Stay homely: Valuing Nature and Nurture over Neo-liberalism

Today I pulled open a 2007 copy of the National Geographic which my mum picked up once in a bundle from the car-boot. Funnily, or eerily enough,  I opened it on a special segment discussing pandemics called "Deadly contact: How animals and humans exchange disease“ by travel writer David Quammen. Lo and behold, as if by some uncanny coincidence my eyes instantly fell upon the word 'bats' towards the bottom of the page, it read “At this point you’re entitled to ask: Damn what is it about Bats?“ It then went on to explain how bats are an ideal candidate to host a variety of dangerous viruses because they roost in huge colonies, snuggle together intimately, give birth to only a few young and therefore nurture those young dotingly, and they have long life spans especially for small mammals. 

Skipping over all the scary images of pandemics (too much for my brain at the moment!) I  swiftly skim-read the article. The main message which struck me was the fact that in this changing world, where species are transported across the globe for zoos, for food, for fun, viruses will be on the increase - and this is because viruses are pretty bad-ass. Viruses evolve quickly, they are versatile, elusive and unaffected by antibiotics. Travelling more, importing and exporting food all enables the contact-spread of pathogens,  which spreads diseases and viruses. Basically, what is happening now is not some random event that couldn’t have been predicted. Quammen predicted it and so did hundreds of other biologists.

Whilst this all seems rather daunting, and it even stirs up a gut-wrenching anxiety in me now, I am reminded that, if pandemics like SARS, Ebola, Measles... have stuck before and will inevitably strike again, this experience shouldn’t be compared to a one-off event like the Blitz. The Blitz was a human-made war which happened under human-made circumstances. We reacted to it in a human way - rationing food, blacking out homes, hiding/confusing/deterring the problem. This pandemic is a pathogen spread virus, we cannot hide, confuse or deter pathogens. Thus, this situation is a hard-hitting but important lesson - as a species we must holistically adapt. We cannot change the phenomena of organisms, we can only change our ways to protect ourselves and other species. With the global impact of this virus, we must see ourselves more as a species inter-connected to other species, rather than as separate entities. In opening up to a greater empathy for all living things on Earth, we can begin to understand how our trans-national, neoliberal lives, founded on exploitation and destruction, have lead to this. 

By looking at the science from a past perspective - and not reading into the many alarming political theories circling around currently - it has helped me to realise that this situation is tragic but it is also a massive opportunity for adapting and re-connecting to our local communities and environments. This problem will not go away because the planet hasn't gone away and the transmission of viruses is a natural phenomena. Our consumer habits and lifestyles are neither natural or nurturing. We need strong communities and localised nurturing collectives, sharing of knowledge and food sources between neighbours. It is time to turn the slogan 'stay home' into 'stay homely.'

Like rats, humans tend to be opportunists, we fan out quickly, arrive in new places and reproduce fast, some of us are more conservative like tortoises, which remain within their preferred habitat and reproduce slowly. Like gorillas - who were able to carry and spread ebola - we are intellectual and social creatures. Like fruit bats, we are also nurturing creatures who; live in big communities, spend a lot of time bringing up our young and have pretty long life spans. Our safety, our health is not the only issue. The disease can go both ways, from humans to other species as well as from them to us. Therefore, it is in some ways the great species leveller. It is not the great class, race or cultural leveller. Yet as a collective of humans, it does kick us off the top rung of the ladder and land us on the same level as every other living species on Earth. 

Is that reassuring? I think so. For me, it is quite grounding, we are not as invincible as Capitalism would have us believe. We are reminded that, even though domesticated pets seem to be the only animals many humans care about, when it comes to a virus, the cat and dog are just as dangerous as wild animals, as we come into contact with them everyday. There is therefore no hierarchy between the dog or the cow, the man or the bat. We are all on the same level.

‘Pandemic’ might now seem like the buzz word which sends us reeling into fear, but all it means is the spread of a microorganism; the spread of a living part coming into contact with another living part within the living world. Our world is a world within worlds, if it wasn't alive it wouldn't be so complex, ugly, weird and beautiful. 

