Earth Day: the Earth Fights Back

Nature can be a vindictive mother.  She is relentless, unforgiving and she knows how to win.  If you are smart, you do not mess with a woman like that.  Best to treat her like a lady, make her smile when you can and keep your distance. 

            Earth Day is a good time to reacquaint ourselves with our Earth Mother.  This April 22^nd will be the 50^th anniversary of Earth Day, the largest secular holiday in the world.   Unfortunately, it seems that right now Mother is royally irritated with us and we have no one but ourselves to blame.   

From ancient times humanity has been visited by some remarkably grim viruses. We can find evidence of pandemics going back as far as 5000 years.  AIDS and many of the hemorrhagic fevers like Marburg and Ebola, started in the jungles of Africa.  Respiratory diseases like Avian flu, H1N1, SARS and the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 2009 seem to originate in Asia.  Syphilis was a disease of the New World, brought back to Europe by Columbus and the explorers that followed him.  But, regardless of where a virus evolves, once in the population it is an equal opportunity threat. 

In each case, the cycle of devastation follows a predictable path.   You need a critical mass of humanity.  That is because the host must find the virus, not the other way around.  Virus do not travel on their own.  They wait for their host and can retreat to an inert form for amazingly long periods of time when one is not available.   

Once in the population, the infection will continue until the virus outruns its supply lines by eliminating all available hosts.  A virus who kills too many, too fast, is left with no hosts or only those with an acquired immunity.   While the most successful viruses (like the corona type viruses of SARS and our current COVID-19) have coding that protects them from our natural defense mechanisms, eventually humans will develop an immunity.  

What if we think of our planet as a single living thing—just like us.  When a foreign body (like a virus) enters our bodies, we create antibodies to attack it, destroying it before it can destroy us.  Does our planet do the same thing?  We are destroying the deep forests, places where life forms not compatible with our own live on the animals that occupy those niches.  We denude these natural areas, forcing microscopic life to jump to whatever living things are now available to them.  [If you are a virus that lives happily on bats and the bats disappear, you jump to some other mammal.]

Next, we humans then speed communication of the virus through arteries made of paved roads and air traffic lanes, spreading viruses from one population density to another. In many ways, we have become our planet’s own invasive species.

What if the planet is treating us like an invader? What if the earth is behaving like a person? What if an angry, threatened Earth mother is retaliating by sending out its antibodies—viruses of every kind—to kill the invader before the invader kills the planet?

Of course, the questions I just posited form an analogy. This is the stuff that science fiction is made of, but it is also what informs many scientific works. The concept of a world fighting back is at the heart of many good books from The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, through The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett to The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. These authors have presented us with the dangers of not treating mother earth with the respect she deserves.

Earth Day is our chance to look again at how feckless we have been with the earth that is our home.  We have been given ample evidence that nature does not suffer fools lightly.  Is it possible that she is fighting back? 

Love your mother and keep the faith.