I remembered Albany... as just another down-on-its-luck small American city that had sacrificed its vitality to a whirring ring of homogenous suburbs. - James Howard Kunstler

Few dogs were around anymore. Some had been eaten during the hunger that followed the flu in the spring of that year. People didn't talk about it; it was so demoralizing.

The germ theory, which emerged in the late nineteenth century, focused the world's attention on the specific agents responsible for... diseases, but the [physical,] social and ecological contexts are equally important [for it], and these are now coming more prominently into play with world population well beyond the limits of the earth's [sic] [...] [optimum] carrying capacity and with climate change... in progress. [...] Ecological... [pressures], rapid changes in land use, penetration of formerly inaccessible habitats, and disturbed migration routes can lead to the appearance or diffusion of a disease. While we may be able to identify [some, if not all] the microorganisms involved, we can be helpless in the face of it, and our behavior may still promote its spread.

The more comfortable we have become with the blandishments of industrial technology, the more complexity we are burdened with —as the and the remind us—and the more likely we are to meet the very fate we are desperately trying to avoid: our rendezvous with entropy [a euphemism for death].