Nine years before the COVID-19 pandemic, Steven Soderbergh’s film, Contagion, presaged the current outbreak. The compelling narrative aside, it was the film’s closing sequence that haunted me when I saw the film. In the first vignette in the sequence, a heavy dozer emblazoned with the “Aimm Alderson” logo plows down a tree in a tropical forest. The felled tree displaces a colony of bats, one of which finds shelter in an industrial hog farm. Clinging to the ceiling of the hog pen, the bat defecates, and a piglet gobbles the feces. The piglet is slaughtered and brought to a chef, who stuffs ingredients into the pig’s mouth. As he prepares the pig, the chef is told to greet a customer. Wiping his hands on his apron, the chef greets Gwyneth Paltrow’s character, the first victim of the deadly virus.
In a clever stroke of irony, the writers lay bare the consequences of global economic development. In the film, Paltrow’s character works for Aimm Alderson, the same fictional company that denudes tropical forests in Asia. She is infected with the virus on a business trip to China. Thus, the company that disturbs the forest also sees its employee as the first victim of its own destructive actions. The sequence underscores the systemic conditions that give rise to deadly viruses: habitat destruction, industrial animal agriculture, and lax standards of hygiene.
The film’s depiction of the rise of zoonotic pathogens is not far from reality. There is evidence to suggest that the novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) originated from pangolins, a scaly ant-eater that lives in the forests of Asia. Previous pathogens have also originated from wild animals. For example, the SARS virus originated from Horseshoe Bats, and its transmission to humans was mediated by masked palm civets.
In a previous blog entry (Consanguinity Part One), I pondered the linkages that bind seemingly discrete bodies together, how we form a continuous bloodstream across the globe. Membership in this communion of blood belongs not only to homo sapiens, but to many species as well. The Coronavirus that courses through the arteries of bats in remote dark caves also leap into the human frame. Its audacious and terrifying journey from creature to creature is a stark reminder of our corporeal bond as earthlings. Despite the appearance of separateness, we are inextricably bound to one another in a thread of evolutionary fate.
There is some suggestion that unbridled habitat destruction and poaching is unleashing reservoirs of pathogens that humans have not previously encountered. Inger Andersen, the UN’s environment chief, says that the COVID-19 outbreak is “a clear warning shot”, and warns that unrelenting pressures on eco-systems will lead to severe consequences. 75 percent of all emerging pathogens come from animals. Insatiate economic development encroaches on wild landscapes, removing natural barriers that mediate animals’ contact with humans. In a world of interdependence, incursion into wild habitat also cuts into human spaces, as displaced animals infiltrate human locations. Destabilized landscapes can discharge the unpredictable, and unruly microbes that can wreak havoc on the human species. Domestication of animals have also brought about a host of plagues, from small pox (related to pox viruses in cattle) to measles (related to rinderpest in cattle), which have devastated human societies[1].
Is this consanguineous involvement with animals a terrifying curse? Considering that humans are responsible for a significant decline in wildlife populations since the 1970s, and over 22 billion domesticated animals are slaughtered each year (3 times the number of the human population), we are far deadlier to animals than they are to us. At the same time, the outbreak of COVID-19 is a stark reminder that as participants in the community of life, vulnerability is shared by all members. In systems of interdependence, one action affects everything else. To the extent that humans demolish and devastate, so the consequences must return in ways unpredictable and startling.
The realization of our involvement with the web of life should be the beginning of respect and reverence for the network of life. The ways we interact with nature is an expression of ourselves, the quality of our character, the calibre of collective consciousness. They portend the future we shall inherit from our present selves. In a world of rapid climate change and ecological devastation, this inheritance is not passed to the next generation, as if we shall die before the consequences greet us. No, we shall see the results of action within decades, if not years.
So here we are, mingled in this web of animal life, the fate of the naked ape entwined with faunal multitudes, both domesticated and wild. The American Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman once explained: “We are empty of any isolated, separate identity. . . we are a complete nexus of interrelatedness, which means there is nothing to do but improve.” As the COVID-19 pandemic upends the entrenched norms, whatever that may be, we should ask how we want to live on the earth, how we want to respect and revere the more-than-human world, how we want to live with all those who share this mammalian blood.
[1] Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999).