Nature vs Man in the Time of COVID-19

Nature is a modern product that is antiqued to look ancient and premodern. But modernity is over – the writing is on the wall, or rather in the thin layer of carbon deposited from 1790 throughout Earth’s crust, beginning what is now called the Anthropocene. We created a geological era that now intersects with human history: think for a moment about how scary that is. Now we know it – so Nature, which just is “stuff over yonder” – is no more, because we now know that “over yonder” doesn’t exist: it has a real name, such as Pacific Ocean or wastewater treatment plant or neonatal tissue. There is no “away” to which to chuck things anymore.  Interview with Rice University Professor Timothy Morton, 1/11/12

With human beings at the top of the food chain and no superior animal predators – adding tool making (on steroids!) and social organization to the mix – there are 7.8 billion of us, plus or minus, living on planet Earth today. Effectively, if we look back on the evolution and explosion of modern man, for every one person on earth 20,000 years ago, there are one thousand today. Looking at this statistic inside out, there is a “mind-boggling net addition [of] 1.5 million people per week — 9,000 more people each hour, and every hour, which the Earth must support.” Joe Bish, Director of Issue Advocacy, Population Media Center writing in the December 28, 2017 Gizmodo.com. Poverty isn’t going away; it’s amplifying as Malthusian population growth hits resource-impairing, accelerating climate change.

COVID-19 will cull the herd, but why does the herd need culling? Let’s start with a most basic question: How many people can the Earth comfortably accommodate? That, of course depends on your definition of “comfortably.” If you apply Western standards of living, the answer is a fraction of what the Earth has today. Also writing for the above Gizmodo piece, Bent Flyvbjerg, Professor at the Säid Business School, University of Oxford, presents this sobering perspective:

“As a first approximation, let's take the French lifestyle as a benchmark. According to the Global Footprint Network's calculator, if all of humanity were to live like the French, we would need about 2.5 Earths to sustain that lifestyle. Any lifestyle that cannot be universalized to the rest of humanity cannot be just. Every newborn should be able to enjoy their fair share of the world's resources.

“Thus, to ensure the ideal population size so that everyone could enjoy a comparable way of life, taking the French lifestyle as our benchmark, we would need to reduce the world population to about 3 billion people ([4.8] billion less than today's population). If, instead, we chose the lifestyle of people in the USA as the benchmark, then the world population would need to be reduced to 1.9 billion.”

Humanity has pushed the environmental envelope, close to the breaking point. Decimating jungles and forests to make way for farms and urban sprawl. Polluting the oceans while over-fishing those same resources. Species are going extinct at record levels. Assuming that a lifestyle that might work, somewhere between the above Western levels and what the rest of the world experiences, suggests that a population reduction of somewhere between one-third and half of where we are today would probably be comfortably sustainable. Nature seems to be working on that, and it hurts. It’s not just about feeding the rising volume of people; it’s even more about the direct impact of too many people on every aspect of the environment. Tim Morton’s quote above: effectively man is part of nature, not above it. But we are not killing half this planet to make the numbers work!

We do have checks and balances against population growth, even if we are not routinely culled by sharks, tigers, piranha and crocodiles. First and foremost, mankind itself seems to have replaced predatory animals in killing people; wars and murderous criminal activities have played their part. Starvation, accelerated by drought and pestilence (think locusts and for disease: ticks, fleas, roaches, tsetse flies and mosquitos), has killed and reduced human fertility. Disease – epidemics rising to pandemics – have defined history.

But there is difference over time. The ancient mega-killers were mostly bacterial; viruses became the mega-killers much later. Nature seemed to be experimenting over time, trying to adjust to maximize effectiveness. The Black Death (a bacterial infection - Yersina pestis) began in Asia and the Middle East in the 1340s. It rapidly migrated to Europe, as this summary in History.com explains:

"The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. People gathered on the docks were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of 'death ships' out of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the Black Death would kill more than 20 million people in Europe-almost one-third of the continent's population...

"They know that the bacillus travels from person to person through the air, as well as through the bite of infected fleas and rats. Both of these pests could be found almost everywhere in medieval Europe, but they were particularly at home aboard ships of all kinds-which is how the deadly plague made its way through one European port city after another." Mostly, it seems from flea bites from insects carried by rats. Ah, insects! But the path to mass infection has changed over time.

