This piece will be appearing as a newspaper op/ed in my red congressional district (VA-06).
************************
The coronavirus pandemic provides a glimpse into some basic realities regarding the forces at work in life-on-earth, and humankind’s place in life’s system.
This contagion is sweeping across the planet because a particular kind of virus mutated into a form that could be transmitted from bat to human, and that readily spreads from person to person. One might say that, for the virus, such spreading amounts to “success” in the ancient game called “natural selection,” i.e. the process that has shaped living organisms, including both ourselves and the virus.
This pandemic illustrates a couple of important points about the dynamics at work in the biosphere:
The Shock of the New
The impact of this pandemic is so disruptive to our species precisely because the virus is something new. This destructiveness illustrates a general evolutionary pattern: the sudden confrontation between evolutionary “strangers” often wreaks destruction whereas, if given enough time, life-forms develop some sort of mutual accommodation. For example:
Over millions of years, a fungus and the Chinese chestnut it infected evolved together so that the tree could tolerate the fungus. But when the fungus was imported into North America, the new confrontation with the great American chestnut wiped out what had been a dominant tree in America’s Eastern forests. The Europeans who came to the New World were the heirs of generations that had survived epidemics of measles. As a result, they had immune systems much better equipped to deal with that virus than were the peoples they encountered in the New World who were strangers to measles. Those Native American populations -- newly exposed to this virus (as well as to the virus for smallpox) – were decimated. Now the world is gripped by this pandemic crisis because this “novel” virus poses a threat to our species, which – because we have never encountered this virus before -- has no natural immunity to it.Upending Mother Nature Entails Risks
Another aspect of this situation – relevant to how life-on-earth works – is the way the disruption of biologically evolved systems by human civilization creates openings for new destructive scenarios to unfold.
Among the millions of life-forms on this planet, civilized societies are unique in their being structured not by the biological process of natural selection but by the creative innovations devised by the creature itself.
Humankind’s extricating itself from the biologically evolved order, even as it has conferred on us many advantages, has also created possibilities – unprecedented in the history of life-on-earth – for new kinds of disorder.
The evolutionary perspective helps explain how epidemics became an important part of the human world. Because civilized societies brought with them “unnaturally” large congregations of human population. (Quoting from an article in the journal BioScience: “Only when communication between small groups of neighboring towns began to be established is it likely that human populations became large enough to sustain direct life cycle bacterial and viral infections. It is in these first cities [more than 5000 years ago] that the now common diseases of humans started to appear.”) “Pestilence” became important enough to our civilization to be deemed one of the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” Pandemics –diseases across very broad territories -- become possible as the progress of civilization increased human mobility. More than six centuries ago, ships carrying goods from Asia to Europe introduced the rat that carried the flea that contained the bacterium for Bubonic plague—a pandemic that wiped out half the population of Europe. So interconnected had civilization become by the early 20th century that there could be a war that was a “World War.” The movement of troops across the globe at the end of that conflict -- combined with the mutation of an influenza virus into an especially virulent form (the “Spanish Flu”) – produced a pandemic that killed perhaps 50 million people. And now, with the entire globe much more fully woven together by human travelers, we get a virus that originates in one area – China – that swiftly becomes worldwide in just a matter of months. Had such a virus emerged centuries ago, it has been said, it would have likely been confined to a few Chinese villages and then played itself out. But with the “globalization” of commerce and other densely webs of international networking, what happens in China doesn’t remain in China, but can move like a viral tsunami across the entire planet.(Epidemics are one, but not the only example of disorder resulting from civilization’s extrication from the natural order. For example:
Because civilized human activity began so recently – not having had to pass long-term evolutionary muster -- the agricultural practices of ancient civilizations turned previously green and fertile areas into deserts. (As described in the classic book, Topsoil and Civilization.) The most significant such “disorder” facing us in these times is the disruption of the earth’s climate, as a result of the alterations of the earth’s atmosphere generated by the technologies of industrial civilization.)This pandemic can serve as a reminder that -- however dominant our species has become on this planet -- we are still embedded in a larger system in which other forms of life are driven in their development by the same opportunistic processes that shaped us. Humankind is powerful, but we don’t run the show.
************************
Andy Schmookler is a prize-winning author. Many of his works can be found at www.ABetterHumanStory.org .