ecological systems parallels the consequences pathogens like swine flu can have for human communities. However, plant migration is usually done on misguided purpose, while pathogen migration happens despite our best efforts to stop it. Strangely enough strong analogies can be made between both plant and pathogen bioglobalism and bioterrorism.
Bioterrorism, scary as it is, isn't as scary as malignant bioglobalism: terrorist acts are assumed to be limited to a specific location or group, even if with biological weapons they may not be contained; globalization is by definition everywhere all the time, and that means your community right now too. Above all, the fear factor difference between bioterrorism and bioglobalism is that the former usually happens for specific reasons, and the latter for no apparent reason at all. The 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic killed 40 million people worldwide. That's close to the death tolls of World Was One and Two combined, in one year, with no weapons, no enemies and no peace treaties. The last pandemic in 1968, the 'Hong Kong Flu', killed one million people worldwide.
We generally remain in the 9/11 mindset about possible terrorist attacks: they will be spectacular, their messages unsubtle, and quick to be claimed by haters of everything "we" are. Nobody to my knowledge has suggested that the outbreak of swine flew in Mexico was an act of bioterrorism aimed at coinciding with Obama's recent trip there, infecting him and so Washington and the US in the process. I hope the museum worker who died of swine flu a day after the President's visited the place is investigated. And although the fact that Obama was there to speak against drug trafficking makes a plausible motive for the powerful Mexican and international drug cartels to take action, no facts I know of support this conspiracy theory. But in any case: killing with a bullet is murder, killing with a cough can be genocide.
Instead, what has emerged is a narrative in which individuals unaware of their own vulnerability and of all demographics around the world are at risk of a new strain of the flu virus that combines animal with human genes. Bioglobalism, it seems, is a radical democratization of bioterrorism, whether or not the latter causes the former. SARS, bird flu and other recent pandemic scares are somehow different from the swine flu, if only in how the media is reporting it and how the number of cases in the US remains unannounced. Even if bioterrorism is eliminated as a current event creating the future, bioglobalism may not or cannot be.
