As the global COVID-19 crisis builds up its incredible momentum, for which an apex is still months to come, the mainstream media and so-called policymakers are dazed and confused, lost in graphs of exponential case counts and body counts; shipments of masks and respirators; and the assembly of makeshift hospitals. Everywhere the morgues are filling up and the crematoriums are burning the cadavers at full tilt.
“But what does it mean the plague? It’s life, that’s all.” – Albert Camus, The Plague.
This interview was conducted by Collapse Chronicles host Sam Mitchell.
Sam Mitchell: Gilbert, is COVID-19 the trigger for the global collapse of global industrial civilization? Why or why not?
The first infection by the agent of COVID-19, variously called 2019-nCoV or SARS-CoV-2, probably happened around December 12, 2019, based on the interviews in late December with a group of new pneumonia patients in Wuhan, China.
Pathogenic RNA viruses began to prey in earnest on humans around the time of our industrial revolution. As the human population exploded and then increased its density by a massive effort of urbanization, it also changed land use to encroach on wildlife. Such changes continue today, unabated, even accelerated, as the human population attempts to achieve its final doubling. There is currently tremendous encroachment on wild animals.
It was dusk. Out of a cave, black clouds of bats were coming out: thick. The fading sun skipped on their velvety wings. It was beautiful. The bats faded into darkness, on their way, on the hunt: tiny knights of nature carrying a deadly weapon about to cure humanity of its follies and arrogance. Their weapon of choice was called COVID-19. A new era had begun. Things would never again be quite the same.
Respect nature or pay the ultimate price
The sophistication of our technological tools, with causality levels proper of the current interplanetary biocapitalism, have shot out the formation of new multicausal contexts, dispositionally bearers of new rules that trigger new causalities with systemic effects of global erasure of the dialectic molecularity that determined the dynamics relations of production/productive forces, with loss of autonomy on the part of the workers.
The first day of school is a big day for your child and for you. I hope you enjoy my reading of this lovely poem by Emma Robinson, beautifully animated (as always) by We are Cognitive.
The post Dear Teacher appeared first on Sir Ken Robinson.
