Our Ecological Sickness
When most of us first heard about the coronavirus, it was as another swine flu: a media-hyped potential pandemic that seemed to be no worse than the seasonal flu. It was, for many, something learned about passively through social media posts, a minor concern ambiently tracked alongside other daily news items, nothing to lose sleep over. Those who were paying close attention saw worrying mortality trends, strange infection patterns, a sobering and severe containment crackdown that hinted at a virus far worse than a seasonal flu. For the rest of us, it barely registered.
By February, it was beginning to seem more likely the virus would spread. Some people began to express serious concern about what was happening, most made jokes about Corona beer and talked up flu statistics as an argument against panic.
By March, it was clear this was not just another seasonal flu, though quite what it was was still beyond our grasp. The virus had reached pandemic levels, travel restrictions were being put into place, schools and major industries were beginning to shutdown. It seemed we were in for a rough couple months.
By April, it started to seem possible this wouldn’t just be a couple months, it seemed possible this would go until there was a vaccine. And it seemed like maybe this wasn’t a bad flu, maybe this was something worse, something stranger, something harder to pin down. The enormity of what was happening was setting in and it was staggering - whatever this was, it was catastrophic in ways we were only beginning to understand.
The material impacts of the pandemic have cut wide and cut deep: Mass death, debilitating illness, governments strained, livelihoods lost - our daily lives have become unrecognizable from six months ago. The psychological impacts have hit just as hard, but are even more difficult to measure. The stress, the fear, the trauma of what’s occurring won’t be fully understood for years to come, if it ever can be. We get through each day compartmentalizing and coping in our own ways, some part of our psyche warping and bending our perception of things to keep us afloat during a global catastrophe unlike anything we’ve known. Even the virus itself, with its strange expressions and idiosyncratic patterns, evades intuitive comprehension and leaves us struggling to make sense of what we face.
For many, this crisis has brought on a worsening of conditions that were already terminally bad. For others, especially in the first world, it’s an existential reckoning with a fundamental truth about life - that all we are, all we’ve built, all we can ever be, is part of, and therefore at the mercy of, the rest of the natural world. Humans, despite our best efforts, are still beholden to the terrific whims of life, never out of reach of the biosphere that birthed us. The pandemic, for all its unique horrors, is in part only a symptom of an even greater ecological illness: climate breakdown.
Like climate breakdown, the pandemic is both a crisis of natural and unnatural origins. Its manifestation is natural in form, yet its impact is only so dire, indeed only so felt, because of the unnatural means and causes that animate it. The pandemic, for instance, could not reach outside its original territory were it not for globalization and mass transit. Nor would it be grinding our world to such a halt were our economic systems not so at odds with human welfare and safety. Damningly, it may not even have evolved at all in a world less warm, less climatically unstable, less shaped by human industry, than the one we inhabit today.
Zoonotic diseases - diseases that originate in animals other than humans - are estimated to make up 75% of new, emerging, or re-emerging diseases affecting humans in the 21st century. It is suspected that Covid-19 is just such a disease. Yet many of these diseases, despite originating in the natural world, stem from human activity or spread due to the impact of industry. The global use of antibiotics in raising livestock, for instance, breeds antibiotic resistant diseases. Depleted and damaged ecosystems suffering biodiversity loss lead to increased disease transmission and infectivity.
As the planet warms, insects expand their range of migration, exposing new regions to potential pathogens and increasing disease exposure to populations unaccustomed to dealing with such migration shifts. Breeding cycles can accelerate leading to greater numbers of insects and more chances of exposure to insect-born diseases. Insects that deplete crops and reduce yields are causing more damage as temperatures rise, affecting trade and food security leading to knock-on effects like greater community spread of illness as people have to travel further and trade more frequently for food.
The warming behind so many of these dangers is itself a natural manifestation of a distinctly human origin. Climate breakdown is not an environmental crisis, but an economic one brought on by the exploitation of fossil fuels in service of luxury for the wealthy and to provide for the industrialization of everything from farming to clothing to art. It’s a crisis where the practices themselves that brought it on - the polluting industries and extractivism underlying climate breakdown - are just as devastating as the crisis itself.
