I guess you have heard this before. If you haven’t, then the terrific cartoon below, by Eric Lewis of the New York Times (I really must get better at crediting pictures on these blogs) represents the concept wonderfully well:
The planet is in the middle of an ecological crisis (there really isn’t a debate to be had about this), and we are responsible (or this). Our use of fossil fuels and, as we are becoming increasingly aware, plastic – to name but two examples – are having a hugely detrimental effect on the environment.
Ergo, we are a virus. It’s a pretty good metaphor in many respects. The planet is a body, and we are making it sick.
It’s not the whole picture though.
I am sitting in a lovely house (I am very lucky), on a laptop microprocessing computer with a capacity that even ten years ago would have been unthinkable. I am communicating with the entire planet using a Wi-Fi internet connection that is being beamed here via a satellite. In the background, music is playing from a soundbar, being wirelessly streamed by my smart phone off an app that allows me to access about 90% of all music produced since we started producing music. It is minus three outside, but I am warm, and my fridge, freezer and storage cupboards have a ridiculous variety of food that could keep my family fed for weeks. Clean water – hot or cold – is the turn of a tap away. Like I said: I am very lucky.
I am acutely aware that the domestic picture I have painted means that I am a privileged westerner, and that there are billions of people who do not have all the things that I take for granted. However, I am, in my part of the World, an average Joe. I am not special.
Had I been born a mere one hundred years ago (that’s just five generations), I would have had precisely none of the above. I would probably have had a roof over my head, but I would have lived in a simple, small house, crammed in with my family. The rest of it? Not a chance. And most of it was utterly unimaginable. Not even the stuff of sci-fi. Not that I would have been able to read it – literacy rates in Ireland were less than 10% back then.
Had I scratched my hand whilst doing whatever manual labour I would have been doing – office jobs were for the privileged elite – and had this scratch become infected, there is a good chance it would have killed me. Antibiotics were yet to be discovered. In fact, a variety of entirely curable diseases could have seen me off, if my asthma hadn’t got there first.
Go back another two hundred years (that’s another ten generations) – before the industrial revolution, and the picture is even bleaker. Me, and people like me (almost certainly you, too), would have lived short, difficult, dirty and squalid lives, and it had been like this – pretty much - for several millennia. There had been some changes along the way, but the quality of life for 99% of people was dreadful and difficult for us to conceive of.
In fifteen generations, since we harnessed fossil fuels, the World has become utterly transformed.
We have been to the moon (just sixty-six years after the first flight by an airplane). The Hubble telescope can see up to fifteen billion light years away. Sprawling metropolises cover much of the planet. I can communicate with someone on the other side of the planet instantly, with a few clicks of a mouse.
I am all too aware that ours is a World full of inequity, and that needless suffering is everywhere. Everywhere. We have so much progress to make.
But…we’re amazing.
For a virus.