Earth Day 2020: Earth in the Time of Corona

We knew this could happen; in fact, we knew this WOULD happen. We have a history of epidemics and pandemics dating back to the Antonine Plague in Roma circa 165-180 CE, with no less than 19 in the record up to the ongoing novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) outbreak, which results in the dreaded COVID-19 disease. We have a history of crowding into urban centers, fleeing rural settings as if our lives depended on it, leaving the wide open spaces, and low population density areas for the petri dishes of city life where social distancing is virtually impossible, disease-ridden vectors flourish, and diseases are transmitted with alarming efficiency and speed from human to human.

We have a history of moving away from decentralized systems of food production and distribution where individual households grew most of what they needed to eat right in their backyards, only needing to go to the shops for items that they could not economically produce at cottage scales, e.g. flour, sugar, rice, oil. Instead we accepted, or were made to accept, massive-scale intensive, monoculture, that cleared millions of acres, applied billions of tons of synthetic chemicals, leading to damaged soils, displaced wildlife, reduced biodiversity, and changes in weather patterns over time, aka climate change.

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