A recent study introduced a vaccine that controls Ebola Makona, the Zaire ebolavirus variant that has infected 28,000 people in West Africa. We propose that even such successful advances are insufficient for many emergent diseases. We review work hypothesizing that Makona, phenotypically similar to much smaller outbreaks, emerged out of shifts in land use brought about by neoliberal economics. The epidemiological consequences demand a new science that explicitly addresses the foundational processes underlying multispecies health, including the deep-time histories, cultural infrastructure, and global economic geographies driving disease emergence. The approach, for instance, reverses the standard public health practice of segregating emergency responses and the structural context from which outbreaks originate. In Ebola's case, regional neoliberalism may affix the stochastic "friction" of ecological relationships imposed by the forest across populations, which, when above a threshold, keeps the virus from lining up transmission above replacement. Export-led logging, mining, and intensive agriculture may depress such functional noise, permitting novel spillovers larger forces of infection. Mature outbreaks, meanwhile, can continue to circulate even in the face of efficient vaccines. More research on these integral explanations is required, but the narrow albeit welcome success of the vaccine may be used to limit support of such a program.

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At over twentyfive years old, GIScience has been successful academically and institutionally. However, its relationship to one of its 'natural' homes, the discipline of Geography, has often been troubled and uncertain. We suggest that from the founding of GIScience, its close association with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) has contributed to an acceptance of an absolute coordinate space encoded as (as both a relatively unproblematic and dominant representation of geographical space. We briefly consider how this situation may have arisen, perhaps as an unintended consequence of an originally tactical disciplinary positioning move. However, our purpose here is not criticism, but to highlight the many other more minor strands within GIScience, which can provide fertile common ground for renewed conversations between GIScience and Geography. We suggest congruences between less dominant strands of research in GIScience and theoretical concepts in Geography, as an invitation to constructive collaborations.