What Do We have Against the Ocean?
Capitalism, COVID-19, and Why We Really (Really) Aren't Trying to Destroy the Planet
Hi Folks!
It's been a difficult week for us, in a difficult year for us...in a difficult pandemic for us... Well, I don't have to explain this. So, this week, I thought I would include some pretty and beautiful pictures in my article.
*hug*
Ryka
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One of the less-reported achievements of the Omicron COVID-19 variant is how effective it has been in eliminating the Delta COVID-19 variant.
In fact, if the Omicron variant hadn’t been, well, another deadly version of COVID-19, we might be celebrating it as a magic bullet against the COVID pandemic itself.
In fact, barring a fully effective foolproof vaccine with amazing PR, one of the best outcomes to this pandemic is for some future "Omega" COVID-19 variant to outcompete Omicron and all the other COVID-19 variants—while remaining relatively harmless to us.
COVID-19 was said to have originated in China. Pandas really do live in China. And they are already relatively harmless *
What fascinates me about this “fight fire with fire” strategy is how the competing pathogens must be closely related to each other. Sure, now monkeypox is in the news. However, despite some fearmongering, whatever this monkeypox outbreak turns into will be too distantly related to have an effect on the spread of COVID-19 (barring some weird cofactor, or if it mutates into a superpox that kills us all, may such a thing never occur).
However, a monkeypox outbreak, as terrible as that would be, would help prevent a future smallpox outbreak (again, may such a thing never occur).
Like I'm going to post a picture of monkeypox... Here's a cute baby sloth.**
Even as we stick swabs up our noses and rub five times in each nostril, COVID-19 variants are competing with each other—to be more contagious, to overwhelm infection from other variants—while preserving the bodies they are affecting (because if the hosts die, the variant dies with them).
In fact, the success of a variant depends less upon eliminating its host than it does upon eliminating other variants.
All this means that, while humans struggle to come up with better treatments and vaccines to make all this COVID-19 stuff go away, our communities and bodies are hosts to an even more ruthless battle—between COVID-19 and COVID-19.
As far as us?
A variant or group of variants might evolve to become so harmless to us that most humans decide vaccines are unnecessary. At that point, those variants might join their SARS cousins the common cold viruses as pathogens with virtual monopolies upon our bodies.
And we would be fine with that—because as much as say that we want all of this COVID-19 stuff eliminated—what we really want is some sort of normal. A new common cold?
It won’t be perfect, but then again, what is?
🦠
Human pharmaceutical companies are often accused of sacrificing the public welfare in the name of rampant, heartless capitalism.
And, while many of their action may be ethically questionable, watching the progression of COVID-19 variants shows that much of what we label “capitalism” is far older than the writings of Adam Smith or even the Medicis.
Like the Medicis or Adam Smith, this stealthy ocelot also hunts for prey.***
Finding new markets, protecting existing territories, creating/filling an ongoing ecological niche—this is how life has always competed to survive.
There is an elegant efficiency to how COVID-19 opened, penetrated, then dominated the market. First, there was the initial eccentric entrepreneur pathogens (remember all those alarmist tales of Chinese “wet markets?”) who, after an initial success were outcompeted by copycats and variants that did certain things better, leading to those variants in turn being outcompeted in turn by others.
Others who were very much like them.
Many times, we frame human survival as struggling against what is not human. Against disease. Against poverty. Against the elements. Against asteroids on collision courses. Heck, against the sun turning into a red giant in a few billion years.
But what we might sometimes overlook is that, for all our specialness, we are in some ways not so different from the COVID-19 viruses that we are working so hard to survive.
If we think of the harm we have done to our host—yes, we’ve polluted the air, contaminated the ocean. We’ve eliminated other species, altered the climate.
But our aircraft carriers were not created to hunt whales to extinction. Our fighter jets were not designed to puncture the ozone layer. And our automatic weapons are not being bought by the truckload to kill endangered species.
🦠
As much as we’ve been straining the planet, affecting its cycles, its very abilities to breathe—killing the planet is not our objective. We’d be a virus without a body. We need our host to shelter us to house us, to provide us with the resources we need to reproduce.
As much harm as we are doing to our host, the real battle is between humans and humans.
"Hello! I am an okapi. I know you didn't mean to, but you've almost wiped out my species"****
Whether one supports it or no, “capitalism” is a very comforting word. Using it makes what we are doing seem, for better or worse, human. But when we use it imprecisely, as a blanket term for ruthless exploitation, greed, and runaway amorality, what we really are describing is something far more basic. Something any virus can do. Something that requires no humanity whatsoever.
And so, as variant nations and cultures and classes fight amongst each other to become the next dominant strain, other species, other more distantly related organisms can only watch and hope that we might stop burning fossil fuels, dumping plastic in the ocean, and destroying ecosystems.
If I am a monk seal, or an okapi, or the coral reefs or rain forests themselves, I would be hoping that whatever humanity emerges will be content to sicken the earth, but not kill it outright.
"Hi Humans. Monk seals here. Just hoping for the best."*****
Sure, humans will still human, but maybe in our "Omega variant," our ecological disasters will ebb and flow like the comings and goings of cold seasons and flu seasons—sometimes doing more harm, then sometimes less, but in a way that the planet can find some sort of normal, some sort of peace.
It won’t be perfect, but then again, what is?
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Next Week: As Real as It Gets: Acceptance, Community, Escaping the Cave, and the Physics of Niels Bohr
COVER: Grant Faint/ Collection:The Image Bank/ Getty Images
*Comezora/ Collection:Moment/ Getty Images
**Future Publishing / Collection:Future Publishing/ Getty Images
***Mike Hill/ Collection:Stone/ Getty Images
****picture alliance / Collection:picture alliance/ Getty Images
*****Auscape / Collection:Universal Images/ Getty Images