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Can COVID-19 Save Lifeboat Earth?
Harbhajan Singh asks [6 April 2020]: “Could COVID-19 save Lifeboat Earth?”
Many realize that eliminating humanity would make Earth healthier for Nature, plants and animals.
Many also realize that without profound changes to human behavior — by everybody, everywhere; including limiting population growth and ending greenhouse gas emissions — that humanity can not exist in balance with Nature, and both will increasingly suffer, eventually — in a few lifetimes? — fatally.
It is well documented that as human encroachment and destruction of Nature (e.g., environments and biodiversity) advances, that habitability decreases.
That decrease is due to a combination of:
— pollution (bad air, ocean plastic, dead seas, lost topsoil, lost forests, toxic land);
— climate change (and more violent weather, floods, droughts, wildfires);
— food source degradation (inorganic industrial farming, loss of natural varietals, loss of seafood), and
— greater hazards of releasing viruses (epidemics and pandemics) fatal to people.
The scientific reports get very specific on ‘this particular negative effect has this particular [human stupidity] cause’, but in aggregate they show what I’ve just outlined.
More people are realizing that humanity’s accelerating encroachment and destruction of Nature can only cause more deadly virus pandemics to plague us. Hotter environmental temperatures from global warming, and greater particulate and noxious gases pollution from human activity (industrialization, capitalism, militarism) aggravate the severity and lethality of all respiratory illnesses, like COVID-19.
I prefer that humanity became vastly more intelligent, and cooperative, and altruistic, and balances its existence (both individual and collective) with Nature’s timeless rhythms and geophysical limits.
The most important aspect of that wished-for cooperativeness is that we cease viewing each other as deadly rivals in a grim zero-sum game of making-money one-upmanship and competing narcissistic schemes of enslaving others.
Miraculously, the Earth is the most wonderful Paradise we know of in the entire Universe. If we treated it as such, instead of treating it like a garbage dump and sewer, it would return that appreciation, and we would knowingly experience life in this actual Paradise, for ourselves and for endless future generations.
This is not just poetry, it is fact.
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manuelgarciajr 
yup
Quote,
“The sun with all the planets revolving around it and depending on it, can still ripen grapes as if it had nothing else to do.” — Gallilleo
IS CORONAVIRUS DYING OUT NOW?
(Rich Lancaster and MG,Jr. discuss it.)
14 April 2020
Rich Lancaster:
Just checking country stats all over the world and the story is the same almost everywhere, with few exceptions. This phase of the virus is on the decline across the board, almost like it’s dying of its own accord. I don’t think isolation and social distancing alone can explain this, because it’s ubiquitous and isolation and social distancing were not. Chile was one country with a rising death rate still. In my opinion (there’s no need to be like that), it’s over for now but for a few more weeks of isolation to clean it up and prepare for back to work.
[IMAGE (found by Rich Lancaster) of Coronavirus incidence worldwide, not shown here].
Rich Lancaster:
All the data seems to show that the past 3-4 days most of the US has had declining deaths, same across the world. I don’t see how it can suddenly reverse from here without everyone coming out of isolation.
MG,Jr.:
So long as the virus remains in human hosts, and remains virulent (doesn’t ‘die out’ on its own), and there is no cure or preventative vaccine, then a resurgence of epidemics could occur once people “get close” again.
Rich Lancaster:
It’s kind of weird how it’s simultaneously flaming out all over the world, and you know it’s not because of isolation and testing in many developing nations. I think it’s fizzling out, just a hunch, but what else explains the down numbers across the US and across the world, it’s the same almost everywhere I look for the past 3-4 days.
MG,Jr.:
Flu viruses do that. They ‘fizzle out’ and then mutate into new strains for next year. There are 200 varieties of “common cold” viruses (which can ‘shift’), which is what makes it impossible to arrive at a drug cure or vaccine for the common cold. Similarly with flu, where the epidemiologists, virologists and drug makers have to identify/decipher the likely strain(s) to come out of Eurasia in early fall, so as to race to make vaccines – and test them to assure safety – and then manufacture them in quantity and get them to hospitals/distribution for the public. Every year it’s a race.
Flu viruses ‘incubate’ or ‘hibernate’ themselves in wild water fowl (mainly), without making them sick, between spring/summer and early fall, and then leap out to humans via avian hosts (birds, sometimes bats) to farm animals (chickens, pigs) then to humans, every year. Why water fowl?: because they migrate far and wide and can spread the viruses to many fall-to-summer populations. Why Eurasia (mainly Asia)?: because it is a huge landmass with thousands of wetlands for waterfowl to move between and sustain themselves.
The 1918 flu came out of Haskell County, Kansas, from swine-to-humans (and from birds to swine before that), first infecting the soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas, and from there was carried along the U.S. Army routes to WWI in Europe, and from there fanned out worldwide. It’s only the “Spanish Flu” because the Spanish newspapers did not censor reports about that deadly flu, and that is how most of the world public learned about it (as they were dropping dead in droves). The WWI belligerents censored this news because didn’t want to “alarm” their publics whom they wanted to keep engaged in fighting the shooting war.
The more you learn about viruses, the more awesomely scary it gets. There are at least 4 kinds of viruses that can directly cause cancer. There are umpteen viruses hosted by wild animals (and our pets and livestock) that cause them no harm, but if they mutated (and viruses are “drift” and “shift” mutation champs) to be able to invade humans could be terrible for us. Humanity’s “war” with viruses and bacteria (plenty of bad guys there, too, and becoming drug resistant) is continuous and never-ending. Fascinating.