The nature of things

Rethinking our relationship to Earth amid a pandemic

by

Some of the stories from this awful time are so difficult to bear. I am haunted by one, in particular.

A friend and canoeing partner recently died from the cancer that had been diagnosed months ago and, though his death was tragic, I was equally shaken by the trials of his caring wife who endured her husband’s final weeks with no physical comfort from friends and family. That seemed unthinkable to me. I can’t imagine the pain of those whose loved ones died of the coronavirus without family at their side. 

Yet these tales have become part of our common narrative now. And, though the price has been high, we have been reminded of the primal importance of human connectedness and touch.

Maybe the most dismal words to come out of this time will be those that are showing up in advertisements for everything from pizza restaurants to car dealerships — “No human contact necessary.” It just feels so wrong.

We need each other. 

That lesson is there before us, easy to grasp as many of us deal with the quiet and the emptiness of our own homes.

Other insights are more difficult to parse, especially in the throes of a crisis that is far from over. Of these other lessons, none may be more important than understanding the crucial connections between this pandemic and our relationship with the Earth, from which this virus arose and from where future, perhaps even more devastating, diseases will emerge.

For me, personal passage through this strange time has often intersected with this larger ecological theme.

Scientists have documented a great silencing and slowing of Earth’s processes as more of us embrace the stillness that has, like it or not, enveloped us. Seismologists around the world have measured lower levels of ambient seismic noise — the vibrations caused by our frantic motorized comings and goings on the Earth’s surface. The silence is the sound of people staying home. 

For many of us, life has indeed slowed as we shelter away these long weeks, learning things about ourselves that we might not have otherwise. I’ve learned, for example, that my wife was right about one of her frequent observations. I am addicted to television sports. Withdrawal has been terrible. I caught myself, clicking through the channels, seriously considering watching the live broadcast of a rodeo.

Mostly, I seem to drift through these days of virus and torpor, unmoored from my old routines, roaming the rooms in my house to see if the view from any one window has changed since the last time I looked.

I pet my dog more. I take afternoon naps with the bedroom window thrown open to the spring and the sharp scent of a prairie burn coming in on the breeze. I cook, ruining recipes and lingering for long afternoon hours in the kitchen. I sharpened all of our kitchen knives. I am on excellent terms with all of the birds that visit our feeders, noting the different species in my journal. I have become obsessively protective of a robin that is sitting on her nest hidden in the big wood vine that has taken over one side of our screen porch.

Such a pause in life’s rush is at least one good thing that has come from this mess. What a shame it would be not to heed that message. Similarly, how careless would it be to dishonor all the lost lives and those now struggling to survive a shattered economy by not trying to understand how we got here and how we can make changes that will reduce the likelihood of this suffering in the future.

For most of us, much of the focus has necessarily been on surviving the moment and learning how to reorient our lives to the realities of stay-at-home orders and masks and disinfectants and a narrowed day-to-day existence. But the virus and all the destruction it has wrought also offers an important opportunity to contemplate our damaged Earth and the role we humans have played in disrupting natural processes and fueling the rise of such scourges.

This requires rigorous truth-telling and a reliance on science and research rather than shifting and frequently unreliable political whim. President Donald Trump, for example, has consistently scapegoated China for the rise of COVID-19, even going so far as charging that Chinese scientists created the virus in a lab (an accusation that has been disproven). But doing this denies and obscures a deeper and more troubling reality that better illuminates the link between our actions and the growing threat of viral outbreaks.

COVID-19 is a coronavirus, a class of virus that, along with several others such as MERS or SARS, is zoonotic, or spread by animals such as ducks or bats, often through an intermediate host. Bats are suspected as having originally harbored COVID-19. Such viruses exist everywhere in nature and, in the past, have largely stayed put without escaping into the wider world and infecting humans.

But we have dramatically altered our world, slashing and burning forests around the globe and forcing animals such as bats out of their natural habitats and into closer contact with humans. By burning fossil fuels, we hasten climate change, another factor that allows some disease-carrying creatures, such as mosquitoes, to thrive in new and frequently heavily settled areas where they were less prevalent before. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that animals now transmit 60 percent of the infectious diseases found in humans. The destruction of habitat and displacement of wildlife happens everywhere, from Borneo to the American West. That means we are all to blame, not just China. If you drink coffee, a patch of rainforest was likely cleared to grow it.

