Coronavirus
outbreak
Covid-19 is
nature's wake-up call to complacent civilisation
George
Monbiot
A bubble
has finally been burst – but will we now attend to the other threats facing
humanity?
@GeorgeMonbiot
Wed 25 Mar
2020 06.00 GMTLast modified on Wed 25 Mar 2020 12.17 GMT
We have
been living in a bubble, a bubble of false comfort and denial. In the rich
nations, we have begun to believe we have transcended the material world. The
wealth we’ve accumulated – often at the expense of others – has shielded us
from reality. Living behind screens, passing between capsules – our houses,
cars, offices and shopping malls – we persuaded ourselves that contingency had retreated,
that we had reached the point all civilisations seek: insulation from natural
hazards.
Now the
membrane has ruptured, and we find ourselves naked and outraged, as the biology
we appeared to have banished storms through our lives. The temptation, when
this pandemic has passed, will be to find another bubble. We cannot afford to
succumb to it. From now on, we should expose our minds to the painful realities
we have denied for too long.
The planet
has multiple morbidities, some of which will make this coronavirus look, by
comparison, easy to treat. One above all others has come to obsess me in recent
years: how will we feed ourselves? Fights over toilet paper are ugly enough: I
hope we never have to witness fights over food. But it’s becoming difficult to
see how we will avoid them.
A large
body of evidence is beginning to accumulate showing how climate breakdown is
likely to affect our food supply. Already farming in some parts of the world is
being hammered by drought, floods, fire and locusts (whose resurgence in the
past few weeks appears to be the result of anomalous tropical cyclones). When
we call such hazards “biblical”, we mean that they are the kind of things that
happened long ago, to people whose lives we can scarcely imagine. Now, with
increasing frequency, they are happening to us.
In his
forthcoming book, Our Final Warning, Mark Lynas explains what is likely to
happen to our food supply with every extra degree of global heating. He finds
that extreme danger kicks in somewhere between 3C and 4C above pre-industrial
levels. At this point, a series of interlocking impacts threatens to send food
production into a death spiral. Outdoor temperatures become too high for humans
to tolerate, making subsistence farming impossible across Africa and South
Asia. Livestock die from heat stress. Temperatures start to exceed the lethal
thresholds for crop plants across much of the world, and major food producing
regions turn into dust bowls. Simultaneous global harvest failure – something
that has never happened in the modern world – becomes highly likely.
In
combination with a rising human population, and the loss of irrigation water,
soil and pollinators, this could push the world into structural famine. Even
today, when the world has a total food surplus, hundreds of millions are
malnourished as a result of the unequal distribution of wealth and power. A
food deficit could result in billions starving. Hoarding will happen, as it
always has, at the global level, as powerful people snatch food from the mouths
of the poor. Yet, even if every nation keeps its promises under the Paris
agreement, which currently seems unlikely, global heating will amount to
between 3C and 4C.
Thanks to
our illusion of security, we are doing almost nothing to anticipate this
catastrophe, let alone prevent it. This existential issue scarcely seems to
impinge on our consciousness. Every food-producing sector claims that its own
current practices are sustainable and don’t need to change. When I challenge
them, I’m met with a barrage of anger and abuse, and threats of the kind I
haven’t experienced since I opposed the Iraq war. Sacred cows and holy lambs
are everywhere, and the thinking required to develop the new food systems that
we need, like lab-grown food, is scarcely anywhere.
But this is
just one of our impending crises. Antibiotic resistance is, potentially, as
deadly as any new disease. One of the causes is the astonishingly profligate
way in which these precious medicines are used on many livestock farms. Where
vast numbers of farm animals are packed together, antibiotics are deployed
prophylactically to prevent otherwise inevitable outbreaks of disease. In some
parts of the world, they are used not only to prevent disease, but also as
growth promoters. Low doses are routinely added to feed: a strategy that could
scarcely be better designed to deliver bacterial resistance.
In the US,
where 27 million people have no medical cover, some people are now treating
themselves with veterinary antibiotics, including those sold, without
prescription, to medicate pet fish. Pharmaceutical companies are failing to
invest sufficiently in the search for new drugs. If antibiotics cease to be
effective, surgery becomes almost impossible. Childbirth becomes a mortal
hazard once more. Chemotherapy can no longer be safely practised. Infectious
diseases we have comfortably forgotten become deadly threats. We should discuss
this issue as often as we talk about football. But again, it scarcely
registers.
Our
multiple crises, of which these are just two, have a common root. The problem
is exemplified by the response of the organisers of the Bath Half Marathon, a
massive event that took place on 15 March, to the many people begging them to
cancel. “It is now too late for us to cancel or postpone the event. The venue
is built, the infrastructure is in place, the site and our contractors are
ready.” In other words, the sunk costs of the event were judged to outweigh any
future impacts – the potential transmission of disease, and possible deaths –
it might cause.
The amount
of time it took the International Olympic Committee to postpone the Games could
reflect similar judgments – but at least they got there in the end. Sunk costs
within the fossil fuel industry, farming, banking, private healthcare and other
sectors prevent the rapid transformations we need. Money becomes more important
than life.
There are
two ways this could go. We could, as some people have done, double down on
denial. Some of those who have dismissed other threats, such as climate
breakdown, also seek to downplay the threat of Covid-19. Witness the Brazilian
president, Jair Bolsonaro, who claims that the coronavirus is nothing more than
“a little flu”. The media and opposition politicians who have called for
lockdown are, apparently, part of a conspiracy against him.
Or this could
be the moment when we begin to see ourselves, once more, as governed by biology
and physics, and dependent on a habitable planet. Never again should we listen
to the liars and the deniers. Never again should we allow a comforting
falsehood to trounce a painful truth. No longer can we afford to be dominated
by those who put money ahead of life. This coronavirus reminds us that we
belong to the material world.
• George
Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
 |
This book
must not be ignored. It really is our final warning.
|
Mark Lynas
delivers a vital account of the future of our earth, and our civilisation, if
current rates of global warming persist. And it’s only looking worse.
We are
living in a climate emergency. But how much worse could it get? Will
civilisation collapse? Are we already past the point of no return? What kind of
future can our children expect? Rigorously cataloguing the very latest climate
science, Mark Lynas explores the course we have set for Earth over the next
century and beyond. Degree by terrifying degree, he charts the likely
consequences of global heating and the ensuing climate catastrophe.
At one
degree – the world we are already living in – vast wildfires scorch California
and Australia, while monster hurricanes devastate coastal cities. At two
degrees the Arctic ice cap melts away, and coral reefs disappear from the
tropics. At three, the world begins to run out of food, threatening millions
with starvation. At four, large areas of the globe are too hot for human
habitation, erasing entire nations and turning billions into climate refugees.
At five, the planet is warmer than for 55 million years, while at six degrees a
mass extinction of unparalleled proportions sweeps the planet, even raising the
threat of the end of all life on Earth.
These
escalating consequences can still be avoided, but time is running out. We must
largely stop burning fossil fuels within a decade if we are to save the coral
reefs and the Arctic. If we fail, then we risk crossing tipping points that
could push global climate chaos out of humanity’s control.
This book
must not be ignored. It really is our final warning.
|
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