The Virus ! - Day #2 (26 March 2020) – 21 day #Covid19 Lock down

Day #2 (26 March 2020)

The Virus !

It is surely difficult to write a blog every day for 21 days, with the notorious virus, Covid19 as a key protagonist. This virus has affected a total of 4,91,152 people across the world, and killed 22,165 even as I write this here. It is getting very very worrying by the hour. So, I actually got up in the morning thinking how do I make this a habit for the next 20 days. Writing in the times of the worst crime inflicted on human race by a puny little creature, as I thought it was, dents my pride as a human being. Nevertheless, the story of the villains need to be written.

Carrying a double qualification as an Engineer by training and an Environmentalist by experience and passion, as I claim myself to be, I am seriously worried when the story line of even Environmentalists go like this “This is nature taking revenge !”. Is it so ? Is it in the nature of nature to retaliate, and take revenge on any of the species that evolve, collaborate, compete and co-exist in this blue planet. Is there revenge in nature ? Animals and even Plants and organisms, which are in trillions, attack, and defend. But revenge needs a memory, and the development of an intention, and even a method – a thought out design to retaliate. An eye for an eye. That needs a brain of the type that at this point only we have - Homo Sapiens, the last in the Homo species, who is known to have evolved just three hundred thousand years ago. This is as recent as 0.0085% of the time in comparison to the time the first life on earth happened ( between 4.4 and 3.5 billion years ago).

When the world is seeing so many deaths, and such levels of panic, triggered by a complete collapse of the most modern and sophisticated of social and health systems, in the most developed (or so we thought till last week !) of nations, in front of a virus, that is not even recognised as a full living organism, we as a race feel humiliated. But that is because in the recent history, we do not seem to have experienced humiliation. We are a race that has a track record of not just humiliating other co-species, but annihilating them and driving them to extinction. Surely, we do not know humiliation.

Yual Noah Harari concludes in “From Animals into Gods: A Brief History of Humankind” that “Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of life.”

There has been five mass extinctions in the history of life on earth. A mass extinction is a time period in which a large part of all known living species go extinct. The last of these mass extinctions is supposed to have happened 65 million years ago, and it eliminated 75% of all living species. The present era of the Holocene in which the Homo Sapiens literally rule most part of the world, and decides the fate of almost the whole of the earth, is also going through one of the worst of the mass extinctions. We call it the Sixth Extinction,and much has been written about it. But in a capsule, what does it mean. The Holocene Extinction is primarily attributed directly to the acts of the human being. Over population,over consumption, over-predation of even predating species and niches by the human race has been blamed for the loss of billions of regional and local populations of various species on earth, and that too in a time of a few centuries, and super fast tracked in the last few decades.

Many species of animals are natural reservoirs of viruses. Bats and Pangolins that are blamed for the Covid19 virus were also host to the recent major viruses that caused outbreaks – SARS, MERS, Ebola, were all known to have jumped from bats to humans. The recent sudden spurt in viruses hosting themselves into humans has perplexed scientists and many explanations are being proposed.

Of all the recent statements, what gave me a lead into this blog was that of Inger Anderson, the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme. I quote from the Guardian. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/25/coronavirus-nature-is-sending-us-a-message-says-un-environment-chief)

“Humanity was placing too many pressures on the natural world with damaging consequences, and failing to take care of the planet meant not taking care of ourselves.”

“The immediate priority was to protect people from the Corona virus and prevent its spread. But our long-term response must tackle habitat and biodiversity loss.”

“Never before have so many opportunities existed for pathogens to pass from wild and domestic animals to people. 75% of all emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife. Our continued erosion of wild spaces has brought us uncomfortably close to animals and plants that harbour diseases that can jump to humans”

Looks like we know why this pandemic has happened. Looks like our kind of wisdom (sapiens) is just not enough to handle it. Global Warming and the Climate Change has its manifestations demonstrated to us as disastrous climate events. But the destruction of the natural world, the various ecosystems, biodiversity and their interactions; for farming, mining, housing, tourism, infrastructure and so on are more sinister acts. The villain in the drama is not the Covid19, it's the Homo Sapiens. We are the Virus.

Sridhar Radhakrishnan

@sridhar67