This post was first published on Cylvia's Substack page on March 17th, 2022.  

Just imagine how different the situation in Ukraine would be if humanity had seriously committed to evolving beyond fossil fuel and had had enough wisdom not to build nuclear weapons arsenals and power-plants we can’t fully control.  Had we picked that path Putin would have no leverage and this war would not be happening. 

I strongly support the recent decision by the Biden Administration to ban U.S. import of Russian oil and I am heartened that a large majority of Americans from both parties as well as those registered as non-affiliated voters also supported the ban even though it contributes to increased gasoline prices.  However, the U.S. and global governmental response to try to mitigate increasing fuel costs misses the mark by, once again, turning a blind eye to the dire need to move beyond fossil fuels.  The truly rational response would be a massive, all-in redirection of resources toward efficiency retrofits and renewable energy alternatives.  But that is not what leaders are choosing.  Rather, the response has been to increase oil production and release additional petroleum reserves.  The U.S. is even talking with once-shunned Venezuelan President and petro-dictator Maduro about increasing access to that country’s oil even though the oil extraction industry has decimated ecosystems and local communities.

Compounding the madness is the timing.  The terrorization of the Ukrainian people, the needless suffering and destruction caused by the attack, has dominated media coverage and global attention. So much so, that the recently-released report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) clearly explaining the dire climate impacts that ecosystems and communities around the world are already experiencing – and that are going to get much worse – barely registered with the media and public.

The report paints a stark picture of where we are and where we are heading.  UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put it this way:
Today's IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership. With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change. Nearly half of humanity is living in the danger zone – now.  Many ecosystems are at the point of no return – now. Unchecked carbon pollution is forcing the world's most vulnerable on a frog march to destruction – now. The facts are undeniable. This abdication of leadership is criminal.

The report goes on to state that incremental measures to adapt to climate breakdown such as building sea walls or early weather monitoring systems are no longer going to cut it.  Instead, countries must implement “transformative changes,” shifting where and how people build homes, grow food, produce energy and conserve nature.   This must involve rethinking society’s current methods and habits of consumption.

The recent landmark IPCC report was a culmination of eight years of work exposing the havoc the climate crisis is causing the world. It was expected to be a major wake-up call, but then bombs started smashing into Kyiv.  Ukraine’s leading climate scientist Svitlana Krakovska has said, “I started to think about the parallels between climate change and this war and it’s clear that the roots of both these threats to humanity are found in fossil fuels . . . This is a fossil fuel war. It’s clear we cannot continue to live this way; it will destroy our civilization.”  

Our addiction to fossil fuels and the resulting petropolitics breeds dictators and drives war while our rapacious extraction and combustion of fossil fuels is an assault on nature.  Every oil spill, every additional ton of pollution spewed into the air is another bomb dropping on something beautiful and irreplaceable.   

“Drill baby drill” and “pump, pump, pump” may help keep gas prices artificially low but it also locks us into climate catastrophe and it does nothing to aid Ukraine. It is quite simply and insane and immoral approach. 

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In a pull-no-punches article in The Nation, Mathew Miles Goodrich wrote, “As Vladimir Putin’s war continues to inflict widespread devastation on Ukraine and its people, the feeling of powerlessness only grows deeper for those of us witnessing images of war crimes on the news and social media. But this powerlessness assumes we are mere spectators to this invasion. We’re not. For Americans, our addiction to same-day delivery service and mobility at the click of an app makes us pawns in Putin’s game of petrostate perestroika.” 

The truth is simple, straightforward, and for many too terrible to be faced -- if we want to prevent petro-dictators and ecological collapse and desecration of this beautiful planet we must get off fossil fuels and to do that we must evolve beyond economies and cultures based on rapacious consumerism. 

