A Given PLACE

Covid-19 is a zoonotic disease, meaning it is a disease that normally exists in animals but has been transmitted to people. The CDC reports that three out of four diseases are now zoonotic including these: Plague, Lyme disease, rabies, Coronavirus: SARS/Covid-19, Zika, H1N1, Malaria, Dengue Fever. Much has been said about the Chinese practice of eating wild animals and the very unsanitary conditions in wet markets in the East.

Jane Goodall, a chimpanzee researcher for sixty years, in a Ted Talk after Covid-19 emerged, explains more about zoonotic diseases. “It’s very, very clear that these zoonotic diseases like the corona and HIV/AIDS and all sorts of other diseases that we catch from animals, that’s partly to do with the destruction of the environment which, as animals lose habitat they get crowded together and sometimes that means that a virus from a reservoir species, where it’s lived harmoniously for maybe hundreds of years, jumps into a new species, then you also get animals being pushed into closer contact with humans. And sometimes one of these animals that has caught a virus can provide the opportunity for that virus to jump into people and create a new disease, like Covid-19.”

And new diseases don’t just impact people, they also affect the natural world and our food system:  forest trees, fish, wildlife, crop plants, fruit orchards and vegetables plus grains, livestock and, pets.  

So if Covid-19 is one example of environmental degradation, are there others?

In the natural world, here is a glimpse of the destructive disease effects.  Birds took it on the chin when West Nile Virus arrived in North America. This disease along with changing habitat conditions, exacerbated by the use of herbicides and pesticides, changed the vegetation, insects and seeds available, and reports suggest that an estimated 2 billion songbirds have recently been lost.

The beetle, the emerald ash borer, not native to North America, has marched across forests, farms, parks and yards and the result is a near complete collapse of mature ash trees throughout eastern Canada and the northern US. Billions of dead and dying trees show what one invasive species can do.  Another insect — the wooly adelgid from eastern Asia — has no natural predators or parasitoids in North America and is attacking Eastern and Carolina Hemlocks, with perhaps tens of millions of these magnificent trees dying. Both invasions echo the early 20^th century fungus that decimated the American Chestnut tree in the eastern US reducing hundreds of millions of mature trees to forest sprouts unable to grow.   

So does this mean trees are not the answer to global warming?

There are a lot of problems with trees, not the least of which is the timeline for action.

Let’s start here. It is time to trust what you have been thinking. Commerce is not king. In fact, everything rests on the health of our environment and on the health of our places.   

In the natural world rapidly changing conditions allow the migration of invasive plants, pest insects, bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other types of organisms plus allow species to migrate to new places where there are defenseless species. Humans are part of the natural world and outbreaks of new diseases, viruses, and secondary illnesses in people move just as they do in the plant and animal invasions.

meteorological change by any standard, moves slower. The rate of spread of the coronavirus is measurable in hours. Climate and meteorological change are measurable in years or decades.  Our experience of fast-moving is familiar, news covers the whole thing with blow by blow details. The alarm goes off, there is a sense of high alert.

Our understanding how to read slow-moving climate change is harder. The coronavirus is a pressure cooker on the verge of exploding in only a few days in each new location it invades. Climate change is more comparable to happy frog in the kettle of cold water that is slowly being heated. The frog is contented with the warming conditions until at some point, when it’s too late to do anything, the frog’s physiology shuts down and the frog is literally cooked.

What if there is a wholistic, healthy economic reality that can be developed place by place, one that does not fill our oceans with plastic and our bodies with toxins? What if we see that there is no greater issue than the health of the whole?  

This virus is a prescient wake-up call that a new disease is raging across everywhere. Research shows: a warmer climate appears to dampen immune response to the seasonal flu, air pollution, created in burning fossil fuels for energy, releasing greenhouse gases, is responsible for 8.8 million deaths each year, patients in China who lived in high pollution areas were twice as likely to die from SARS when compared to patients from regions with cleaner air. 

What ifwe see the coronavirus as a ‘canary in the coal mine’ event, and understand its links to climate change as a threat multiplier. What if ‘prudent behavior’ and ‘risk mitigation’ includes seeing how a crisis of the land creates a refugee crisis, a fresh water crisis, a food security crisis, multiple health crises, flooding and other disruptions with immeasurable costs and suffering.  What if our response now is to rebalance the system in favor of the natural world, supporting the future of the whole, place by place. This is our wake-up call.