We Live on Slum Planet--Mike Davis

But if ecological reality prevails, it won't stop there. Today's megaslums are unprecedented incubators of new and re-emergent diseases that can travel across the world at the speed of a passenger jet. And, as the imminent peril of avian influenza indicates, economic globalization without concomitant investment in a global public-health infrastructure is a formula for catastrophe. It takes only a little imagination—the thought of a series of ill-fated airplane trips—to remind us that we're all living on the same planet of slums, under the same economic regime. The conditions creating the slums—greed, inequity, poor planning, and disrespect for human rights—are human forces, but they tend to intensify the Earth's natural forces. Those forces, ecological and biological, don't always behave as predictably as we would like, or stay within their bounds.