The problem with Climate Change is Coronavirus and the problem with Coronavirus is Climate Change. Go figure. And I promise I’m not trying to confuse you – we get enough of that from our elected compadres (see previous post) so no desire here to continue to screw the pooch/muddy the (polluted) waters/sound like a politician.
The sad reality is that our continuous erosion of vital environmental ecosystems by endless deforestation, expansion of industrial scale agriculture and the forced inhabitation of what probably should be protected forests, coastal areas and wetlands has contributed big time to climate change which in turn has kicked us back up the ass by contributing big time to Covid-19 which has given me the chance to prove that I too can talk smarty pant environmental mumbo like the best of them.
You see poorer farmers in less developed countries have generally been shoved off their small holdings by big agriculture which has forced them to move to cheaper, wilder environmentally sound foresty kinda places where one of the few ways they can make cash (other than flashing their you know what’s on Zoom) is by hunting down some pretty weird creatures to pay for the way too many bills they accumulated thanks to big agro taking the rug from under their paddy field.
This eco migration led one of them to a place where some poor little bat (don’t blame him) gave a big ol’ Corona bug to some cute little armadillo looking thing called a pangolin (don’t blame her) who was then caught by said impoverished ex-smallholder and sold to some not so cute live animal market in you know where. Anyhoo, this sorry, infected pangolin was tout suite bought up by some equally cute little kid who wanted it as a live action stuffed toy or maybe it was bought by some super hungry person who just wanted to eat it. And they’d need to be super hungry cos have you seen the scaly little thing? (NOT the kid) And not exactly top of Michel Roux’s menu. The rest as they say is Corona history. So the next time you’re out trash talking scaly little wild animals think how much this dudes done to change the course of history versus what maybe any of us have done – obviously other than God or Elvis or the guy who invented the Big Mac.
But the reality is that this poor little pangolin who probably sits in some even poorer dudes belly by now, if not she sits right at the top of the U.S.’s most wanted list along with the guy who invented ISIS, may just be the first step in nature’s combined boot back up the ass to us for having decimated nature’s ability to absorb all the gargantuan amounts of CO2 and other noxious gases we pump out while simultaneously destroying nature’s habitats to the point where we’ve killed enough animals to take us straight to the next ice age and back. And all this while we nuke plant life and insects who by the friggin way need each other but apparently nothing like as much as we need them cos without insects and plants we stop the flow of another (non Corona) invisible thingy called oxygen which means we just stop breathing.
So, we may survive this Corona blast from a rewilded past but that won’t matter while we keep raping the planet cos there’s a lot more bat’s and pangolins out there and we seem to have pissed nature off to the point that the next boot back us might just lead to a reverse big bang sucking us into some nano-sized black hole to hell and (no going) back.
The other problem with Coronavirus (sorry) is that right at the point that the airwaves were finally starting to focus on climate change they’ve gotten all bunged up with the Corona meaning that there is a risk Coronavirus might just stick it to climate change as well as all of us. Stay with me. You see Coronavirus doesn’t just attack our bodies and health systems but it also reenforces our politicians innate inability to concentrate on more than one thing at a time (see Brexit) while attacking our economic arteries to the point where no one’s gonna have any money left to fix the climate thingy that gave us Tesla, Virgin Galactic and this damned pandemic in the first place.
And while all this eco tripping doomsday soothsaying just makes me want to go to the pub, Corona/climate change/one little bat and one very cute little pangolin put paid to that too. Christ.
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Philip Letts 