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It Came from Beneath the Sea – A Coronavirus Lesson

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Like most of you I’ve been binging on videos, especially for me: classic sci-fi from the 50’s. All those monsters spawned by radiation from atomic testing: ah, those were simpler times. But is there a lesson in them for us today?

What’s this worry about pandemics, economic crashes and the decline of the west? Come on! Especially you boomers – remember “duck and cover”? I mean we grew up with the atomic apocalypse and the extinction of civilization. And just to grind the point home – how about being scared silly watching late night movies about the atomic radiation-induced mutants ravaging our cities and countryside?

Most were done in the 50’s. We are talking about real classics here like “Them!” where giant ants consume people in mass quantities. Or how about “It Came from Beneath the Sea”. A giant octopus from deep in the ocean trenches munches on ships and the Golden Gate Bridge.  Our “lovable” humongous cephalopod is forced to forage near the surface because its been irradiated by hydrogen bomb testing. Unfortunately, this has enabled its usual prey to avoid it. Guess that just leaves us crunchy and delicious humans for needed nourishment!

This got me to thinking. The movie’s almost 70-year-old premise was really an ecological one. Humanity’s actions had an unintended impact on nature that rebounds upon it.  Fast-forward 70 years to today. Rather than making the earth’s surface well done with nuclear weapons (at least not yet) we are instead consuming a particularly critical part.

Thirty years ago, a wide belt of rainforest circled the earth, covering much of Latin America, Southeast Asia and Africa. Today, it is being rapidly replaced by great swathes of palm oil trees and rubber plantations, land cleared for cattle grazing, soya farming, expanding cities, dams and logging. Half the world’s rainforests have been razed in a century. At current rates, they will vanish altogether in 100 years.

So what? Well, instead of a gigantic sci-fi movie kraken we got ourselves a “for real” microscopic deadly virus. From John Vidal in The Guardian: “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 such as 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 such as Covid-19… 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 between the wellbeing of humans, other living things and entire ecosystems.”

 “We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbor so many species of animals and plants – and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses,” David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic, recently wrote in the New York Times. “We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.”

So what do we do? In the movie an intrepid handsome submarine captain and brilliant beautiful female scientist save the day. (Yes, I know the feminism was well intentioned but clumsy, but hey it was 1955.) In our immediate future the cast has Doctors Anthony Fauci, at 79 and Deborah Birx, at 64. Not exactly Hollywood but be thankful. Modern medicine and genetics point to the possibility that a vaccine may be just around the corner. Hopefully, we’ll dodge the bullet on this one and muddle through.

What about the bigger issue of the ecological destruction that we continue to wage and it’s consequences. Sadly our “new normal” is we are not going to stop consuming our natural inheritance and this isn’t our last pandemic.

Optimistically, we haven’t blown ourselves up with atomic weapons despite them being around for 75 years and now in the hands of nine countries, some of which are pretty sketchy. So, maybe we will also get better at biological defense. And, the world’s population growth is starting to slow and decline thereby putting less strain on the environment. Plus, we are trying to pollute less with more green technologies.

Who knows? However – no hyperbole here – our world is forever changed. Plague tends to have that effect. I wonder what movies they will be reminiscing on in 50 to 60 years – “Outbreak”, “Contagion” or “28 Days Later”?


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