By Charles Foster
Cross posted from The Conversation
To be clear, and in the hope of heading off some trolls, two observations. First: of course I don’t welcome the epidemic. It will cause death, worry, inconvenience and great physical and economic suffering. Lives and livelihoods will be destroyed. The burden will fall disproportionately on the old, the weak and the poor.
And second: these suggestions are rather trite. They should be obvious to reasonably reflective people of average moral sensibility.
That said, here goes:
1. It will make us realise that national boundaries are artificial
The virus doesn’t carry a passport or recognise frontiers. The only way of stopping its spread would be to shut borders wholly, and not even the most rabid nationalists advocate that. It would mean declaring that nations were prisons, with no one coming in or out – or at least not coming back once they’d left. In a world where we too casually assume that frontiers are significant, it doesn’t do any harm to be reminded of the basic fact that humans occupy an indivisible world.
Cooperation between nations is essential to combating the epidemic. That cooperation is likely to undermine nationalist rhetoric.
2. It will make us realise that people are not islands
The atomistic billiard-ball model of the person – a model that dominates political and ethical thinking in the west – is biologically ludicrous and sociologically unsustainable. Our individual boundaries are porous. We bleed into one another and infect one another with both ills and joys. Infectious disease is a salutary reminder of our interconnectedness. It might help us to recover a sense of society.
3. It may encourage a proper sort of localism
Internationalism may be boosted. I hope so. But if we’re all locked up with one another in local quarantine, we might get to know the neighbours and the family members we’ve always ignored. We might distribute ourselves less widely, and so be more present to the people around us.
We might even find out that our local woods are more beautiful than foreign beaches, and that local farmers grow better and cheaper food than that which is shipped (with the associated harm to the climate) across the globe.
4. It may encourage altruism
Exigencies tend to bring out the best and the worst in us. An epidemic may engender and foster altruistic heroes.
5. It may remind us of some neglected constituencies
Mortality and serious illness are far higher among the old, the very young, and those suffering from other diseases. We tend to think about – and legislate for – the healthy and robust. The epidemic should remind us that they are not the only stakeholders.
6. It may make future epidemics less likely
The lessons learned from the coronavirus epidemic will pay dividends in the future. We will be more realistic about the dangers of viruses crossing the barriers between species. The whole notion of public health (a Cinderella speciality in medicine in most jurisdictions) has been rehabilitated. It is plain that private healthcare can’t be the whole answer. Much has been learned about the containment and mitigation of infectious disease. There are strenuous competitive and cooperative efforts afoot to develop a vaccine, and vaccines against future viral challenges are likely to be developed faster as a result.
7. It might make us more realistic about medicine
Medicine is not omnipotent. Recognising this might make us more aware of our vulnerabilities. The consequences of that are difficult to predict, but living in the world as it really is, rather than in an illusory world, is probably a good thing. And recognising our own vulnerability might make us more humble and less presumptuous.
8. Wildlife may benefit
China has announced a permanent ban on trade in and consumption of wildlife. That in itself is hugely significant from a conservation, an animal welfare, and a human health perspective. Hopefully other nations will follow suit.
The climate will benefit from a breath of fresh air. People will realize all their traveling in airplanes ✈️ is wasteful and destroying the Earth.
Yes–Tara is correct, the climate will benefit, not just from reduced air travel but from the drop in economic activity generally–because the assumption that we must pursue infinite “economic growth” is what is driving our greenhouse gas emissions ever-upward. The abstraction that is the “global economy”and its relationship to our three-dimensional reality–the world that really keeps us alive, the one that has at its base green plants fixing CO2 into available biomass and thus creating our food via photosynthesis–badly needs to be rethought, as do the immensely complicated supply chains that are currently distributing it. Perhaps taking a breather from the accelerating (virtual) circulation of “money” around the planet will help us understand this.
