My social media feed was filled with the news yesterday that medical professionals and scientists have identified a swine flu strain that has a potential genetic makeup to create a mutation that could lead to another pandemic. All the while we’re still in the early stages of COVID-19.
This caught my eye which led to my heart in my throat because over the last ten years or so, I’ve been waiting and watching for the pandemics to start rolling in like waves at high tide.
This is because since I dug into the environmental movement first as volunteer, then by making it a big part of my professional life too, and as I learned news updates and read more professional opinions, I formed my own; one that expected the Earth to try to get rid of humans like the parasites we’ve become.
If you are familiar with James Lovelock and his Gaia principle, than you’d understand why I’ve felt this way pretty quickly. When I first read and absorbed the hypothesis, it felt true like some sort of primal memory from pre-historic ancestors that said, why yes, I have actually known this all along. The Earth doesn’t support life. It is life. The minerals, plants and animals are all one big connected body with a beating molten-core heart in the middle.
(And no matter what you think of the plot, writing, and troubling white-savior themes running through, Avatar was a damn good cinematic example of the principle. It helped me think of Gaia in the same beautiful imaginative way James Cameron illustrated the moon Pandora in his film. Psilocybin also helps this theory. Or... so I’ve been told.)
The feral and fauna interdependence is intertwined — this is a well-known fact. Earth is an enclosed biosphere. We have our Garden of Eden, but we’re trashing it and making it uninhabitable. (Perhaps the Book of Genesis is fable about our future, eh, not our past?) But taking this a step further and seeing Gaia as an entire whole-planet living entity, well that might mean that humans are about to really get it from Mother Nature. And she might be attempting filicide.
James Lovelock, as well as ex-NASA scientist, James Hansen have been warning humanity for decades of climate change. Lovelock can be harder to take — he is blunt with no hope to give regarding our timeline for survival. I do not subscribe to this level of dreariness, especially now, after experiencing the air clearing during the initial lockdowns. But both of these James have been pretty bleak in their outlook of what is going to unfold for humans once Earth’s temperature really starts to warm up.
From an interview with Lovelock, I read this offshoot theory that Earth may exert a defense mechanism at some point. In this interview, now more than ten years old, he mentions that our planet will “get rid of us much like we shake the flu.” Though his outlook is still negative on what that means for Gaia in the long run, in this article, another scientist has a more nuanced variation of this theory:
Lovelock's thinking is that our increasing presence is getting things so out of whack that, in the manner of a human immune system, the planet has no choice but to respond.
"Individuals occasionally suffer a disease called polycythaemia, an overpopulation of red blood cells," writes Lovelock, environmentalist, futurologist and creator of the Gaia hypothesis. "By analogy, Gaia's illness could be called polyanthroponemia, where humans overpopulate until they do more harm than good."
In his blog, MSNBC's Alan Boyle writes that University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward has an alternate new theory: Earth is set up to kill off life, including us, when it spreads too widely.
So here I’ve been for the last dozen years or so with a back-of-the-mind watch for Earth starting to rebel. But optimism always kicked in thinking that we’d have more time. Well, maybe we still do, but perhaps instead, things are unraveling quickly.
There have been many obvious signs of symptoms: stronger storms, blazing wild fires, extreme conditions — drought or floods and no in between for example; and melting glaciers. All the while, world organization like NOAA — broadcasting our CO2 levels like a naval lookout man yelling down from the mast counts of hostile battle ships as they appear on the horizon — have been trying to warn us.
And of course, pandemics have been around throughout history since the agricultural revolution. But it can be easy to think that we’re so advanced technologically, that we’ve created the vaccines and a society with running potable water and garbage collectors, etc, to feel complacency. It just seems so much safer.
That is an illusion of course; and now we are at our first major pandemic in over 100 years. And humans — Americans at least — seem less equipped to deal with a pandemic if only out of a plurality of ignorance and hubris.
Which finally brings me to my main point: this scary, terrifying news of yet another dangerous virus on the heels of COVID-19 gives me a perverse sense of hope. Perhaps Earth is kicking in her three-alarm defense mechanism early enough to get us to wake the hell up and change course right now.
(Or the craven, incompetent leadership of Donald J. Trump actually will lead to so much mayhem and death that the system will be forced to change for the better. I don’t know. Maybe a universal acceptance of wearing face masks will mobilize soon; and we can still save more lives than could otherwise be a really dire scenario.)
I understand that this is a grim post. So hear me when I say I know this doesn’t sound very hopeful. The hope comes from the wish that the human race is finally hearing the alarm bells that have been ringing for decades now. We are recognizing the pivotal historical moment we are in; and finally realize that we’ve got to strip our entire society down to the studs and rebuild. This is not as impossible as it seems. The Green New Deal would be a strong start. (And, again, I’ve already blogged about solutions here.)
Either way, in the end however, my waking dream is that Gaia herself will recover and live with an intelligent species that will love and care for her as a true custodian. Whether that gets to be us remains to be seen — the window is very nearly closed. I will probably be long gone before this is answered.
For now though — Earth’s temperature is rising, and more viruses are crawling out of the pigpens, caves and permafrost like micro-zombies as the mercury breaks records.
November is the most important election of my lifetime, future included. Of that I feel absolutely sure.
“I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruelest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.”
- James Lovelock