Hey Covid… Why oh Why
Why ask WHY? Because only the right questions will take us where we need to go. Granted, we’ll get tangled up at the intersections of history, politics, science, and the daily lives of us regular folk. But our generation may be the only one that can save us from ourselves. Over time, global pandemics will equal global pandemonium. Ongoing misery and death will bring social unrest and economic collapse.
The price of ignoring the root causes of the novel coronavirus is to encourage more deadly pandemics.
For billions of years, our planetary home supported life. Health and disease, air and chemistry, formed an intricate and precarious balance that was conducive to life for our species. When we were few in number, our inroads into that balance were nothing more than flea bites on mother nature.
As our species began to dominate, we increasingly viewed ourselves as conquerors of an unruly or inconsequential environment. We believed we could outsmart the laws of nature and rejected notions of humans as stewards and students of the only teacher we had. We codified our superiority into religion, law and politics because in our blind hubris, humans presumed we’d be capable of maintaining the delicate sliver of balance that has allowed us to thrive.
From that viewpoint, our race’s growth is no more than a long upward trajectory of biting the only hand that ever fed us. Extinctions are anywhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than they would be without human interference. Our single species has already annexed half the land mass on Earth. To sustain these trends, even today it would take 1.6 Earths.
In numbers that have more than doubled in my lifetime, we’ve gone from 3.7 billion people in 1970 to some 7.6 billion now. And 30 years from now? We’re expecting to have 10 billion homo sapiens on board. We’re not preparing for that.
We’re like the farmer who was convinced he could make better weather than God, who finally offered him control of the weather for one year. At harvest all looked bountiful and the farmer was proud. But on the inside, the high wheat grasses were empty. Confused and angry, the farmer asked God how there could be no seeds to harvest when he had done everything right. “The wind,” God said. “You forgot the wind.”
Like that farmer, humanity now hovers at 11:58 on the doomsday clock. In truth, this might be a really good time our last chance to assess where we went wrong — and change it.
You don’t need to be an astrophysicist to understand that destroying natural ecosystems and increasing pressure on our highly populated planet are not good. Nor to see that we are destroying our natural safety nets.
“Growth in humanity and its activity is largely to blame. Meat production has increased by 260 per cent in 50 years. We have intensified agriculture, expanded infrastructure and extracted resources at the expense of our wild spaces. Dams, irrigation and factory farms are linked to 25 per cent of infectious diseases in humans. Travel, transport and food supply chains have erased borders and distances. Climate change has contributed to the spread of pathogens. The end result is that people and animals, with the diseases they carry, are closer than ever.” The United Nations Environmental Programme announcing its report.
Understanding what we’re doing is easy; so is knowing what to fix.
“To prevent future outbreaks, countries need to conserve wild habitats, promote sustainable agriculture, strengthen food safety standards, monitor and regulate food markets, invest in technology to identify risks, and curb the illegal trade in wildlife.” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres
The issue isn’t knowledge. We know. It isn’t no tools to fix it. We have them. The issue is our dulled, weary acceptance. It seems we’re still genetically hard-wired to respond to the tiger at the mouth of the cave and only deal with immediate threats. Unfortunately we still believe an existential threat is in a vague future. We still think there’s time.
When enough of us realize we’re staring into the tiger’s eyes, we’ll demand change and we’ll force the political will necessary to make it happen. Meanwhile, let’s hope the tiger doesn’t pounce first.
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References:
https://www.worldenvironmentday.global/biodiversity-coronaviruse
https://www.infoplease.com/world/population-statistics/total-population-world-decade-1950-2050
https://www.unenvironment.org/resources/frontiers-2016-emerging-issues-environmental-concern