My thanks to Charles Foster for mentioning (unfortunately, last) the wild animal connection. All 3 of the lethal coronaviruses, the ones causing the first SARS epidemic in 2002-2003 and the one causing the MERS outbreak in 2012 as well as this SARS-CoV-2 virus, are believed to have jumped the species barrier from a wild animal, a species of bat or this time possibly a pangolin, animals originally found in Africa and taken by the increasingly lucrative “bushmeat” trade out of their habitat to be sold for human consumption, the 2 SARS viruses emerging in the “wet markets” of China. We need to get a holistic grasp of what’s going on–we humans have allowed our own species population to increase enormously and have coupled it with an enormous increase in consumption of other animal life and accelerating invasion and destruction of their wild habitats. We do not need to be doing any of this. Counting the massive habitat destruction caused by expansion of the global livestock industry, “animal product consumption by humans (human carnivory) is likely to be the leading cause of modern species extinctions” (see Machovina, Feeley and Ripple 2015, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969715303697); many scientists are increasingly recognizing the “tightly-linked diet-environment-human health trilemma” (Tilman and Clark 2014, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13959), and the growing market in bushmeat is accelerating the demise of many wild animal species (Ripple et al. 2016, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.160498). If the global economy is in for a major reset–as it may well be–then transitioning people around the world to plant-based diets will be a very sensible part of the new paradigm. Meanwhile, negative social feedback toward all those involved in and profiting from this ruthless consumption of our wild evolutionary cohorts, a practice that also happens to put our own species at risk from pandemics yet to come, will be appropriate. It will not be a matter of “racism” to want to stop human cultural practices (now to be found in every country and every human grouping) that in one way or another are endangering the Earth’s remaining slate of highly developed lifeforms–including our own.
(I will try again–if you want to censor me, please email me the reason why.)
Yes, the climate will benefit, not just from reduced air travel but from the drop in economic activity generally–because the assumption that we must pursue infinite “economic growth” is what is driving our greenhouse gas emissions ever-upward. The abstraction that is the “global economy”and its relationship to our three-dimensional reality–the world that really keeps us alive, the one that has at its base green plants fixing CO2 into available biomass and thus creating our food via photosynthesis–badly needs to be rethought, as do the immensely complicated supply chains that are currently distributing it. Perhaps taking a breather from the accelerating (virtual) circulation of “money” around the planet will help us understand this.
My thanks to Charles Foster for mentioning (unfortunately, last) the wild animal connection. All 3 of the lethal coronaviruses, the ones causing the first SARS epidemic in 2002-2003 and the one causing the MERS outbreak in 2012 as well as this SARS-CoV-2 virus, are believed to have jumped the species barrier from a wild animal, a species of bat or this time possibly a pangolin, animals originally found in Africa and taken by the increasingly lucrative “bushmeat” trade out of their habitat to be sold for human consumption, the 2 SARS viruses emerging in the “wet markets” of China. We need to get a holistic grasp of what’s going on–we humans have allowed our own species population to increase enormously and have coupled it with an enormous increase in consumption of other animal life and accelerating invasion and destruction of their wild habitats.
We do not need to be doing any of this. Counting the massive habitat destruction caused by expansion of the global livestock industry, “animal product consumption by humans (human carnivory) is likely to be the leading cause of modern species extinctions” (see Machovina, Feeley and Ripple 2015); many scientists are increasingly recognizing the “tightly-linked diet-environment-human health trilemma” (Tilman and Clark 2014), and the growing market in bushmeat is accelerating the demise of many wild animal species (Ripple et al. 2016–full refs and links available upon request–if links are not allowed here, these references are to show that this problem has been discussed in the scientific literature for quite a while, and something could have been done long before this outbreak).
If the global economy is in for a major reset–as it may well be–then transitioning people around the world to plant-based diets will be a very sensible part of the new paradigm. Meanwhile, a certain degree of negative social feedback toward all those involved in and profiting from this ruthless consumption of our wild evolutionary cohorts, a practice that also happens to put our own species at risk from pandemics yet to come, will be appropriate, because just making it “illegal” has not been and will not be sufficient to bring it to an end–the “demand” has got to cease.
It will not be a matter of “racism”—but fear of being accused of this may be reinforcing the silence on this topic—to want to stop human cultural practices (now to be found in every country and every human grouping) that in one way or another are endangering the Earth’s remaining slate of highly developed lifeforms–including our own. It will be a matter of honesty, and concern for getting Life on Earth back in balance.
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