THE MOST IMPORTANT ECOLOGICAL LESSON FROM COVID

The COVID 19 crisis is not a one-time health crisis.

For several decades, the world has gone through many crises that have not been taken seriously. Why?

Many flaws in our way of life and management of the planet are involved: our problematic relationship with nature, which is expressed through a multitude of behaviors that destroy living beings, natural environments and pandemics.

• bird flu,
• swine flu,
• bluetongue …                    in animals from industrial breeding
• viral, bacterial, fungal diseases,
• the golden flavor of the vine,
• xylella fastidiosa of olive trees
• variegated chlorosis of citrus fruits…              in a pandemic state industrial monoculture

The health of the living world is threatened as a whole.

During the period 1970-2010, a new disease decimates forests every 5 years …

There is a general weakening, in particular due to multiple environmental, chemical, bacteriological and food pollution.

The print and broadcast media have almost all put forward a single hypothesis and demonized independent scientists by calling them conspirators, which is the most vile way to destroy a person’s reputation, work and even life.

As for the COVID pandemic, the virus is believed to have come from a bat, via a pangolin from a market in Wuhan, China.

This is the narrow dogma of people who teach that the wilderness is dangerous.

For other pandemics, there has been the dogma of migrating birds, vectors of avian influenza.

In all cases of pandemics, humans are exempt from liability!!!

The “wilderness” is responsible. Do you have to exterminate certain species?!

It is the same for pathologies of cultivated plants: “we must destroy all” weeds “…”.

It is the “war” against all that disturbs because we refuse to choose the path that prevents the development of the undesirable, who in reality are not undesirable, but victims of our ignorance of the “living”.

We come to be afraid of nature! fear of every human, fear of their own body which might be in contact with a germ, a virus and that is isolation. Leaving your house becomes dangerous! …

We manage to adapt a vision of the greatest aberration: everything that is alive in itself is subject to the risk of disease, of death. Machines replace humans who stay at home (a society without human contact).

Fear of nature is a deadly attitude that must be replaced by love of nature. Fear has never been and never will be a good counselor.

The slogan “Save lives, stay home “urgently needs to be replaced by “Save lives, escape isolation and take daily nature baths”.

The fear of the living world inevitably leads to an attitude of war towards the living: industrial battery farming, soil-less cultivation, intensive monocultures, are practices which are real vectors of multi-resistant bacteria and develop viral diseases in the animal world, in the plant world.

The decrease in biodiversity goes hand in hand with an increase in diseases of plants, animals and humans.

Lyme disease developed strongly following ecological changes: a modification of the landscape, the destruction of the puma, a predatory carnivorous mammal that regulated the population of tick-carrying animals. Deer carrying ticks have moved closer to homes. Ticks, the agents of borreliosis transmission, have become more numerous near human populations. The destruction of foxes and other predators encouraged the proliferation of small rodents carrying ticks, etc.

When a link in the complex ecological chains is missing, the terrestrial organism as a whole “soil / plant / animal / human” is seriously disturbed, even destroyed, then bacteria, viruses, fungal diseases… develop in an uncontrolled manner. This is the case for all pandemics.

The intelligent study of nature and its multiple and complex cycles must create in the mind of the public a vision and a global understanding of nature, of the landscapes that we must consider as “super organisms” to be respected and valued…

What to do?

To consider the countryside, the farms as an “organism” where all living beings are welcome. Plants, animals and microorganisms must live in their own context, that is to say in harmonious cohabitation with other living beings and never alone. All are part of a “WHOLE”.

Managing agricultural estates, rural areas and the countryside is a big challenge. Is humanity ready to take up this saving challenge?

What if we learned to be benevolent for every living organism rather than waging a bitter war against the living that we do not understand?

Before acting, let us imbibe the forces of life that the earth contains to discover its secrets which are ultimately only revealed to those who respect life instead of mistreating and destroying it.

J.-C. Rodet

21.02.2021