Covid-19 Should Be a Wakeup Call to Canadians

Few would dispute Justin Trudeau's statement that it will take years for Canada's economy to recover from the damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. That's the harsh reality of a tightly-wound, globalist economy. It's not resilient. It doesn't bounce back the way economies did before the neoliberal era. Scars take longer to heal.

What I want you to mull over is what does this mean if we don't have years to recover? What if we're hit with another, perhaps even more severe pandemic two or three years from now while we're still getting back on our feet? What if these seismic events start arriving in multiples, two at a time?

The Earth is suffering a parasitic infestation. That would be us. There are too many of us, living on average far too long, and consuming more rapaciously with each passing decade.  We need so much of the Earth's surface and its resources that we're forcing other creatures into a rapidly shrinking wilderness that cannot support their populations. Since the 1970s their overall numbers have declined by more than half.  Meanwhile species are falling extinct at rates hundreds, some think thousands of times higher than natural baseline rates.

We are encroaching on our planet's dwindling wilderness at rates that are driving the collapse of wildlife populations and the accelerating extinction of species. Climate change is another stress multiplier for wildlife. We are choking out biodiversity oblivious to the fact that we ourselves cannot survive the loss of biodiversity.

And now nature is demonstrating, once again, that the habitat we're destroying and the pressures we're putting on other species are creating the perfect conditions to trigger and spread pandemics that will destroy our civilization and claim lives on a scale we cannot imagine.  SARS, MERS, Ebola, Covid-19 may be just a dress rehearsal for a train of pandemics many experts warn we must expect in the near future.

Only a decade or two ago it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harboring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans like Ebola, HIV and dengue. 

But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases like COVID-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise—with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike. In fact, a new discipline, planetary health, is emerging that focuses on the increasingly visible connections among the well-being of humans, other living things and entire ecosystems. 

Is it possible, then, that it was human activity, such as road building, mining, hunting and logging, that triggered the Ebola epidemics in Mayibout 2 and elsewhere in the 1990s and that is unleashing new terrors today?

Research suggests that outbreaks of animal-borne and other infectious diseases like Ebola, SARS, bird flu and now COVID-19, caused by a novel coronavirus, are on the rise. Pathogens are crossing from animals to humans, and many are now able to spread quickly to new places. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that three-quarters of “new or emerging” diseases that infect humans originate in nonhuman animals.

There was a time when these contagions traveled no faster than the "speed of sail." They could hit one area but die out before they became pandemic.  They were much easier to quarantine. Today they travel, often undetected, at the speed of a jetliner, taking hold globally before resources can be mobilized to deal with them.

Overpopulation is an existential threat every bit as great as the climate emergency. Every existential threat hanging over mankind today is inter-related. They all trace back to one common failure - mankind's inability or outright refusal to live within the finite limits of our ecology, our planet, Spaceship Earth.

There are simply too many of us, more than our spaceship can hold and sustain. I spoke with one scientist at the Global Footprint Network about the damage we have already inflicted on Earth's life support systems. There was a time in the 70s when the planet could sustain a maximum population of 3 to 3.5 billion. Today that number is about 2 billion. As we close in on 8 billion the magnitude of our problem becomes inescapable.

There's a process underway today called "Overshoot." It's worsening by the year. This simple graphic illustrates what this is:

The red line signifies consumption. The black dotted line is Earth's carrying capacity. When consumption (per capita consumption times population) exceeds carrying capacity it begins to degrade carrying capacity until the floor collapses out from under consumption. As population numbers collapse carrying capacity doesn't rebound. It can take centuries, even millennia to recover.

A fellow blogger posted a thoughtful item today on overpopulation and both sides of what has become a hollow debate. There are those who still argue that there is no population crisis, that technology will allow us to feed billions more.  The argument is moot given powerful factors such as soils degradation and groundwater collapse, among other ways that we're ravaging our ecosystem, that are always omitted from the debate.

I would like to conclude with an inspirational call to arms about how we must come to grips with overpopulation only I think nature will attend to it long before we can do anything meaningful. It may be better for us to think defensively, focus on how we can keep the next pandemics from our borders, how we can secure our freshwater resources, ways we can bolster our food security. We don't have to wait for chaos to overwhelm us. We need to think strategically and we don't have time to waste.