Microbes of Empire

Abstract

In the ancient world, plague spoke in the language of the gods: it was the natural—which is to say divine—world's way of manifesting a rupture in the social order. The ancients' understanding of the connection between these worlds has been severed over time, but perhaps the contemporary moment can return us to that sacred insight. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has witnessed a proliferation of devastating climate disasters in the form of record-setting temperatures, especially heat waves, and accompanying droughts, fires, hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, monsoons, and landslides. In the analysis that surfaced at the 1989 conference, the new viruses emerged as evidence of the unforeseen and disastrous consequences of that progress: the technological and other advances that contributed to increasing globalization and development practices, including improved transportation that moved people and goods more rapidly around the globe and the settlement of a growing population in previously sparsely inhabited or uninhabited areas around the world. [...]just as the social and global inequities are etched in the health outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic, they are expressed, as the environmental justice movement has shown, in the inequitable distribution of environmental risks: manifestations of the practices of human exploitations intrinsic to colonialism and empire. Writing in Science in 2000, the Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg, who had given a keynote address at the 1989 conference, noted how the very human innovations that had spelled evolutionary success (increased longevity, for example) had "fostered new vulnerabilities: crowding of humans, with slums cheek by jowl with jet setters' villas;the destruction of forests for agriculture and suburbanization, which has led to closer human contact with disease-carrying rodents and ticks;and routine long-distance travel.