Air pollution has damaged our respiratory and immune systems and made us more susceptible to illness brought on viruses like Covid-19. It leads to heart disease and impacts our arteries in many of the same ways that Covid has. The same processes that are killing hundreds of thousands every year as a result of climate breakdown are killing millions more directly, and now, in the context of a global pandemic, exacerbating all the risk factors we’ve been doing our best to avoid.
Climate collapse alone kills an estimated 400,000 people every year, and fossil fuels and their related activities (from pollution, occupational deaths, and diseases) kill over 4 million people every year. At the time of this writing, Covid-19 has killed over 700,000 people across the globe, leaving potentially millions with lasting heart damage and other permanent health issues. Some sizable portion of those deaths and enduring bodily trauma are due to climate breakdown and fossil fuel use, a fact that will come to feel more ominous as we look back on it in the years ahead.
There is, to a certain extent, something seductive about the fear brought out by the pandemic. It’s a fear that comes through as existential because it is existential, but more importantly, it’s existential in a manner that’s safe to express. You can, and should, hunker down and avoid people. You can, and should, react with extreme trepidation and concern around the danger of the virus. You can, and are justified in, panicking and feeling anxious and scared. It’s a socially acceptable time to feel apocalyptic, something many have been feeling for years but haven’t felt able to fully express or let out.
Climate breakdown is not a looming existential threat - it’s a series of crises that began decades ago and continues accelerating through the present and into the future. It kills nearly half a million people a year. The industries that fuel it kill millions. The situation worsens, catastrophes multiply, and our imagination for the future becomes murkier each year, each month, each day. And yet, the natural fear response, the sense of existential dread, that ought to accompany such circumstances, is forcibly suppressed in each of us. We can talk about it, sure, but we can’t panic about it, not in any material way. We can’t refuse to meet up with friends because our climate terror is paralyzing. We can’t work from home because of climate threats. We can’t post about our relatives or friends getting sick because of air pollution or losing their livelihoods because of climate change. We can’t mourn the parts of the world being lost every day to disasters and ecosystem deaths.
Technically we could do those things, but it would seem out of place and strange, it would feel stilted and draw attention to emotions in the wrong ways. There’s no mainstream social or cultural space to react to the deeper, larger apocalyptic threat of climate collapse that is amplifying all the dangers in our world. But with Covid it’s different. We now have an outlet, a space to breakdown and cry and worry and pace and stress and wonder about our futures where we are in solidarity with billions, where we can stand alongside and struggle with other as we face the terrifying unknown. Our fear can exist in the open without shame.
This newfound acceptance of existential dread - for the bleakest of thoughts and the accompanying paralysis and unmaking of our lives that has come with this crisis - can, if we let it, shepherd us into reckoning with the underlying enormity of climate breakdown. The inextricable link between disease, between this pandemic, and our warming planet demands that we not sideline climate breakdown as we consider the origins of Covid and the threats that lie ahead. But it also leaves us with a choice: Do we consider the crisis we face today - cut off from our family and friends, waking each day to the fear of contracting a mysterious illness that could kill us or irrevocably damage our bodies without warning - as a single threat to overcome, or do we consider it as part of the web of crises exacerbated by industrialization and capitalism and fossil fuels, manifested ultimately in the form of global ecological heat death?
Do we let this fear, newly embodied and set loose, drive us inward? Cause us to turn away from the greater threats and dangers that loom around us as it leads us away from a seemingly insurmountable reality?
Or do we allow it to open us up? To let the fear of this pandemic - of loss, of illness, of an uncertain future - bring out the courage and strength to face what’s ahead, to truly embrace and accept that our climate is collapsing before our eyes and that we still have a say in what happens next?
Ours is not a future that has been written, but nor is it one that we can stand idly by and allow to write itself, for to do so would mean the destruction of not only ourselves but the remainder of the biosphere that we share the planet with. We have a chance, in this moment, to begin to truly reckon with the greatest existential crisis our species has ever known. To allow ourselves to fear what’s ahead, to mourn what we have yet to lose, and to find hope in what it means to face this together.