The Covid-19 pandemic is now (2020) worldwide. The threat inherent in the spread of the virus has engendered a widespread panic and paranoia which has the global community headed in the opposite direction from a healthy response.
A healthy response would require a worldview of Oneness in the Global Village. People would understand and value the connection among nature, disease and humans. “At the same time that we devastate wildlife and eliminate entire species, we squeeze the creatures that remain into perverse and dangerous configurations, ultimately jeopardizing our own health. Zoonoses reveal that environmental stewardship is not simply related to public health; in many cases, they are the same.”[i]
“The virus has exposed global entities as either weak and politically compromised, in the case of the World Health Organization, or all-but-irrelevant, in the case of the United Nations. It has restored or hardened borders, impeded migration, devolved power from the international to national and the national to local. And it has spurred renewed great power rivalry with ‘Chimerica’ dissolving and a trans-Pacific Cold War Looming.”[ii]
“‘We need to stop looking at people in a vacuum,’ says Jonathan Epstein, a disease ecologist and vice president for science and outreach at the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. ‘Everything we do to disrupt natural systems, to manipulate the environment around us, influences our own health. We haven’t thought about that carefully enough.’”[iii]
In fact, with our current worldview, we probably won’t think about that at all.
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Supplemental Reading: Oneness, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
#81 Full Speed Backwards
[i] Jabr, Ferris. “Out of the Wild.” The New York Times Magazine. June 21, 2020, p. 35.
[ii] Douthat, Ross. “The End of the New World Order.” The New York Times Sunday Review. May 24, 2020, p. 9.
[iii] Jabr, op. cit.
