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Michael Lavalette

The year 2019 marked another dreadful year for our planet. The five hottest recorded years of our existence have been the last five (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019); the last decade the hottest ever (Milman 2020). According to a report from Christian Aid, there were 15 extreme climate disasters in 2019 each of which cost over $1bn (with seven of them costing over £10bn each [Christian Aid 2019]). The Christian Aid report came out in December. The following month our television screens were full of terrifying images of Australian bush fires running out of control (ABC 2020), Brazilian rainforests experiencing unprecedented fires (often deliberately set by farmers and logging companies) (Wood 2020), flash-​flooding in Indonesia displacing 60,000 people (Leung 2020) and swarms of locust driving through East Africa and parts of Asia eating crops and threatening populations with starvation (Gilliland 2020).

These scenes, and particularly the hellish, nightmare vision from Australia, combined with the heroic school strikes to defend the planet and protests by Extinction Rebellion activists, once again pushed the climate crisis to the centre of world politics.

Yet within a month, the climate crisis had disappeared from the world media’s gaze as they focussed on the frightening spectre of the COVID-​19 pandemic.

COVID-​19 is a coronavirus (CoV). Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause illnesses, ranging from the common cold to severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). In their range, coronaviruses cause coughs, fevers and a range of breathing difficulties. In more severe cases infection can lead to pneumonia, kidney failure, heart failure, severe acute respiratory syndrome –​ and death. As Parrington (2020) notes:

Viruses can cause vast human suffering and death, as well as social and economic dislocation. However, they are also the simplest forms of life … Be that as it may … viruses are at the root of some of the most infectious and lethal diseases that afflict humanity.

The world’s media focussed on the spread of this frightening new disease. It was portrayed as an almost unpredictable, random event, a quirk –​ or (with clear racist overtones) as a result of peculiar Chinese eating habits. The epicentre of the virus was Wuhan Province in China and the ‘wet-​markets’ of the region were identified as the source of ‘zoonotic transmission’ (zoonosis is the process whereby viruses and diseases transfer from one species to another).

Yet while the media focus changed from climate crisis to pandemic crisis, it is, nevertheless, the case that there is a link between the two. I do not mean by this that COVID-​19 is caused by the climate crisis –​ that is simply not true. But both the climate crisis and the COVID-​19 pandemic reveal our problematic relationship with nature. Specifically, they point to the way in which modern industrial capitalism is destroying our planet, our ecological system and creating the conditions for zoonotic transmission of deadly viruses and diseases. As Ian Angus notes:

Global warming. Superstorms. Rising sea levels. Toxic air and smog. Ocean acidification and dead zones. Species extinction. Soil erosion. Fresh water depletion. Ozone destruction. Indestructible plastics and chemical pollution. Deforestation. Expanding deserts. Antibiotic resistant bacteria. New diseases and plagues. The list goes on. We face a planetary emergency, a convergence of ecological crises that threatens the survival of civilisation. (2019: p51)

In his path-​breaking work, The Monster at the Door (2005), Mike Davis plotted what he described as a ‘viral apocalypse’ in the making (Davis 2005). His focus was the threat of new strains of pandemic flu, the existential threat they posed to human society and the potential public health system failures which, he claimed, were unprepared and ill-​equipped for the pending catastrophe. A hastily printed new edition of the book, now called The Monster Enters (Davis 2020), includes a discussion of COVID-​19, pointing out that the pandemic was completely predictable because it developed out of the conditions of life and work in the contemporary world. Davis argues that pandemics happen in particular social, political and economic contexts and he is clear, the modern world is creating the conditions for more, and more deadly, pandemic events to occur.

For Davis there are four elements in particular that are creating the conditions for zoonotic transfer and pandemic threat: first, the impact of capitalism, as a system, on our environment, second, within this, modern capitalist farming methods and the dominance of large agri-​businesses; third, the growth of mega-​cities and urban slums, and, finally, dominant political ideologies which prioritises the market at the expense of preventative public health strategies. Let’s look at each in turn.

Capitalism is a system that puts the needs of profit maximisation above all other considerations. It is a system that subordinates the satisfaction of human needs to its inherent drive for profit and wealth accumulation. In his great work Capital, Marx noted the impact capitalism had on our environment and argued that capitalism

Disrupts the metabolic interaction between man and earth [and generates] an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. (Marx 1976: pp949/​950)

In this passage Marx introduces the concept of a ‘metabolic rift’. Marx argues that humans have a close, dialectical relationship with the natural world. We are not determined by the natural world, nor do we fully control it, but we are part of nature and dependent upon it. The ‘metabolic rift’ is the central concept within Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism.

[It] is built around how the logic of accumulation severs basic processes of natural reproduction, leading to the deterioration of the environment and ecological sustainability and disrupting the basic operations of nature. (Weston 2014: p67)

In other words, under the conditions of capitalist competition, natural resources are used, abused and exploited for short-​term profit maximisation without any consideration to the long-​term consequences for our environment, our ecological systems, for other animal life and, ultimately, for the existence of human societies.

To give some examples, we are currently in the midst of the ‘sixth great extinction’ of animal species (Vaughan 2015). Wildlife is dying out due to habitat destruction, overhunting, toxic pollution, invasion by alien species and climate change. Land-​insect populations have fallen 25 per cent since 1990. As Carrington (2019) notes:

The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems” … More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found.

