Covid, Climate and the Systems View of Life

IN THE course of a year, the Covid-19 pandemic has infected 100,000,000 people, killed more than two million, led to a massive increase in the number of people suffering acute anxiety and mental health problems, and reduced incomes worldwide.

The latter has had a crushing effect on those who, at the best of times, find it a struggle to live.

According to the IMF, Covid-19 has cost the global economy (as of October, 2020) £21.5 trillion, which translates into a considerable loss of money to public services.

Another cost is the curtailment on people living their life to the full, as in not been able to take part in cultural and sporting events, socialise, form friendships, exchange and test ideas and provide each other with emotional sustenance.

School pupils, college and university students are an example of a set of people whose education and personal development has been negatively impacted by the necessary health restrictions.

In spite of the social visibility of the virus, there is a difficult to calculate but sizeable number of people who believe it is all a hoax, contrived and disseminated by unnamed powerful individuals to increase their level of control over people’s lives.

Credence to this perspective appears to be on the basis of emotionally identifying with the source, rather than on critical assessment.

Perspectives that have no basis in science act as a vector for the virus, as they reduce caution.

There is another group of people who, in the spirit of libertarianism, say they won’t be told what to do and, therefore, regardless of whether they believe Covid-19 exists or not, don’t follow the health guidelines, and say they won’t be vaccinated.

People with these mindsets turned out in high numbers at Donald Trump’s presidency rallies and some have protested outside Downing Street, on the streets of Dublin and Belfast, in the Netherlands, Denmark and Spain.

Whatever reason people have for not believing that Covid-19 exists, or for not abiding by the health guidelines, it is critically important that they are persuaded that the virus is as real as Fermanagh rain if it is to be eliminated.

This is because the pandemic shows that we are not – as libertarians believe – discrete autonomous individuals who can behave as we like but, rather, are part of a symbiotic community.

Our interconnectedness pertains to an even greater catastrophe than Covid-19, which is our ruination of the biosphere through global warming, deforestation, the building of mega dams, our poisoning of the air, water and soil, to mention but a few of the environmental harms we exacerbate by the day.

To take just one harm caused by our reckless regard for nonhuman nature, 8.8 million people die prematurely every year due to outdoor air pollution – a death rate that far exceeds that of Covid-19.

Indoor air pollution also takes a heavy toll.

Covid-19 provides the world with what one hopes is not too late a reminder that individualism, long considered by western societies as a desirable character trait, is counter to the common good unless imbued with a strong sense of community responsibility, and underpinned by an understanding of the systems' view of life.

This view holds that all things are connected, and share a common interest, and that we, for good or ill, affect each other.

It means, as Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi write in the preface to their book on the subject, “thinking in terms of relationships, patterns and context”.

Individualism is on display in ordinary everyday events, such as when a farmer – thinking that they can do what they like with the land they are custodians of – digs up a mature hedgerow and sets it alight.

When this happens, harm is caused to neighbours and passers-by who breathe in the toxic smoke, and the survival prospects of innumerable creatures is undermined through the loss of habitat.

There is also a cultural and aesthetic loss. People who litter may tell themselves that they have a right to behave as they want to, blithely ignoring the fact that they are harming the bio-community and the livelihood of farmers whose cattle and sheep are liable to swallow what they have scattered around them, or thrown out of a vehicle window.

In spite of errors of judgement and decades of ignoring scientific evidence of the strong likelihood of a pandemic, governments who are acting with great urgency to address Covid-19 are to be commended.

However, unless they imbue the cultural milieu through public education programmes with a systems view of life, pandemics will reoccur, the climate will continue to get warmer, air pollution along with other environmental woes will get worse, and as the research shows, we will by the century’s end be living on a planet that is unable to provide for human need or support other life-forms.

Thankfully, it is not too late to adopt a systems mindset and, in doing so, make the world a better one for everyone to live in.