Our Way of Life is the Public Health Crisis

Years ago, when I taught science to junior high school students, I would sometimes make an offhand remark to the effect of “Animals like us….”  One or more students would respond, “Miss, we’re not animals!”  I doubt my adolescent students were alone in misunderstanding their place in the biological kingdom.

The disconnect between humanity and the natural world, to which every living thing belongs, characterizes all industrialized nations. Our Western prioritization of artificial systems (economy) over natural systems (ecology) laid the groundwork for our perilous conditions. We were in crisis before this novel coronavirus pandemic, and we will continue to be in crisis after. It’s a classic tragedy, with our hubris and ignorance leading to the near-term extinction of our species, because our values and paradigms remain rooted in fantasy instead of reality.

Ecological degradation for economic growth

We should all find it ironic that the economic condition which likely caused zoonotic diseases such as Covid-19 is the very same state to which we are desperate to return. The main theory of transmission of this novel virus to humans suggests that the virus resided in bats, spread from them to an intermediary creature (probably the pangolin), then to humans through a “wet market” in China.

Because of their commercial exploitation for meat or for the use of their scales in traditional medicine, pangolins across the globe face extinction. They represent just another of the species that human enterprise has threatened and endangered, increasing our planetary biodiversity crisis. In the case of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), our close association with wild animals like pangolins, who carry pathogens yet unknown to human immunoresponse, threatens us all.

An unsanitary exotic meat market is simply one distinct situation that poses a pathogenic risk to human health. Our encroachment into previously wild areas of the planet for development, resource extraction, industrialization, and agriculture has brought about other recent novel viruses and diseases such as SARS, MERS, H1N1, Ebola, and AIDS. Epidemiologists, virologists, ecologists, and all types of scientists who study the natural environment had predicted the emergence of such a pandemic, and know that the potential exists for far worse, due to our over-consumptive economy. Our ecosystem disruption and proximity to wild species form the root cause of the viral pandemic, yet our focus remains on mitigation and excludes prevention.

Artificial constructs and artifice

This coronavirus has not only laid bare the fissures and vulnerabilities in our society, it has exposed our way of life - dictated by our political economy - for the lie it is. It should be obvious that nothing has to be this way. It is all an illusion. We operate under a system of man-made laws that can be as easily dismantled as they were erected. Economics may have rules, but any and all of these rules can be broken and altered in any way we please.

When so-called leaders claim we cannot end homelessness, poverty, student debt, lack of access to medical care, rampant economic exploitation and inequality, remember this: "There's an infinite amount of cash in the Federal Reserve."

Last week on 60 Minutes, Neel Kashkari, the official who managed the Wall Street bailout of 2008, explicitly leaked a key truth, as so many of the powerful often do when they talk long enough. Of course, in 2008 as now, that money created out of nothing is mainly available via the powers-that-be to supply themselves and their plutocratic friends. Sure, desperate citizens have been allocated a pittance that cannot even cover one month’s rent in most regions, but those crumbs were dispensed just to quash potential unrest.

At any time the Federal Reserve could have and can make their assets available to eliminate our socio-economic ills. But providing cash to people, such as a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to ensure them the necessities of existence, would demonstrate that our economic system of capitalism is just a construct. It would show that the capricious, often arbitrary rules of our political economy were established to serve the plutocrats, to maintain the profiteering of the wealthy and the servitude of the rest.

A kindergartner can see the obvious immorality and artifice in providing billions to corporations and industries that pollute the planet and exploit its resources and employees, rather than providing those billions to people in need. For example, Boeing, who knowingly allowed the deaths of hundreds of people with their flawed 737 Max aircraft will benefit, as will so many expendable industries that contribute to the continuous degradation of the biosphere and of human health.

Natural versus artificial systems

While the economy operates via manmade laws, science operates via natural laws. We continually uncover more information about scientific laws and properties. Though much remains unknown and though we constantly intervene to try to circumvent them, natural, scientific laws never change.

To that end, we humans are biological beings, not economic beings - organisms, not workers. We are not Homo economicus; we are Homo sapiens.  We were not born to find occupations in a consumer capitalist economy. In fact, for most of the 200,000 year history of our species, we did not. Yet, we have been spending centuries now mostly ignoring physical and biological reality. We cling to the entirely synthetic construct of capitalism that cannot help but degrade our biosphere and destroy our physical well-being.

