[WSMDiscuss] King Covid Rules (Satya Sagar)

Sun Apr 12 06:30:03 CEST 2020

Dear Jai Sen

Thanks for your mail and appreciation of my article. On the theme of 'web
of life of Mother Earth', here is a piece I wrote two years ago called
'What on Earth is a Human Being?'. Am pasting the link below:

https://www.ecologise.in/2017/07/16/satya-sagar-earth-human/

best regards

Satya

On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 12:31 AM Jai Sen <jai.sen at cacim.net> wrote:

> Saturday, April 11, 2020
>
> *Viruses in movement…, Ideas in movement…, **Mother Earth in movement…*
>
> [The author, Satya Sagar, is a marvellous story teller, and laces his very
> serious parables with gentle humour.  Read this; I think you’ll not just
> enjoy it but see things in new ways…
>
> [But (and there has to be a but), and not to take away at all from this
> story, there’s then also the story of how King Covid is, of course, in turn
> only part of an even wider and larger, and more profound, web of life of
> Mother Earth, which is the larger whole.  And how in turn that loops around
> and is connected to climate change…  All of which though, I only sense and
> have a crude idea of in my mind, and do not ‘know'.  And maybe that’s
> another story that Satya, you’re working on…? :
>
> [Thanks, Satya ! :
>
> *King Covid Rules*
>
> Satya Sagar
>
> https://countercurrents.org/2020/04/king-covid-rules
>
> It is a capricious little virus with a funny crown and a flimsy protein
> coat, zipping across the planet, leaving behind a trail of utter confusion,
> death, and destruction.
>
> And as nations rush to prevent exposure to COVID-19’s deadly effects, the
> virus is in turn exposing each one of them for whatever they are – good,
> bad or ugly. Depending on their responses to the deadly pandemic – humane
> or cruel, systematic or clumsy – the very innards of their systems are
> today open for everyone to see, like in a public autopsy.
>
> At another level altogether, COVID-19 is stripping the human species
> itself of its various pretensions- of being in command of Planet Earth,
> muscular enough to beat any foe or clever enough to manage any crisis. Or
> for that matter even being ‘human’, as societies respond to the crisis with
> a mix of panic, prejudice and quest for self-preservation over others.
>
> Sure, this is not the first time our world has faced a pandemic – the
> history of deadly infectious diseases like small pox or the plague going
> back several millennia. Despite all the devastation wrought, humans have
> not just survived such microbial assaults, but also developed clever ways
> to prevent or overcome them repeatedly – and will perhaps do so in future
> too.
>
> However, COVID-19 has arrived when, more than any time before in history,
> technological prowess has created the illusion that our species is immune
> to the laws of nature itself. From captains of industry to the politicians
> who front their cause and even among large sections of the general
> population, hubris about human achievements has been the dominant sentiment
> for a long time now.
>
> A good example is the sheer arrogance with which anyone trying to mobilize
> global action to deal with the problem of climate change - potentially an
> even bigger crisis than the current pandemic – was being dismissed by those
> in power for the last decade or more.
>
> ‘Don’t you dare interrupt my orgasm!’ is the refrain of climate-change
> deniers along with those who benefit from the way industrial capitalism is
> set up in the world today – of a tiny minority of humans consuming endless
> amounts of energy while destroying the ecology and very future of the
> planet. (Thanks to COVID-19, much of the globe is today in lockdown mode,
> which is what may be needed to mitigate climate change!)
>
> The malaise in the modern human mindset stems from the belief they are
> above all evolutionary and ecological processes, which stretch back
> millions of years. While this is true of those who deny Darwin’s ideas on
> how life arose on Earth, even those who endorse it in theory, seem to
> believe ‘Yes, evolution happened in the distant past, but today we are in
> the driver’s seat’. This is due to their almost blind conviction, that
> tomorrow’s science can always overcome every problem created by the one
> from yesterday.
>
> What COVID-19 is really telling us in a spectacular and scary way is that
> the story of evolution – a non-linear process driven by many chance events
> –  is not over yet, and never will be. To understand why not, one needs to
> consider that for much of its existence, our planet, formed 4.7 billion
> years ago, has been essentially run by microbes like bacteria and viruses.
> Homo Sapiens, our species, emerged just 200,000 years ago and while we seem
> to dominate the visible world, we are nobodies compared to the invisible
> one, which is stupendous in antiquity, diversity and sheer scale.
>
> Bacteria are better known and recognised for their role in a very wide
> range of essential phenomenon from fertilizing the soil, recycling waste,
> regulating atmospheric gases and even running critical functions within the
> human body. Viruses, poorly understood and studied till recently and not
