Nora Holzinger

I begged my partner to ferry me on the back of a motorcycle up the rutted, unpaved eastern side of the Sandia Mountains. I was searching for something. It was mid-October and still hot in Albuquerque, especially in the valley. The AC was on and we wore shorts while our local stores stocked plastic pumpkins and Halloween decorations. An unusual spate of rain gave the parched weeds false hope, and they rioted green in our yard. Autumn was not arriving, despite all the faithfully conducted rituals. The chile had been roasted, ristras strung, the hay baled and put up in barns, the crows returned, Balloon Fiesta chaos packed in, and tarantulas scuttled across the road searching for mates.  Every morning the sun rose a little later over the top of the Sandias, and every evening the sun painted them adobe a little earlier. Slowly the sun traced its way south along the eastern ridge of the Sandia mountains.  Every marker of the changing season had arrived except the one I lusted after...

It’s hotter than you ever thought possible. You should have prepared better for this hike but now you’re out here with an empty water bottle and burning skin. Your legs feel heavy and your head aches, your vision blurs, blood rushes in your ears, you feel nauseous.  You plop down in the sand under some scrub brush, wiggling to get your head deeper into the dappled shade it provides - any twig between you and the sun is a positive development.  You tell yourself you can’t stop here but the shade feels good. You close your eyes for what you tell yourself is just a minute…  You open them to a stock-still jackrabbit a few inches from your face.  Sunlight filters through the blood vessels in the jackrabbit’s large ears and staring at you are luminous orange eyes that have seen present, past, future, and the yet-to-be-imagined, all possibilities unfurling like the desert landscape at sunrise.  You stare back into those deranged eyes as the red walls of the slot canyon...

  Right off the bat, let’s get something straight – I am not a vegan. I followed a vegan diet for about eight years, but I’m not currently.  However, as a public health epidemiologist, I’m starting to wonder if I should go back to veganism. COVID-19, Avian flu, anthrax, mad cow disease, and swine flu are all diseases that have “spilled over” into humans from the animals we eat.  With concern over Avian flu growing and the world still recovering from COVID, I’ve been wondering what long-term pandemic prevention would look like. And continued industrial farming isn’t part of that picture.  A recent article in Nature found that industrial fur farming is a “viral highway” where numerous infectious diseases are circulating - diseases with pandemic potential. Potentially pandemic pathogens are viruses, bacteria, and parasites that could spread quickly and easily in humans and could cause significant sickness and death. With not much difference in the living conditions b...