What a global pandemic helps us realize is that we are all alike, all valuable, and all deserving of basic rights. As organisms, we need to maintain homeostasis, which we do through having proper water, food, shelter, and clothing. Those of us lacking these necessities find ourselves more vulnerable to every sort of external antagonist. Our basic human requirements should not be contingent upon jobs that elites and economists deem valuable.

Our economic system has left so many in crisis. Millions are in dire need. Millions more possess little or no reserves should the artificial economic system grind to a halt. Thus, when confronted with an infection from the natural system, our pre-existing crisis turns colossal in scale. And the same companies and industries that our leaders want to save after this pandemic are those that contribute overwhelmingly to climate catastrophe, biodiversity loss, toxification of ecosystems, and untold numbers modern human illnesses. In turn, these ailments compromise our immune systems, leaving us vulnerable to novel pathogens like the coronavirus.

Our precarious predicament is a product of our own creation.

Platitudes, princesses, and Pollyannas

The new mantra of the pandemic era is “We’re all in this together.” Since when? Since two weeks ago? If we were always in this together, we would have fashioned an egalitarian society that serves everyone’s basic needs instead of greed - not for this moment, but forever. We wouldn’t have empty, extra homes while others sleep rough. We wouldn’t have hungry citizens while others feast. We wouldn’t have multi-millionaires and billionaires while others can barely cobble together an existence.

Since the coronavirus pandemonium began, the comfort class started losing its shit, almost literally. The first thing that compliant consumers did amidst the chaos and uncertainty was to go shopping, and the first thing they bought up was toilet paper. Because of shelter-in-place orders, hoarding of food and supplies by those with the most left stores barren of necessities for others, particularly those who have little expendable wealth to stock up.

As it stands, the financially privileged have little idea what to do with themselves when they can no longer go to their gyms, salons, bars, restaurants, entertainment venues, etc. Internet and television commentators opine about how to keep ourselves occupied and how to sustain our profligate lifestyles while indoors. The comfortable also lament the loss of their travel, vacations, and extravagant festivities.

On the other hand, the no-so-comfortable see little difference in their lives. The unemployed and underemployed, who could not afford such luxuries, stay home and search for their elusive work, as usual, remaining as frugal as possible to maintain a roof over their heads and food to eat.

Those with no food or shelter face their typical inhumane struggle for survival amid a more acute existential threat to their lives. In some places, the homeless are being temporarily housed for public health protection, and we are left to wonder why this cannot be accomplished all the time (hint: it can) and why we only care when their precarity directly threatens us.

Mass media reports showcase the growing list of “heroes” like healthcare, grocery, sanitation, and postal workers, and graciously highlight the volunteers who help those in need, though mainly fail to address the economic insecurity many of them live under..

For seemingly the first time, some media have finally encountered the woeful inadequacies of our corrupted for-profit medical care system, as well as of other systems that should serve the public good. They cover scoundrels trying to capitalize off of everyone’s uncertainty and fear. They look upon these opportunistic immoral deeds as uncouth now. But they forget that in “normal” times they would describe such failing systems as the best in the world, and such unethical people as entrepreneurial, with great business acumen.

When confronted with some of the unpleasant truths about our way of life, the media like to say “This isn’t America.” I’m afraid it is.

Pausing – or better, stopping - for people and the planet

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, in defending his stay-at-home orders for the state, said that although people want to return to their livelihoods, they won’t have livelihoods without lives. We should take that one step further: We don’t have lives without our life support system (our biosphere), which continues to be ignored as we focus all of our eyes and energy exclusively on the viral pandemic. 

In that vein, the Trump administration has suspended EPA regulations and environmental protections during this emergency. Consequently, the very industries and economic conditions that fostered the eruption of this pandemic are now being allowed to continue without oversight.

The stoppage of all unessential services uncovered further truths about our way of life in the context of environmental sustainability. While a headline from The Onion satirically stated, “Thousands of Formerly Endangered White Rhinos Flood City Streets Mere Days After Humans Quarantined Indoors,” they were not far from the truth. In reality, wildlife returned to the cleaner waterways in the Venice canals. Air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions decreased dramatically throughout the U.S. and across the globe, as unnecessary transportation, industry, and commerce halted. The United Nations even called for a global ceasefire during the course of this pandemic, which not only ends immediate deaths, but suspends the immense pollution stemming from military operations.