I know individual actions seem far too small to meet this moment, but apathy and avoidance are our greatest existential threats.  Every one of us alive in this moment is being called to action, called to help redesign humanity’s relationship with one another and with nature.  We do this with our individual actions, our voices, our demands for saner governance, our voting power.  We do this when we choose not to buy, not to drive, not to order the latest gadget just because we can.  Shopping second-hand is a moral action.  Repairing instead of buying new is activism.  Learning to feel that we have enough, that we are enough is a transformational feat. 
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It is hard to fully anticipate how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will reshape the world but along with the great suffering there is also potential for great evolution in this terrible set of events.  Crises often contain the seeds of change, and as the assault on Ukraine rolls on, it’s possible that the suffering and increasingly high fossil fuel prices could stimulate a leap forward toward saner, more life and freedom affirming energy policies and practices.  It’s possible …. if enough of us get serious about trading in the title “consumer” for “citizen-of-Earth.”  What if we made these choices right now?

This was first published on Cylvia's Substack page Feb. 28th, 2022.  Check it out in case you'd like to subscribe.  ...  

Welcome to the very first issue of TRANSCEND.  This is a space where I share my thoughts on issues that I care about like Earth, Nature, spiritual development, and healing the insanity of humanity.  I hope you find some good stuff here.   

To start, I wonder if you ever feel like you just don’t fit into this crazy world?  I have felt that way for most of my life.  I just never had any interest in doing the whole corporate, normal job thing.  Part of it was an innately entrepreneurial nature that liked to run my own schedule, but the bigger piece was a deep sense that the “normal” way of life in my part of the world was just too hard on the planet.  I couldn’t just go along with that because I love this planet, and all the wild diversity of life she supports – I don’t mean just appreciate, or enjoy, I mean deeply, passionately love. 

My entire career has been devoted to working to evolve humanity’s relationship with Nature.  Over the past few years, I faced a bit of an existential crisis when I finally had to admit that all the environmental movement’s efforts to get businesses and governments to choose a saner course had failed.  My work had failed. 

The recent United Nation climate talks made it heart-breakingly clear that solutions aren’t going to come from broken political processes, big business, or consumption-addicted economic mechanisms.  There is just too much buy-in to protecting the status quo, the “normal” way of life.  The insanity of humanity runs too deep in the global consumption-based economy’s major power institutions and in most modern human cultures. 

That’s why I launched my new project, The Rethink.  When COVID struck, I knew “normal” as we’d known it was over and that didn’t make me sad or afraid but rather, oddly exhilarated.  We needed a major disruption of the destructive collective trajectory.  Exhilaration turned to delight when all over the world Nature started to rapidly heal and rebound as the virus forced us to hit pause on the rapacious global economy.  Skies and waters cleared of pollution and wild species moved back into open spaces.  As people stopped commuting and travelling and our vehicles stayed parked, the very surface of the planet quieted; scientists literally measured less trembling of Earth’s skin.  Beautiful, clear, real-time evidence that the planet will heal if we take our collective foot of her back.  To get a sense of how much possibility exists I highly recommend watching the documentary The Year Earth Changed.  It will blow your mind how fast Earth and her beings can heal and how much better human lives could be if we change course. 

At the same time, with programs like extended unemployment benefits and small business relief funds millions of people got a chance to see what it might be like not to have to grind all the time just to pay basic bills.  Over the past two years huge numbers of people have left meaningless, low-paid jobs in pursuit of something more fulfilling and aspirational.  It was a chance for millions to ask the underlying important question, “was the economy working for us, or have we just been working for the economy?”  

Many of us have COVID to thank for strengthening ties with our neighbors and friends and being reminded that community is one of the most precious currencies. 

Not surprisingly, the response from political leaders and status quo interests was to do everything possible to get us “back to normal” and to get the economy growing, wasting, and polluting again, to ratchet up the GDP.  Of course, that’s a fundamentally insane approach on a planet already made ill by our constant pursuit of limitless economic growth.  Our trajectory has to change. 