Further, about 90 per cent of marine fish populations are now fully exploited, overexploited or depleted. According to the WWF (2020)

the number of overfished stocks globally has tripled in half a century and today fully one-​third of the world’s assessed fisheries are currently pushed beyond their biological limits.

As Dawson (2016) argues:

Today’s mass extinction crisis is one of the clearest indications of the fundamental irrationality and destructiveness of the capitalist system.

We are witnessing unprecedented levels of land destruction. Depending on location, fertile soil is being eroded between ten and 100 times faster than new soil can form. Alongside this we have deforestation where, on average between 2014 and 2018, an area of tree cover the size of the United Kingdom was lost every year (Angus 2016). Dawson (2016) notes:

Studies suggest that over the last fifty years a shockingly high 40 percent of the world’s flora and fauna have become extinct. And this extinction rate is accelerating. There are a number of factors that explain the dramatic mass extinction event that we are living through. By far the most important is habitat destruction. While all of the world’s ecosystems host myriad wonderfully diverse life forms, the greatest troves of biodiversity are concentrated in a few regions. The richest places on the planet in terms of biodiversity are tropical rainforests. And these rainforests are being burnt and chopped down at alarming rates.

The ultimate cause of all of these processes is the way our society is organised to put the interests of capital and profit maximisation first.

These processes also feed back into the system, creating environmental and ecological crises in the present and for the future. They also bring humans into closer contact with a range of species who carry diseases we are not immune to. Deforestation, damming and environmental destruction force animals into ever smaller regions, often bringing them closer to human habitations. The eviction of small farmers from their land by large agri-​businesses and logging companies forces landless peasants deeper into the forest. Facing poverty and starvation some populations turn towards bushmeats as a source of food (though in some parts these exotic foods are now highly valued ‘luxury items’ on the pates of the wealthy.) With all these developments, the chances of zoonotic transmission increase.

The second aspect of the crisis Davis highlighted was the destructive impact of capitalist farming and the growth of agri-​businesses. Recent years has witnessed what is sometimes called The Livestock Revolution –​ meaning the development of large-​scale, relatively unregulated, agro-​industrial capitalism.

Within the agribusiness sector a relatively small number of massive corporations dominate global farming. They have intensified animal husbandry, bringing together massive numbers of animals in single locations. Their aim is ‘production density’, meaning that there are now regions in North America, Brazil, Western Europe, South Asia and China where the chicken population runs into the hundreds of millions. The factory-​farms create terrible conditions for the livestock.

These are also ruthless enterprises. As Davis notes:

The world icon of industrialised poultry and livestock production is giant Tyson Foods. Tyson, which kills 2.2 billion chickens annually, has become globally synonymous with scaled-​up, vertically coordinated production; exploitation of contract growers; visceral antiunionism, rampant industrial injury; downstream environmental dumping; and political corruption. The global dominance of behemoths like Tyson has forced local farmers to either integrate with large-​scale chicken and pork processing firms or perish. (2006: p83)

Within the sector there is an emphasis on breed specialisation and genetic modification of species to ensure they produce more milk, meat or eggs, but the creation of such mono-​cultures reduces the chances of the animals developing resistance to new varieties of virus.

In the process the agri-​business sector has created what Wallace (2016) describes as a gigantic petri-​dish for the creation and propagation of new diseases. Intensive industrial food production provides ample opportunity for viruses to mutate and spread across hosts, while the proximity and size of the local population provides cross-​over gateways for viruses to infect human populations. As Lee Humber has argued:

The industrial model of agriculture and livestock rearing explains how we have come to the point when each year brings the threat of a new and potentially deadly global virus. (2020)

Davis’ third aspect of the crisis was the nature of overcrowded towns, cities and slums. Modern pandemics are what Spinney (2017) calls ‘crowd diseases’. When they take hold in human communities they spread because capitalism forces people to live and to work in close proximity. The poorer the conditions, the more overcrowded the locality, the easier it is for the disease to take hold and spread.

In the absence of a vaccine, the key way for people to stop human-​to-​human transmission is to socially distance, for economies to lockdown for all but the most essential of work tasks, for people to have appropriate PPE and masks to reduce infection spread and protect those at work.

Yet, as is discussed elsewhere in the book, in poor communities and in the slums across the Global South social distancing becomes near impossible. And the prospect of a long-​term shut down of the economy to protect people poses a dramatic question of the purpose and aims of societies –​ to protect people or to defend profits?

On this final point the present pandemic has revealed the incompetence of right-​wing, populist leaders to address the crisis. In the UK, the US and Brazil, for example, government ineptitude has let the disease take hold and put far more lives in danger than need be the case. Deregulation, years of austerity, a commitment to marketisation in health and social care, just-​in-​time agreements in frontline health sectors have all been part of a monstrous government failure to protect people.

The COVID-​19 pandemic has its roots firmly in the way the present system prioritises profit over people’s needs and their health. The crisis exposes a system that is destroying our planet and our ecosystem in the relentless drive to accumulate. It is time to put people and our natural world before profit. Another world is not only possible, but desperately and urgently needed.