Basically, as we consume nature in excess, nature pushes back. And when we up our medical game against plagues, nature ups hers. The correspondence between overpopulation and the evolution of human-killing viruses appears to be on a parallel track, as you might assume. The underlying details, as Yale University Law School executive director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program, Viveca Morris (writing for the April 2^nd Los Angeles Times) provides, are both fascinating and scary:

“About two-thirds of emerging infectious diseases in humans — including COVID-19, SARS, MERS, Ebola, HIV, Zika, H1N1, cholera and almost all recent epidemics — came from animals. And 70% of those originated in wildlife… Pathogens have leaped from animals to humans for eons, but the pace of this spillover has increased rapidly over the last century. As 7.8 billion people on this planet radically alter ecosystems and raise, capture and trade animals at an unprecedented scale, ‘the road from animal microbe to human pathogen’ has turned into a ‘highway,’ as the journalist Sonia Shah has written.

“The growing body of scientific research is clear: Diseases like COVID-19 are an expected consequence of how we’re choosing to treat animals and their habitats… By changing the nature and frequency of human-animal interactions, our actions — through the wildlife trade, deforestation, land conversion, industrial animal farming, the burning of fossil fuels and more — propel the emergence and transmission of novel and known human infectious diseases.

“Scientists suspect that COVID-19, like SARS, is caused by a coronavirus that jumped from bats to humans (perhaps via pangolins or another kind of animal) at a live animal market in Wuhan, China. In these markets, an ark’s worth of animals that rarely encounter one another in the wild are crammed together in stacked cages as they await sale and slaughter… ‘You have a bird pooping on a turtle that poops on a civet,’ Dr. Christian Walzer of the Wildlife Conservation Society told the New York Times. ‘For getting new viruses to emerge, you couldn’t do it much better even if you tried.’

“China is not alone in creating ideal conditions for diseases to spill over species barriers. Every year, Americans pay to capture, box up and import hundreds of millions of live animals for agriculture, the pet and aquarium industries and other uses… Inevitably, some of these traded animals carry hitchhiking pathogens or disturb their new environments in ways that amplify disease risk…

“Humans have altered three-quarters of terrestrial environments and two-thirds of marine environments. Our ecological domination, aside from risking mass extinctions, makes humans more vulnerable to disease… Biodiversity can act as a powerful disease ‘dilutant.’ In New England, people are more likely to become infected with Lyme disease in or near fragmented forests. Unlike many of their predators, white-footed mice — the primary carriers of Lyme — thrive in smaller patches of forest. More ticks then feed on those infected mice, and more ‘edge habitat’ exists where those ticks can infect people.

“The human health effects of deforestation are even more devastating in global disease ‘hot spots,’ which are tropical areas with high wildlife biodiversity. When these forests are felled — be it in the Amazon, East Africa, Thailand or Indonesia — the mosquitoes that transmit malaria become more abundant and infect people at higher rates.

“It’s not just insect-borne diseases. The emergence in 1998 of the deadly Nipah virus in Malaysia has been linked to the increase in size and density of pig farms in bat-rich areas. The virus caused fatal encephalitis among pig farmers, nearly took down the country’s pork industry and led to the culling of about 1 million pigs, many of which were buried alive.

“And then we have the bio-catastrophes that are modern factory farms. We pack most of the world’s livestock animals, for all or part of their lives, into crammed living conditions that are hotbeds for viral and bacterial pathogens, and then we lace their feed with the world’s most medically important antibiotics, creating perfect conditions for antibiotic-resistant pathogens to develop. The public pays the price in the form of drug-resistant UTI and MRSA infections, feces in the air and water, and increased risk of deadly viral epidemics like the 2009 H1N1 outbreak that sickened an estimated 59 million people.

“To prevent future outbreaks like COVID-19 or worse, we have to treat planetary, animal and human health as inseparable. This will require radical changes to business as usual… To date, we’ve operated under the fallacies that medicine and ecology can be understood independently and that the conditions that impact the animal kingdom are separate from those that impact humans.

“COVID-19 exposes these fallacies. Scientists estimate that animals carry more than 600,000 unknown viruses with the potential to jump to humans. How often these diseases have the opportunity to make the jump, and how prepared we are for them, is up to us… The coronavirus shows that what we’re doing to animals is killing us, too.”

We can blame China, an overpopulated monolith migrating from old-world agricultural practices into cutting edge modernity. Or we can blame all of us. It isn’t us against nature. It is humanity’s understanding that we are an inseparable part of nature, a balance between responsibility and respect, on the one hand, and the willingness to do (sacrifice) what allows mankind and nature to work harmoniously, on the other. If climate change failed to instill that lesson, perhaps COVID-19 might jar us into a new perspective, one that seems already to have captivated large swaths of the Y and Z generations. Time for the rest of us to get on board! It is the solution.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and while we are learning how to downsize, protect and survive during this outbreak (thank you South Korea, Germany, Washington State and California for showing how this should work), human life after COVID-19 needs to be different and vastly more ecologically responsible.