> even considered a form of ‘life’, are as important as bacteria, if not
> more
> <https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-viruses-secretly-control-planet>,
> and the most abundant biological entities on Earth.
>
> The best current estimate is that there are a whopping 1031 virus
> particles <https://jb.asm.org/content/202/9/e00052-20> in the biosphere.
> If all the viruses on Earth were laid end to end, they would stretch for
> 100 million light years. And in every adult human body, while there are 30
> trillion human cells and also around 39 trillion bacterial cells, that is
> nothing compared to the 380  trillion
> <http://doi.org/10.1016/j.coviro.2011.12.004> viruses that live inside us
> (COVID-19 has come to visit its in-laws).
>
> More significantly, their huge population, combined with rapid rates of
> replication and mutation, make viruses the world’s leading source of
> genetic innovation and key drivers of the evolutionary process. They are
> the ones who have since time immemorial ‘invented’  new genes that find
> their way into other organisms, affecting all life on Earth and often
> determining what will survive.
>
> In other words, what we face in COVID-19 is essentially a force of nature
> – like an invisible tsunami - that cannot be stopped. Yes, ‘infection
> control’ or ‘lockdowns’ can buy some time to prepare better, but in the
> absence of a vaccine the virus will find a way to infect a very large
> section of the human population.  The only thing we can do now is deal with
> the consequences (still not clear in the fog of media-driven panic), to the
> best of our abilities and wait till much of the global population acquires
> herd immunity, as part of a natural ebb and tide of all viral pandemics in
> history.
>
> Ultimately, COVID-19 is also reiterating something that all humans know
> very well, but don’t like to acknowledge because they lack humility; we are
> just perishable biological creatures, like any other plant or animal. In
> the larger context of our planet and certainly the universe, we are so
> minuscule as to be just like microbes themselves (one more reason to treat
> bacteria and viruses with greater respect).
>
> Even more fundamentally, we are products of nature and not ‘above’ it in
> any way. We will be again and again subject to both its creative,
> productive cycles as its sometimes whimsical, destructive ways.  That is
> why preservation and enabling of life in all its forms – using mutual
> cooperation, human solidarity and all resources at our command – can be the
> only meaningful goal for societies, instead of chasing GDP growth or
> accumulation of wealth and military might.
>
> Nowhere is this more tragically clear, than from the current plight of the
> United States, the planet’s ‘top dog’, being ferociously wagged by its tail
> in the ongoing pandemic. The world’s only Superpower is painfully learning,
> that natural phenomenon like climate change or pandemics, cannot be fought
> by fighter aircraft or nuclear weapons or with all the money in the world.
>
> And though POTUS will never acknowledge this, he surely understands today,
> it is not he but COVID-19 that wears a crown, because in fact, the virus is
> the real ‘king’ of the planetary jungle.
>
> *Satya Sagar is a journalist and public health activist who can be
> contacted at sagarnama at gmail.com <sagarnama at gmail.com>*
> ------------------------------
>
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>
> ____________________________
>
> Jai Sen
>
> Independent researcher, editor; Senior Fellow at the School of
> International Development and Globalisation Studies at the University of
> Ottawa
>
> jai.sen at cacim.net
>
> Now based in New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325) and in Ottawa, Canada, on
> unceded and unsurrendered Anishinaabe territory (+1-613-282 2900)
>
> CURRENT / RECENT publications :
>
> Jai Sen, ed, 2018a – *The Movements of Movements, Part 2 : Rethinking Our
> Dance*. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press
> <http://www.pmpress.org/>
>
> Jai Sen, ed, 2018b – *The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us
> Move ?* (Indian edition). New Delhi : AuthorsUpfront, in collaboration
> with OpenWord and PM Press.  Hard copy available at MOM1AmazonIN
> <https://www.amazon.in/dp/9387280101/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1522884070&sr=8-2&keywords=movements+of+movements+jai+sen>
> , MOM1Flipkart
> <https://www.flipkart.com/the-movements-of-movements/p/itmf3zg7h79ecpgj?pid=9789387280106&lid=LSTBOK9789387280106NBA1CH&marketplace=FLIPKART&srno=s_1_1&otracker=search&fm=SEARCH&iid=ff35b702-e6a8-4423-b014-16c84f6f0092.9789387280106.SEARCH&ppt=Search%20Page>,
> and MOM1AUpFront <http://www.authorsupfront.com/movements.htm>
>
> Jai Sen, ed, 2017 – *The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us
> Move ?*.  New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press.  Ebook and
> hard copy available at PM Press <http://www.pmpress.org/>
>
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-- 
Send All Pro-Nukes to Fukushima!!
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