When I read that 2019 was the worst year in a century for the environment in Australia I felt stilled. How can this be when so much is known, understood and disseminated? It is horrifying to know that we are committing a form of ecological suicide, that will affect the whole living world – rivers, oceans, plants and animals. As human animals living in our wealthy countries our assumption and consumption has had an unprecedented impact on the life of the planet. We thought we could ‘have it all’. That it was ‘all good’. It is not all good, it is terrifying and we should be terrified. Not just of the Coronavirus but the conditions under which this virus has thrived in finding us as the next host.
If you are to host someone that usually means there has been an invitation extended to a guest or guests. This virus has not been invited but we have given consent, through an insatiable demand for cheap goods, to so much destruction of its normal contained habitat that it has simply leapt across a species gap and found that we humans are a suitable host for it to live and thrive. Is this opportunism or creativity? We might be experiencing it as a destructive force but it is what all life does – finds ways to survive and reproduce. How do we find creative ways to respond to what we perceive is a threat to our existence? What response-ability are we taking? I feel keenly that unless we grasp a more wholistic understanding of what is happening with the manifestation of this virus, then we are not going to be able to imagine a future that is liveable for all life on the planet. If we continue to use and abuse natural resources, peoples, and animals for our own purpose, we will have to live with the painful demise of so much of the living world. We are part of that living world. So our demise as a species is probable. Perhaps it is inevitable.
References for you to understand the complexity of what this virus means for the living world.
Ensia a nonprofit media outlet reporting on our changing planet:
… a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases like COVID-19
https://ensia.com/features/covid-19-coronavirus-biodiversity-planetary-health-zoonoses/
and
United Nations Environment Programme:
Regardless of its cause or origin, the emergence of COVID-19 has underscored the mutually-affective relationship between people and nature. Now, we must try to understand and appreciate the limits to which humans can push nature, before the impact is negative. Those limits must be embraced by our consumption and production aspiration.
https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/covid-19-and-nature-trade-paradigm