Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash
Amid the flurry of think pieces about the significance of the coronavirus and its implications for the future, it is often forgotten that the virus has no meaning in itself. Its significance lies only in how we react to it; its implications are imputed by us. Sadly, many have drawn highly negative lessons from the crisis, motivated by an anti-modern—and, in some cases, anti-human—environmentalist outlook.
When Inger Andersen, director of the United Nations Environment Programme, says that “nature is sending us a message,” what she really means is that she has a message and wants to use the global outbreak to promote it. Her message, as reported by the Guardian, is that “humanity [is] placing too many pressures on the natural world” and that “both global heating and the destruction of the natural world for farming, mining and housing have to end.” One can only wonder what message nature might have been sending to pre-industrial fourteenth-century civilisation via the Black Death.
Of course, many commentators are inclined to see the virus as adding the weight of inevitability to whatever it was they already thought. Pondering the question of “How COVID-19 is like climate change,” for example, Ben Santer writes in Scientific American that there are four key “lessons” to learn from the crisis, all of which are essentially the same: that Donald Trump is a bad president. One suspects that Santer may have already learned this lesson some time ago.
Yet, while environmentalists are not alone in finding confirmation of their ideas in the current pandemic, they do seem particularly attuned to hearing what the Guardian‘s George Monbiot describes as “nature’s wake-up call to complacent civilisation.” With barely concealed glee, Monbiot notes that the pandemic has punctured our “bubble of false comfort and denial” and dispelled our “illusion of security.” Similarly, radical journalist John Wight detects “a whiff of poetic justice about the way COVID-19 has placed the world on notice,” claiming that “coronavirus reminds us that humanity has been a blight on this planet.”
One French magazine, lundimatin, has published an article in the imagined voice of COVID-19 itself: the virus tells readers that it has “come to shut down the machine whose emergency brake you couldn’t find.” Under the headline “What the Virus Said,” the magazine vents its own disgust with contemporary society—a “vast desert for the monoculture of the Same and the More,” populated by “redundant copies of a single, untenable form of life” who are now “preparing to die like flies abandoned in the water of [their] sugary civilization.”
The message consistently heard by environmentalists is that industrial civilisation is bad and that humanity needs to change its ways. As Andrew Norton, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, puts it, “Acceptance of the need to make sacrifices and accept restraints” in response to coronavirus might carry over to the “huge shifts in regulation and behaviour that are needed to address the climate crisis.” While Norton presents this as good news, its implications are ominous: he envisages an extension of current sacrifices and restraints into the indefinite future.
Others have drawn out the dystopian aspects of such green fantasies more directly. According to the East Midlands branch of Extinction Rebellion (XR), the great benefit of the pandemic is that “Earth is healing. The air and water is clearing. Corona is the cure. Humans are the disease!” Their message has been denounced by many as eco-fascism, and was quickly disowned by XR’s UK organisers, who claimed it was a hoax. Yet the idea is hardly exceptional: Twitter has been peppered with posts enthusing that reduced human activity means cleaner air and water. “This isn’t an apocalypse. It’s an awakening,” says one of the Twitterati; “Coronavirus is Earth’s vaccine. We’re the virus,” adds another.
Many greens have always thought about humanity this way. Popular TV naturalist David Attenborough, for example, said in 2013 that “humans are a plague on the Earth,” and argued that “Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us.” Indeed, ecology’s eminence grise, James Lovelock, writes in his 1991 book Healing Gaia that “Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic organism, or like the cells of a tumour … Gaia is suffering from … a plague of people.” Academic papers have asked whether humanity is “a cancer on the planet,” and have weighed up whether humanity is best described as “cancer or parasite.” Just a few years ago, New Scientist was debating whether a “killer plague” would “save the planet from us.”
Although green-hued misanthropy is nothing new, its current expression highlights an important feature of today’s intellectual landscape: the way that our view of human agency has become degraded and pathologised. This is evident in the pleasure that many commentators seem to take in the thought that the virus has cut humanity down to size. For Monbiot, “this could be the moment when we begin to see ourselves, once more, as governed by biology and physics.” We are ruled by natural forces, in other words, and should not seek to master them. To the lundimatin ventriloquists, it seems that the virus is telling them that “One doesn’t need to be a subject … One doesn’t have to be a sovereign to decide. Bacteria and viruses can also call the shots.” Similarly, Wight sees in the current pandemic “a timely reminder that humanity has not been divinely chosen to own this planet or control it.” If the virus “teaches us anything,” he claims, “it’s that for all our conceited belief to the contrary, we are masters of nothing.”
This is a damaging, dispiriting outlook, inviting us to glory in victimhood and vulnerability; to see human ambition to control the natural world as dangerous and deluded. But the green doom-mongers are hearing voices in their own heads. To most of us, thankfully, the response to the pandemic looks different. From the selfless efforts of health workers, through the previously unappreciated labour of new key workers like supermarket staff and delivery drivers, to the spontaneous self-organisation of volunteer community support groups, what is gloriously on display is a human spirit of defiance, strength and solidarity.
