The Earth is a Big Actor
I live in New Zealand, so right now we don’t know how lucky we are. I have never seen so many dads out for walks in the bush near my house with their kids (and I’m one of them!). It’s as if the Earth, with its big hand, has reached out and given us a nudge. A nudge from the Earth, with its little finger, certainly rocks the foundations of our current way of living. This is not to discount human suffering; I felt grief for people in Italy that I don’t know personally that made me horizontal for a while, and I’m in conversation with friends around the world that makes me worry and feel pain for them.
But if we zoom out, we can see how the current crisis is the result of human activity. This story outlines how leading scientists in the emerging field of planetary health think that biodiversity loss driven by human expansion makes our ecosystems brittler and more likely to produce epidemics in the human sphere:
“a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise”
And the effects of this virus which has resulted in our incursion on nature are startling, for example air pollution dropping drastically in China, to the benefit of human health:
“Given the huge amount of evidence that breathing dirty air contributes heavily to premature mortality, a natural — if admittedly strange — question is whether the lives saved from this reduction in pollution caused by economic disruption from COVID-19 exceeds the death toll from the virus itself,” Burke writes.
“Even under very conservative assumptions, I think the answer is a clear ‘yes’.”
The two months of pollution reduction, Burke calculates, has probably saved the lives of 4,000 children under 5 and 73,000 adults over 70 in China. That’s significantly more than the current global death toll from the virus itself.”
In Systems Thinking, this could be interpreted as a negative feedback loop in the global ecosystem:
The Australian Bushfires may have some effect on the political environment with regard to fossil fuel consumption, leading to a similar dynamic.
The cost to our economies and in human lives and human suffering due to Covid-19 is going to be huge, and this is a terrible thing. But we have been heading in this direction for a long time. As eclipse-large as this event seems, I think it will prove to be part of a dynamic, of the Earth waking up, finding its voice, and reasserting its primacy and wisdom; after all the reality is we come from the earth, we are of it, it doesn’t belong to us. And it is evident that Covid-19, which seems like just the tip of an iceberg as the Guardian article above described it, is already asking hard questions of our fragile, growth dependent economic model.
Will this current crisis make us ready as a society to start asking the really hard questions about what living in harmony with all life on earth would look like, what mindset and structural changes would be required? Are we ready to look to our indigenous communities (example), many of whom still have intact understanding and wisdom for this? Or do we need the Earth to ask some more hard questions for us?
Thanks to my Systems Sanctuary whānau for giving me the nudge I needed to find my voice and write this.