Although one of the unfortunate ecological outcomes of the pandemic is the waste from the increased used of disposable products to which we have become accustomed, we could learn that there are many less wasteful ways to keep sanitized and protected. But overall, we are experiencing large positive environmental effects of our global pause.

The combination of systemic change and collective individual change revealed the obvious path to global sustainability: When it comes to superfluous, frivolous and even outright malevolent consumer and industrial processes, we simply must stop. And we can.

Our lives are ultimately governed by the laws of nature. The common notion that the cure (slowing or stopping of the economy) is worse than the problem (the viral pandemic) rests on the erroneous fallacy that capitalism cannot be altered or even obliterated. As long as citizens have the ability to have their basic needs met – and we know that this could easily be accomplished – we have solutions to our environmental emergencies. We just refuse to acknowledge them.

Business as usual and a return to (ab)normal

Normal is U.S. military spending roughly equaling the spending of the next seven nations combined.

Normal is not having enough medical equipment for predicted and predictable emergencies.

Normal is 114K homeless children (nearly 1 in 10) in the NYC public school system.

Normal is 553K homeless on any given night in America.

Normal is almost 115 million American households lacking food security.

Normal is nearly 30 million people without access to medical care in the U.S.

Normal is calling poisoned food “conventional” while charging a premium for food without unnecessary toxic contamination.

Normal is throwing out and burning clothing rather than giving it to people who need to be clothed.

Normal is some people having multiple homes while others have none.

Normal is lying, prevaricating, opportunistic politicians.

Normal is blaming the poor, but not the rich or corporations, for misfortunes not of their own making.

Normal is bailing out Wall Street and corporations for their own malfeasance.

Normal is ignoring people in need.

Normal is narcissism and self-interest rather than humility and altruism.

Normal is "I" over "We"

Normal is synthetic toxics running rampant through our ecosystems and through ourselves.

Normal is greenhouse gas emissions increasing exponentially.

Normal is climate chaos.

Normal is ecological emergency.

Normal is omnicide.

And yet we all want to return to it.

The time for radical change is now

In devastation, there is opportunity (56:35). Right now, as per usual and as described in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, opportunities are being exploited by the rich and powerful, by corporations and capitalists. Instead, we masses could finally rise up.

Climate and ecological scientists keep warning us that radical change is necessary to save humanity. We have proven that we are able to effect radical change overnight. The time for radical change to a more equitable, just, and sustainable society is now. We have changed our lives and our industrial processes drastically to deal with an acute viral emergency; we can likewise change our lives fundamentally to deal with our chronic ecological emergency.

As so many have said so many times before, business as usual is no longer an option because business as usual brought us to the precarious place where we stand. There is no more wiggle room. Only radical changes to our entire global social, political, and economic systems (our artificial, alterable systems) will render the changes that our global ecosystems (our natural, immutable systems) require to survive our concurrent planetary emergencies.

We made this economic system quite recently. The stock market only began a few hundred years ago. Compared to our geological timeframe, it is all a modern historical phenomenon. We can unmake it.

In the short term, we could bailout citizens not companies. Any funds provided to corporations should be investments, and we should own these corporations like they have always owned us. (But really, we should just let them fend for themselves like we all have to do.) We could nationalize essential services. We could enact the precautionary principle to prevent future environmental health crises. In the long term, we could introduce prevention and preparation to enhance our resilience. We could curtail gratuitous endeavors. We could share our resources and provide for everyone. And we could try our best to operate according to the physical and biological laws - i.e., reality - that govern our human, animal existence.

Unfortunately, we will likely just listen to our feckless leaders who tell us to dig in our heels until we return to abnormalcy, and continue on our psychopathic onmicidal way.

Our current way of life is not innate, not biologically absolute. Because it threatens the future of all human life, it is the largest public health crisis on the face of the planet. And just like the coronavirus pandemic, we could try to stop it. I’m not holding my breath.

Kristine Mattis holds a Ph.D. in Environment and Resources.

Email: k_mattis@outlook.com Twitter: @kristinemattis