[…] call for caution was, however, voiced by those who plead for more nuance and refrain from granting agency to the […]
But really. First of all, if nature wanted to send us a message it’s that it’s warming up and dying off.
Secondly, aren’t we humans always trying to help our own thinktank with everything that is happening?
The first thing that has been said from the right in my country when the virus came was “We need to close our borders, so that immigrants and visitors can’t spread it”
Allright, so we as “insert nation’s people here” can’t spread it amongst ourselves? Really? Then as luck might have it, a week later, all nations around us closed their borders already, so we didn’t have to close our borders what so ever.
If a fly dies there will always be a party screaming that we need to learn from it and it’s a massive disaster that will put a mark on the planet.
Seems to me one of the ideas this writer is pointing to is the ongoing, utter disdain certain intellectuals have for the masses. I wonder what the end game is for the green activists? How do they intend to create their green utopian fantasy world? Are the green activists eagerly awaiting the mass casualties so as to validate their worldview?
My whole life I’ve thought that stewardship of the natural world is a good idea. But I won’t buy in to blanket hatred of humanity.
Thanks to the author of this post!
As for the characters described by him, I would give them simple advice: “Be the role model! Please, commit suicide and we will see if this saves the planet.”
I’ve noted Jordan Peterson’s vogue as a neo-traditionalist “public intellectual” reconciling college-age “Middle American” youth to their probable lifelong tenure in that milieu, in contrast to earlier generations of young Americans from simillar backgrounds who nourished aspirations of entering the “cultural elites” as David Riesman and Nathan Glazer’s “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture.” I’ve long seen Peterson, with his solemnly earnest championing of the”Gods of the Copybook Headings” (as Kipling called them) as embodying a kind of archetypal antitype to Princeton historian and Lyndon Johnson special advisor Eric F. Goldman’s portrait of the cultural style of FDR’s New Dealers and of Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson. In *The Crucial Decade: America, 1954-1955* (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), Goldman portrayed FDR’s New Deal as bringing into American public life a certain type of highly educated man, decidedly intellectualish in manner, with a marked, often wise-cracking, impatience for the… Read more »
As I replied in 7:58 PM April 2 reply to Ray Andrews’ 6:43 PM comment that the “days of *real* upward mobility are over” for the American white working and lower-middle classes, that “may also help explain the Jordan Peterson vogue.” What I meant was that, by giving a kind of highbrow validation to the traditional moral, religious, and cultural values of the working and lower-middle classes, Peterson helps reconcile college-age young people from those classes (and from the precarious, insecure lower fringes of the upper-middle class) to their strong suspicion that they will almost certainly never ever rise very far above their origins in those classes. He reconciles them to their most probable fate by convincing them that it’s not really worth-while to yearn for the supposedly “liberated,” “enlightened,” “sophisticated,” “thoroughly modern” values and life-style of the “cultural elites,” as they might perhaps have sometimes felt somewhat tempted to… Read more »
It’s not just the Black Death, funny how we never see many think pieces laying out what message nature was sending us re: HIV or Ebola or even the Spanish flu.
Of course for a long time many people did argue nature was sending HIV victims a message, and we know how the likes of Monbiot would respond to that.
In my April 2 (4:48 PM) comment I’d referred to the white working-class and lower-middle-class Americans who went heavily for Donald Trump in 2016 (and got slurred as “deplorables” by Hillary Clinton) “as badly traumatized and disoriented innocent victims of economic stress”–to which Ray Andres replied at 6:43 PM,”Which they are,” adding that “The days of *real* upward mobility are over. ” That’s been exactly my own point in a number of my own comments in recent weeks to various AREO posts. In the middle decades of the 20th century–the first couple of decades right after World War II, there was still a certain amount of upward mobility by children of the working and lower middle classes into the intelligentsia (“plumbers’s son becomes college English professor, small-town hairdresser’s daughter becomes *NU Times*, *Washington Post*, or *Chicago Tribune* reporter”), but this became increasingly rare and difficult after the 1970’s and 1980’s.… Read more »
I appreciate your points, Phil, but might both of these ways of talking about or responding to the virus have merit?
“One can only wonder what message nature might have been sending to pre-industrial fourteenth-century civilisation via the Black Death.”
Easy. The ‘message’ was that it’s unhealthy to live crowded together in filth.
You gotta admit, though, it made for a great song back in 1970, thanks to Randy California 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMvkvNNajRc
My spontaneous and objective guess is that a lot of the people who spread this message of us being a parasitic force on earth are themselves placed on a lower position in the social status hierarchy and are therefore quite envious of the higher ups who enjoy greater mating and financial opportunities. I studied environmental science and one thing which always came to my mind was that business students were on average far better looking than those in my major. And because we are at the end of the day just another primate species who compete for status and sex adopting such an antihuman message actually just reflects envy on the part of those who do not have that much great prospects in the evolutionary game of life
How is this any different from when religious fanatics say “these disaster’s are God’s wrath for X”? The author acts like what he’s seeing is a new or exclusive phenomenon of environmentalists when it’s just a different coating of an age-old tactic of people using current bad events as justification for disapproval of undesirables.