If We Don't Wise Up, Microbes Will Bring us Down

Pandemics as crafters of civilizations

I highly recommend you commit a half hour to read and six months to digest an article from Aeon titled The Wisdom of Pandemics, with the subtitle: Viruses are active agents, existing within rich lifeworlds. A safe future depends on understanding this evolutionary story.

Yeah I know. tl; dr so I extracted one of the salient take-homes that brings us from the global public-health past to the present, and points us safely beyond—if we’re WISE (not smart) enough to listen to the lesson we’re potentially learning.

Here’s the sequence of moves in the dance between humankind and other-kind including viral-kinds, and how our ham-fisted imposition of our diets on vast landscapes has wreaked havoc with global well-being and health:

So once upon a time, Italy invades the Horn of Africa, and imports cattle from India to feed its troops. This brings forth Cattle Plague virus (Rinderpest) which kills 90% of all the cattle as well as oxen, sheep, buffalo, wildebeest and giraffes. 

While Rinderpest was eradicated worldwide in 2011, its impact left Africa with mass starvation. The land, in the absence of grazing animals, was overtaken by thorn shrubs—poor feed for cattle but great habitat for Tsetse flies. But that’s another story.

So after losing their cattle to Rinderpest in Africa, the British imported large numbers of pigs to free-range into the bush, and all was well until this habitat disruption woke up a new virus known as African Swine Fever Virus to occur in sporadic outbreaks over the next century in Africa but also Caribbean and European countries. Killing all the pigs was the usual method of containing the virus.

In 2018 ASFV showed up in Southeast Asia, including China, where it persisted in pork products and feed stocks and spread rapidly, and more than half the pigs in China (more than 200 million) died or were killed to stamp out ASF.

Virginians may remember that a few years ago, China purchased Smithfield Foods to have a ready supply of pork. But even that did not fill the demand for a population where household incomes were rising and meat was on the menu. 

“In the lead up to Chinese New Year, tens of millions of Chinese people were shopping for meat to celebrate the end of the lunar Year of the Pig and launch of the Year of the Rat.

With pigs in short supply, the entrepreneurial market vendors at Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan were reportedly ready with meat from other species, including peacocks, wild rabbits, snakes, deer, crocodiles, turkeys, swans, kangaroos, squirrels, snails, foxes, pheasants, civets, ostriches, camels, cicadas, frogs, roosters, doves, centipedes, hedgehogs and goats. [Also pangolins and bats. #ff]

It is from this chaotic mix of colonial invasions and naive, semi-regulated global trade that, in late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) and COVID-19 (the disease) emerged.”

This article and others make the case for the urgent need for a new WISDOM that is science-aware but that brings other intuitive, predictive, holistic, ethical and previously-ignored realms of knowing into the collective conversation so that the future does not take us by surprise. 

See also:

• Emerging zoonotic diseases: An opportunity to apply the concepts of nidality and one-medicine

• How psychological scientists found the empirical path to wisdom – Igor Grossmann | Aeon Essays

• We need to talk (more wisely) about wisdom: A set of conversations about wisdom, science, and futures - ScienceDirect