Trippy Thoughts And Covid

So Covid-19 Delta has a long and hard tail in Auckland. It sort of reminds me of the Ankylosaurus dinosaur of the late Cretaceous Period, wandering around whacking Aucklanders over the head with its huge tail.

Such are the joys of having overactive and vivid mental imagery screening in your head. It’s just ongoing movies day after day. But the movie is still playing and I am interested in the finale. Is this movie in my head going to turn into a real-life human apocalypse? Is there cause for optimism or are humans fated to go into the abyss of extinction?

It’s definitely a possibility. Could it be that Earth has had enough of our abuses and sent a killer virus via wildlife to infiltrate our very cells? Covid -19, and especially the Delta variant, has done a stellar job of bringing us to our knees.

That is a trippy idea. It would rest on the premise that Earth itself is conscious and capable of thought. This philosophy is called panpsychism (try saying that out loud) and it has a long history in analytic philosophy in the East and West.

While isolation may have given some of us time to ruminate on such things it still doesn’t solve the Covid-19 problem.

We have heard it said often enough. Covid is here to stay. The only solution is to isolate, test and vaccinate. I agree that this is the only way to deal with this crisis in the short term. However, Covid is just a symptom of our broken relationship with the Earth. If we want to prevent future outbreaks we have to look at how this virus emerged in the fist place.

Otherwise, once we have wrestled the long hard tail of Delta into submission, another variant will most certainly emerge. Is Earth going to hurl even more mutated viruses at us?

And then I had another trippy thought. It’s not Earth versus humans – we are the Earth. We are biological beings who evolved over time with other species. We think we are special and above others but we’re not. And now we soiled our own nest so badly by attacking other species we precipitated a deadly virus.

Humans make up just 0.01% of life on Earth. Yet humans have changed the balance of life on Earth to such an extent that we are now in the midst of a mass biodiversity extinction event.

This is the the most abrupt and widespread extinction of species since Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago. Enter stage left the ankylosaurus with her swishing tail.

What have we done? We’ve domesticated and farmed animals to such an extent that they now outweigh wild birds and mammals ten-fold. We have encroached on the territory of wildlife and in doing so we have inadvertently caused a virus to jump species.

And still many of us don’t care enough. We narrowly focus on our restricted freedoms all the while ignoring the very factors that caused this outbreak in the beginning. We want life restored as it was with free access to KFC and our friends and family.

The virus is fantastical and deadly. And yet when alert levels drop humans respond by queuing up outside fast food outlets such as McDonalds and KFC to get their ‘fix’. At least one person camped outside KFC recently to be right there when it opened.

And KFC has even offered the government their sites to be used as vaccination spaces in the drive to get Aucklanders jabbed.

Why this continued association of KFC and Covid? Deep fried chicken will clog your heart arteries and contribute to becoming obese and living (or dying) with the health implications of that.

There are more ways to die on this Earth than contracting Covid. In short, factory farmed chicken is hardly a great ambassador for a healthy response to Covid.

And what about the chickens themselves? Too bad that we can’t think of the chicken’s experience of a permanent lockdown in a barn before ending up being deep fried in herbs and spices.

Too bad that we can’t think of the way that meat-eating caused this outbreak in the first place. The outbreak was initially caused by the virus jumping the species barrier from wildlife to humans. Global population growth and the human encroachment on wildlife habitat are the key drivers here. Let’s change the way we live with the Earth.

Our health authorities are not likely to encourage the general population to think more deeply either. The message is to contact trace, test, isolate and vaccinate people. We’re like the very factory farmed animals that we devour.

In Taranaki recently the drive for vaccination was sweetened with a bacon butty. Yet the World Health Organization (WHO) has said that less than two slices of bacon a day increases your chances of colorectal cancer by 18%.

The irony of dealing with a global health issue through feeding people a known carcinogenic seems to be lost somewhere. Its even doubly ironic when you think the bacon came from a domesticated pig who most likely was penned up her entire shortened life.

I can’t help but thinking that the long hard ankylosaurus tail of Delta is just a rehearsal for more mutations.

So will humans face the apocalypse? Will we go the way of the dinosaurs?

Personally I think the writing is on the wall unless we take stock of how we are living and how we treat the Earth and other species.

Time to put down those bacon butties and KFC wings and do some trippy thinking.

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