So in this new world, viruses and other disease-causing microbes could come from anywhere we humans have disrupted natural landscapes, creating breeding grounds for disease. Worse, once they are loose, these viruses can now spread rapidly because of our burgeoning population and ceaseless mobility.

Nor is it just our destructive relationship with the wild that puts us at risk. Researchers are warning that industrial farms that cram thousands of animals into barns are dangerous incubators of disease. The H1N1 flu virus originated in the late 1990s in factory farms in North Carolina. This brings the threat directly to our own backyard here in Wisconsin and its growing number of industrial farms housing cows, pigs and chickens.

In 2012, science writer David Quammen, in his prescient book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, laid the blame for the growing threat of pandemics squarely where it belongs.

“We should appreciate,” Quammen wrote, “that these recent outbreaks of new zoonotic diseases, as well as the recurrence and spread of old ones, are part of a larger pattern, and that humanity is responsible for generating that pattern. We should recognize that they reflect things that we’re doing, not just things that are happening to us. We should understand that, although some of the human-caused factors may seem virtually inexorable, others are within our control.”

In other words, viruses and pandemics do not just magically arise and disappear.

Such have been the thoughts that occupy my mind as I rock in my old wooden rocking chair on the screen porch during these listless days, the wood creaking and the white-throated sparrows singing from the woods behind the house. None of this knowledge is necessarily new or revelatory. I’ve been teaching Quammen’s book for years in my science writing class at UW-Madison. The long presence of such science in the world makes what is happening even more maddening and our careless destruction of wild places more depressing.

I have long believed in the power of landscape to heal. Years ago my wife, Doreen, and I lost our 11-year-old daughter, Katie, in a horseback riding accident. It was during a bright, beautiful fall and the only time I could come near to escaping the grief was when I lost myself in a nearby wood or along the tangled shores of the Wisconsin River with its golden bluffs. I remember finding comfort on the very porch where I now contemplate this virus. Behind our house stretches 120 acres of woods and its deep and shadowy recesses were a balm that quieted my anger and confusion.

So it is now. And though, personally, suffering through this pandemic cannot compare with the crushing blow of Katie’s death, it is a time that is still fraught with loss and hardship. I’ve found that I turn once again to the comfort of landscape and the natural world, now renewed by spring and enlivened by all the wild things making themselves at home for the new season. One recent foggy night I left the screen porch and walked to the back of our lot and stood at the edge of the dark woods and, staring through the mist and the ghostly trunks of the big spruce, it was almost as if I could feel the slowing of the Earth and sense a quiet, ancient stillness that put to rest my fears.

In this season of disease and sadness, it would be a solace to think that, in addition to remembering the value of human connectedness, we would also remind ourselves that we are part of a living, healing Earth that can both benefit from our wisdom and languish with our foolishness. At the moment, we are learning the price of not heeding that message.

Quammen takes it another step. Such pandemics, he writes, should open our eyes to an even deeper reality that may offer a more reasoned perspective on dealing with the rise and spread of viruses..

These pandemics, Quammen says, should remind us “that we humans are inseparable from the natural world. In fact, there is no ‘natural world.’ It’s a bad and artificial phrase. There is only the world. Humankind is part of that world, as are the ebolaviruses, as are the influenzas and the HIVs, as are Nipah and Hendra and SARS, as are chimpanzees and bats and palm civets and bar-headed geese, as is the next murderous virus — the one we haven’t yet detected.”

As I worked through all of this from my rocker, something else tugged at my tired, foggy brain — old and familiar words that echoed and held meaning for this time. But they remained just out of my memory’s reach. Then, one late night, with a gentle spring rain pattering the porch roof, I remembered. I went inside and pulled a book off the shelf and brought it back to my chair — a collection of writings from Wisconsin’s own Aldo Leopold. I turned the pages and there it was, a paragraph rising from the page as vivid as the wood grain materializing from sanded oak.

“The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, nor radio, but rather the complexity of the land-organism. Only those who know most about it can appreciate how little we know about it.” And then, this: “If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

I have read these words many times. But on that rainy night in the midst of a plague that had gripped the world, they rang down through the decades with the fierceness of unheeded truth and a forlorn poignancy borne of more than 346,000 dead.

Ron Seely is the former long-time science and environment writer for the Wisconsin State Journal. He is now a freelance writer and senior lecturer emeritus at the UW-Madison's Department of Life Sciences Communication.