NOTES ON A VIRUS

In 2003, Lou and I visited Heron Island, a small outcrop on the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland in Australia. We booked a few days at a small resort on Heron at the end of a wonderful but tiring tour of Australia, thinking it would be a nice way to relax and recharge before returning home. It proved to be just that, and, as we usually do, we made some new friends at the resort. They were all farmers from New South Wales and were having a small holiday of their own during the Aussie winter after a hard year of raising cattle and growing rice on the driest continent on earth. Our conversations spanned many topics, and I was amazed to learn of their efforts to grow what I thought was a crop that needed wet conditions in such a dry place. From there, the conversation touched on how humans could manage to do amazing things by altering the environment to meet their needs. Most of us nodded our heads in approval to such modern-day alchemy.

One farmer, however, was noticeably silent. His friends knew him well and knew what was coming of course. He took a pull on his pint of beer, shook his head and began a quiet but well-measured and well-thought dissertation on how all of this was going to be the ruin of all of us. His friends smiled and quietly chuckled: they'd heard this before. But Lou and I listened with great interest. I don't recall his exact words, these 17 years later, but his final offering has stuck in my mind ever since. "Well, it is obvious, isn't it? We're the plague. We're the ones who are ruining things. There's too many of us."

That year, 2003, was the year of SARS. I remember that, as our travel date approached, we were worried whether Australia would let us enter the country. Toronto was one of the epicenters of SARS, and we thought our Canadian passport would open up a world of difficulty for us. It turned out not to be the case. We entered with no difficulty whatsoever, although a couple of Aussies offered some commiserations to us for being the last ones left alive from Toronto to carry on.

Now, we live in 2020 and the word "Covid-19" has taken on the same worrisome connotation as SARS or the Black Death from medieval times. We are, as of this writing, in the process of shutting down the country, with extraordinary measures enacted for the first time since warfare, or since the last major pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918-19. We have seen the best of humanity ( such as the selfless and tireless work of people in the health care professions ) and the worst of humanity ( the hoarding and panic buying of basic supplies, and the mindless racism of those who just need a flimsy excuse to hate). We practice "self-isolation" and "social distancing" in order to "flatten the curve" of the statistics of new cases, proving that, if nothing else, our modern times is clever in the invention of catchy phrases.

But the Aussie farmer's words …. " we are the plague" …. ring true most of all. There are just too damned many of us on this planet. We number around 8 billion …. how many other organisms number this many? Insects, yes, and bacteria and germs without a doubt. Maybe fish in the sea or birds in the air ? Maybe. But large, intelligent, social and rapacious animals ? No, we're the highest number. And the results have come home to us in a hard way.

Our numbers have seriously altered the planet on which we live. We take and exploit what we need to maintain our modern lifestyle, and we don't bother to put anything back. We live cheek-by-jowl in huge and ever-growing cities. We breathe each other's breath more than we care to know. We depend on food and other materials from far-flung corners of the globe, just to keep us comfortable, fashionable, over-fed and over-medicated. And we just don't care about the cost whether it be environmental or in our collective and individual health.

The Aussie farmer was commenting directly on the environmental price we humans are exacting on the planet. And that price is going up steadily. Until the advent of Covid-19, the hot topic was climate change and environmental degradation, and it certainly stirred up a lively debate and actually some effort to solve the problem. But it took a new version of the Black Death to make us actually pay attention to our spend-like-a-drunken-sailor ways.

Only when things begin to affect ourselves in a personal way, only when the existential threat of death by sickness, only when we realize that family and friends are in imminent danger of becoming incapacitated and ill, do we take this seriously. Climate change ? How does that affect me? I like warm and sunny weather. If Canada becomes more like Florida, that'd be great ! Wait, what ? I might get sick and die soon? Hell, we'd better do something about it NOW !

There's no doubt that self-isolating and social distancing, along with good handwashing and staying home from work or school will ultimately stop the exponential rise of Covid-19 cases. And soon, there will be a vaccine for it. But, before the cure happens, millions will be affected, and many of them will die.

Will we learn from this ? Will we make a determined effort to lessen our numbers and our impact on the planet. Let's hope we have the time to tell.