I'm old enough to remember the first one, and that I was an 18-year-old college freshman who thought there was some validity to it but mostly the focus needed to be on Imperialism and the Vietnam War, as well as racism, which was the war at home. I thought mostly the liberals were using the environment to distract us.
Just saw a link to something being promoted by Michael Moore, "Planet of the Humans," with tagline something like "what if a single species dominated the entire planet?" Posted on account of Earth Day.Didn't watch it; watched something else and then wrote this instead.
Despite most definitely being of that generation, I don't believe in Gaia or all that crunchy granola kind of thinking. I don't believe the planet or the universe is conscious, a spirit being ...
But for some reason, I do believe in poetic justice. And while I don't believe this pandemic is the cure outraged deities have prescribed for the infestation of this planet, yet the next one might be ... a simple virus, with an incubation period of a few days, like this one, including a period during which you're contagious but asymptomatic, but with the mortality of Ebola, untreated AIDS or perhaps just this mortality, but like the Spanish flu of a century ago, killing mostly younger adults, not the elderly.
Not the physical disappearance of every last homo sapiens on the planet -- there are usually survivors -- but enough initially to cause civilization's collapse and that collapse taking care of most of the others.
That comes from the link I actually did click on the YouTube page where Michael Moore's post also appeared, which was to a documentary about the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations more than a thousand years BC.
It explored the theses that the root cause may have been climate change ... the sudden emergence of a much drier climate in the eastern Mediterranean.
Which is the other fevered Covid-19 nightmare: it is neither the wipe-out pandemic, nor a foreshadowing, but a distraction from finally trying to ward off the climate going crazy, as it appears to have done at the end of the bronze age.
You may think we're scientifically and technically advanced enough to cope. That may be, but it may also be true that our political class and institutions are so corrupt and decrepit as to put salvation beyond our reach.
Look at Western Europe and the USA: China gave us the sincerest possible warning: they did complete lockdown on a province with more people than Italy or Spain.
We blew it so completely that both here and there we have infections and deaths orders of magnitude greater than China's.
Were I to believe in Gaia, I might think the Coronavirus was mostly her way of warning us to fix the way we handle our common affairs. Whether climate change or another pathogen, we cannot continue as we are and survive, at least not most of us.
