Living and Dying in the Anthropocene

[Anthropocene /?anθr?p??si?n/ noun: the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.]

Suddenly everything has changed. It is as if humankind has been  shocked out of the complacency of assuming tomorrow will be like yesterday and that our actions have no consequences on the environment. To prevent the deaths of thousands of people, we’ve changed the way we live itself, denying our social and commercial activities, neglecting our livelihoods and isolating ourselves. Scientists are saying that the shock of this pandemic is a symptom of this epoch known as the anthropocene during which human activity has had a significant impact on geology and ecosystems  including climate change. More and worse, they say, is to come

“We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it,” David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic’, recently wrote in the New York Times. Increasingly, scientists are finding that viruses which jump the species barrier from wild animals to humans are linked to environmental change and human behaviour; they do not respect species boundaries. It is thought this is what caused the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 which causes COVID-19. SARS-CoV, the virus which caused the SARS outbreak in 2003, jumped from an animal reservoir (civet cats, a farmed wild animal) to humans and then spread between humans. In a similar way, it is thought that SARS-CoV-2 jumped the species barrier and initially infected humans, but more likely through an intermediate host, that is another animal species more likely to be handled by humans - this could be a domestic animal, a wild animal, or a domesticated wild animal and, as of yet, has not been identified. The World Health Organisation points out on its website that until the source of this virus is identified and controlled, there is a risk of reintroduction of the virus in the human population and the risk of new outbreaks like the ones we are currently experiencing.

Nature poses threats, but it’s human activities that do the real damage. “The health risks in a natural environment can be made much worse when we interfere with it,” says Richard Ostfeld, a senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York.

Like the coronavirus pandemic, the climate emergency requires humans to completely change the way we live, if we are to mitigate  and adapt to its effects of the rising sea-level, more frequent and more intense natural disasters.

I have seen glimpses of this future before this pandemic as a journalist in Leyte in November 2002. A helicopter from Tacloban to Cebu revealed the terrible destruction of the island from Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan): not a single coconut tree of the many thousands that had covered the island was left standing. In the days before I’d seen how centuries of communities living and working together in Tacloban and Palo had been wiped out. A body was laid out at a bus stop, covered only with a dirty cloth. Rubble, sticks and wreckage was all that was left of monuments to a proud civic history, cathedrals, grand mansions, proper houses and makeshift shelters alike. The previously imposing and historic city hall had been set with pleasing symmetry in the plaza, but on that darkest of nights, as emergency vehicles and camera crews passed by, thick shadows loomed over the wreckage and trapped corpses tilting jagged edges of light and dark against each other at crazy, improbable angles. Documents, archives, and records were strewed about, sodden and pointless. The lived experiences of generations were laid waste. Nothing was left. The people had fled. History had been obliterated.

In the avenues and boulevards of the world’s greatest cities today, I feel the same sense of loss, the absurdity of human activity, the end of civilisation and time. They are empty; monuments of cruel empire stand unadmired and unattended. Wild animals are reclaiming suburbs, while urban millions flee the viral load of human company.

The Anthropocene poses fundamental questions “What does it mean to be human?” and “What does it mean to live?”, it personalises them — “What does my life mean in the face of death?” — universalises them and places them against the unimaginably vast scale of geological time. “What does human existence mean against 100,000 years of climate change? What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end?” asks Roy Scranton in his 2013 essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” for the New York Times.

The end of the world as we know it, death (my death and the death of humankind) hides in every moment; the Anthropocene makes of human existence but brief moment. This epochal understanding of everything we are and have ever known is at once mind-boggling and liberating. Accepting the notion of imminent death is something I found myself struggling with during days filled with disaster and conflict. Death is the ultimate reality of our existence on this blue speck whirling slowly in the wilderness of space.

The emergence of this latest coronavirus has become a kind of metaphor for the death of a way of life that is profoundly upsetting the balance of the planet itself. Could we, individually and collectively, understand it as a way of resetting our place on earth and in the heavens? Could it be a call from the universe itself to  remember just how very brief is life? Could it liberate our species to consider how to live life so that we may die well?

Every decision and every action, fleeting and tiny, suddenly bursts with possibility and promise. Here, now - this is life.