The sheer abundance of Earth, its living parts, is something we as a species have exploited. For thousands of years we’ve chopped down the trees from the ancient forests, we have sucked up the waters from the great lakes, we have drilled into her ice sheets and spilt oil into her seas. And now we are learning that this way of spreading ourselves out across every inch of the bio-diverse planet, has meant that the bio-diverse world has bitten back. You can't take the honey and not expect the bee to sting once in a while. Unfortunately, through mass exploitation, poor treatment of eco-spheres, eating animals ruthlessly and relentless travelling, we have been letting out the hive.

“Virologist Eric Leroy’s research points towards fruit bats as an ebola reservoir.” This statement is written in the 2007 National Geographic magazine I found today. Beside it, is an image of a family in the Republic of the Congo. The man who stands in the middle of fourteen children has such pain in his eyes it is unimaginable. His name is Balo Karesh, he was spared from ebola but his wife’s family died so he cares for their children as well as his own. This happened during the ebola outbreak, this article is form 13 years ago and did we change? No, we allowed capitalism to prevail, we kept sucking the honey out of Earth, we didn’t heed the warning signs.

The next chapter in the magazine is about the space age. It talks about the space race between Soviet Russia and the US and how it all began with Sputnik, the first man-made object to orbit the Earth in 1957. Sitting here, with all this going on, the space race article seems so futile. A few men fighting over sending a few of our species out in a rocket to plant a flag on another piece of floating rock? A rock un-inhabitable to us?

Yet, science can provide us with the answers in this time of uncertainty. But one wonders how much of the space race is about creating phallic instruments and shooting them out to penetrate the world we haven’t yet exploited ("I came first!") As Francis Bacon believed, the art of science should always be about creating a greater philosophy around our connection and symbiosis to our living planet. After all we exist because of it, and we need to co-exist with of all of the other species on it. Space is bewildering but so is home and this is our only home. We are and will always be in lockdown on this planet. And that is a good thing. Its verdant green spaces are not only our parks but our source of food. The Arctic is our lockdown fridge and no plumber will arrive from Pluto if it switches off. Our conscious, complex minds are in this planet, we can seek meaning outwards, but we also have to find meaning within it.

For many people, like me, this pandemic has stirred up a huge amount of fear, feelings of needing to escape but no where to run to, mainly because we’ve never been told that we couldn’t. I never thought something like this would ever happen in my lifetime. Sometimes, I think I’ll wake up and it will be just a pretty imaginative dream! Even the Track and Trace App sounds like some kind of weird-ass Charlie Brooker episode of a dystopian nightmare... But today this magazine fell into my lap and after seeing that this was not only predicted but will happen again shows us that we must address the impact of our consumer habits and our neoliberal lifestyles. Now more than ever, it is not a time to live like rats and spread ourselves thinly, we need to nurture our home, our localised town, villages, cities. We are social living organisms and that is the beauty of being human, but we are as much to blame in this crisis as the bat, the bee, the bird, if not more to blame because we had a choice to make, the signs were there and the people in power ignored them. As a species, we need to use this moment in time, to utilise our creative intelligence, honour our role as care-givers of the planet and stop destructively penetrating other habitats.

Well on that note, remind yourself that just as there is the tragedy of death, there is life, because the Earth is alive. She is full of pathogens, particles and strange and phenomenal organisms. The living planet gives us death and decay, but it also gives us the beauty of growth and recovery. Thence the man and the bat are both of the same. But what we should know is that we are not any better than the bat. The bat is utterly brilliant and unknown, they are ancient in terms of evolution, they find ways to sustain themselves on nearly every land apart from Antarctica, and unfortunately owing to the diverse range of species, bats carry a huge amount of unknown diseases. But the brilliance of the bat is that it didn't ask to be on the streets of Wuhan, we exploited the bat, we put it there. We penetrated the landscapes of millions of wild animals and the pathogens have spread with cataclysmic consequences. So, it is time for us to stay at home, not just for lockdown but like the tortoise, learn how to live smaller, softer, gentler on this planet.

"It's not about wildlife health, or about human health," William Karesh said. "There's really just one health - the health and the balance of ecosystems throughout the planet."