Visual Capitalist: Visualizing the History of Pandemics

Disease and illnesses have plagued humanity since the earliest days, our mortal flaw. However, it was not until the marked shift to agrarian communities that the scale and spread of these diseases increased dramatically.

Widespread trade created new opportunities for human and animal interactions that sped up such epidemics. Malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, influenza, smallpox, and others first appeared during these early years.

The more civilized humans became – with larger cities, more exotic trade routes, and increased contact with different populations of people, animals, and ecosystems – the more likely pandemics would occur.

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BBC: The plan to turn half the world into a reserve for nature

One of the major reasons for adoption of these extreme preservation goals is a 2019 report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which found that more than 1 million species are at risk of extinction. Conducted by hundreds of researchers around the world, the study is considered the most comprehensive analysis of the state of the world’s biodiversity ever. [...]

The ambitious goal of protecting and restoring natural systems on a large scale is shared by a number of groups and people. The Wyss Campaign for Nature is working in partnership with the National Geographic Society to support the goals of the so-called “30x30” movement, a highly ambitious initiative that aims to protect 30% of the planet, on land and at sea, by 2030. [...]

The European Parliament has pledged to protect 30% of European Union territory, restore degraded ecosystems, add biodiversity objectives into all EU policies, and earmark 10% of the budget for improvement of biodiversity. In the US, politicians working with conservation organisations recently introduced a resolution to drum up support for protection of 30% of the US’s land and marine areas.[...]

The ambitious goals of campaigns like 30x30 and Half Earth have been met with criticism. Some question whether focusing on saving up to half of the land’s surface will do much for protecting the remaining biodiversity. In a 2018 paper, Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University, and others, argued that most biodiversity occurs in tropical regions, and much of it is already fragmented. They wrote how protecting broad swaths of nature in largely untouched regions – such as Canada’s boreal forest – has benefits. But the remaining large wild landscapes are mostly in temperate regions, which won’t do much for protecting biodiversity because by far most of the world’s species are in the tropics. “This begs our question of how much biodiversity will we protect if the trend to protect wild places continues,” says Pimm.

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Nautilus Magazine: Natural Selection in an Outbreak

Ebola doesn’t select people. We haven’t figured out what Ebola virus selects as its natural host, but it’s definitely not humans. Every once in a while, Ebola stumbles upon a human host, which ends up being a fatal mistake. When I say fatal, I mean for the virus. After all, Ebola is usually not highly efficient at sustaining infection or transmitting from human to human, and eventually that chain of transmission turns into a dead end. Every Ebola outbreak has ended, even the 2014-2015 West African epidemic. [...]

The circumstances that favor Ebola spillover to humans aren’t necessarily the same ones that drive full-scale epidemics, and it’s important to understand this distinction. Natural selection is the process by which the environment dictates what will thrive. Normally, a human population is not a hospitable environment for Ebola virus. But when we have dysfunctional healthcare systems, we convert a dead-end spillover event into a large outbreak—we select Ebola. It’s no coincidence that the largest Ebola outbreaks occurred in countries with weak governments recovering from brutal civil unrest, with poor education systems and inadequate healthcare infrastructures. Ebola virus finds succor in environments where hepatitis B is uncontrolled and cholera regularly sweeps through. It’s the environments where healthcare systems lag behind rapidly growing urban populations, where road networks carry natural resources out of remote areas but medical supplies cannot find their way in, and where everyone with a fever is told they have “malaria/typhoid” because there are no laboratory facilities to tell them otherwise. It’s these human environments that select Ebola. [...]

There’s a lot of speculation about what dampens and ultimately ends an Ebola outbreak. When a spillover turns into an epidemic turns into a trickle of cases, credit goes to the highly technical international response of laboratories and treatment units, skilled local surveillance and monitoring teams, and even the increasing numbers of survivors that cannot be re-infected. What is often missing from the discussion is how communities adapted to this new threat. How they altered their environment through the use of improvised protective equipment and self- or locally-imposed quarantine. We can all learn from this resilience and resourcefulness. It is this local adaption and memory that we will depend upon, if we as a global community fail to build up the failing healthcare systems that favor Ebola.

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UnHerd: Will coronavirus change the world?

Epidemics have been around as long as civilization. Plaga — from the Greek for ‘strike’ or ‘hit’ — devastated classical Athens in the 5th century BC, when the historian Thucydides nursed sufferers; the Antonine Plague — probably smallpox or measles — killed as many as five million Romans at the empire’s peak. Far more deadly was the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century, which had a toll of 25 million and emptied whole regions of the eastern (Byzantine) Empire. Only in the 21st century did researchers confirm that this was the same illness that would appear eight centuries later — the Bubonic Plague. [...]

Another danger is climate change, which might turn a mild virus into a deadly one, or cause disease-carrying animals to migrate. This is what happened during the 14th century when the northern hemisphere became considerably cooler, soon after the Mongols had created the largest contiguous empire in history. [...]

In contrast, Milan perhaps had higher survival rates, because its rulers, the ruthless Visconti family, ordered that any house where the plague was identified be boarded up and its inhabitants left to starve. In a later outbreak the city of Dubrovnik, now in Croatia, initiated the rule that all ships stay anchored for 40 days — quaranta — a sensible measure that appreciated the potential length of incubation periods. [...]

Contagious diseases historically raised fear of the outgroup, and already we have seen low-level violence against east Asians in Italy. We’re not going to get pogroms now, partly because children are largely unaffected — the fatality rate for the 0-9s in China still 0 per cent of the 416 confirmed cases —and that’s what really drives terror, but plagues do draw out our most atavistic fears. There is a theory that xenophobia is an evolutionary response to pathogens, since strangers are more likely to carry diseases that the in-group has no immunity to, and that’s why conservatives respond more strongly to disgust and value purity and cleanliness.

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Social Europe: How the new EU gender strategy fails east-central European women

The premise of the strategy is that gender equality is ‘an essential condition for an innovative, competitive and thriving European economy’, which ‘brings more jobs and higher productivity’. This is in line with what has historically driven the EU to legislate on equality between the sexes—the desire not to eradicate inequalities but to optimise the performance of the labour market by ensuring a steady supply of workers. Indeed, one of the key indicators through which the progress towards gender equality in EU member states is measured is the (increasing) proportion of women in the labour market. What this refuses to consider however, are the labour conditions which women are encouraged to enter.

As we have seen in east-central Europe, this experience has been far from emancipatory for many women, as a large proportion of the jobs created in the past three decades have been of poor quality: underpaid, low-skilled, socially undervalued and performed on zero-hours contracts. Kováts and Gregor showed in their research on Hungarian women that broad segments feel so exploited in the labour market that, rather than think how to escape home to do meaningful work and secure financial independence, their main concern is how to escape employment to be with their loved ones. This exposes the hollowness of the commission’s equation of gender equality with more women on the labour market, as at best out of touch and at worst wilfully class-blind. [...]

The narrow neoliberal framework through which the strategy challenges gender inequalities in the supply of care work is also evident in its focus on solving growing demand by encouraging (individual) men to take it up, as well as establishing institutions relieving women of these responsibilities. While both are certainly necessary, they are woefully inadequate to address the deeper underlying tension within capitalist societies—the need for reproductive labour to sustain productive labour, with the associated lack of valorisation and remuneration. Unless we fundamentally restructure ‘worker’ and ‘carer’ roles deemed separate and mutually exclusive, we cannot hope to eradicate this tension, no matter what work-life balance efforts we apply.

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