Ebola in Meliandou: Tropes of ‘Sustainability’ at Ground Zero

Abstract

This chapter considers how epochal events such as the Ebola epidemic in West Africa that are the antithesis of sustainability nevertheless attract narrative explanations that render them predictable and systemically avoidable. Euro-American narratives emerged suggesting that the so-called spillover of Ebola then presumed to be from a cryptic host in the natural world would have been avoided if more sustainable relations with forests had been adopted. Local narratives emerged that Ebola would be avoided if extractive relations with neo-colonial political and economic orders could be avoided. Each dismissed the other as rumour. By observing how such ‘Black Swan’ events are rationalised we not only reveal tropes of unsustainability—of disorder—but can also appreciate how social communities themselves are mutually constituted in relation to these visions, and how they become the locus of social othering.