And change it will, one way or another.  In fact, radical change is already under way – changes in and on the Earth, changes in relationships among nations, changes in human consciousness.  Some of these are already very difficult and are going to become more so.  However, some are laying the foundation for birthing a better world and ways of being.  We don’t hear about it on mainstream media but there’s a whole New Economy movement underway.  Many of the new world-builders don’t even know they’re part of it.  This movement for a world that works better for all beings is robust and gaining momentum as more and more people, entrepreneurs, businesses and organizations say, “enough is enough” and get busy creating healthier, more equitable, more beautiful ways of making a living, doing business, and doing good. 

We are living in an extraordinary time of change and pressure and potential.  What’s needed in this time is a shift in consciousness, an evolution in modern humanity’s understanding of our place in, and relationship to the rest of Nature.  This will not come from governmental programs, but rather from a massive groundswell of people thinking and acting differently.  As old norms crack, we, those of us alive right now, have a genuine, powerful opportunity to create a better more beautiful world. 

It’s been said that if you ask the wrong questions the answers don’t matter.  Unfortunately, we live in a time when elected leaders, major media, and even most well-meaning non-profit organizations fail to ask the deeper questions.  Taking on deep, uncomfortable, paradigm-challenging questions and issues is my specialty.  Instead of “How do we get the economy growing?”  We should be asking, “Should we get the economy growing given that it requires the desecration of nature to do so?”  I encourage people to ask, “What’s the economy for anyway?”  Should we be shipping plastic stuff back and forth across our oceans on thousands of massive cargo ships carrying millions of containers of stuff?  Shouldn’t it matter that when COVID led to a decrease in shipping traffic humpback whales changed and expanded their songs because they could hear one another again?  Mothers were more successful raising healthy babies because they were able to leave the calves and group together to hunt as a team.  They did this because they could hear and check in with their babies for the first time in decades.  Shouldn’t we change the way we do things so that other species can actually hear, and thrive? 

I’m also increasingly unabashed in talking about the spiritual component and the role of collective consciousness in navigating through this pivotal time.  Climate change and the desecration of nature are not political issues; they are spiritual and moral issues. 

This is indeed a challenging, tumultuous time, but also a time of profound possibility.  It will not be easy to reinvent the world, but with love and firm intention we can do it. This is the time to transcend. 
Here’s a little parting gift:

Guide to Living Well in Transformational (possibly Transcendent) Times
·      Nourish community.  Engage and build relationships. These connections add support and richness to our lives and are especially important during times of profound change. 
·      Notice beauty, celebrate, love Nature (everywhere you can).  We are a biophilic species. 
·      Learn about what new world supporting organizations are doing and apply those measures in ways large or small as you can.  Some of those are listed on The ReThink. 
·      Nourish yourself as a spiritual being in whatever manner brings you joy and growth. 
·      Spend some time imagining the new, more beautiful world you want.  All things are created twice – once in imagination and then in the material.  Imagination has tremendous power. 
​
If you are one of us who don’t feel you fit in to this crazy world CELEBRATE!  You get to be part of creating something far, far better. 
With reverence and hope for this extraordinary time,
Cylvia

So now that the spread of coronavirus is slowing a bit in China, the Chinese government is beginning to ramp back up its manufacturing facilities. However, given the shutdowns in the largest exports markets in Europe and U.S., the demand for Chinese products is still way down.
Right now, while factories have slowed or shut down in China, Europe, the U.S. and other places, would be a perfect time to put a lot of people to work upgrading and improving energy efficiency and pollution control measures, and installing renewable energy options in the furloughed factories around the world. This should be a component in any economic stimulus package and it should be acted on right now while people desperately need jobs and the factories are in time out.
In addition, though we are still in the acute crisis and that must be the primary focus of action just now, it would make immanent sense to begin very thoughtful, visionary yet practical strategic planning effort for how we might be able to come out the other side of this with much healthier, saner and resilient economic systems.

It should serve as a stunning existential wake up call that the only real winner in this crisis at this point is the planet. Air pollution is down, climate change emissions have dropped precipitously, water pollution is down – the canals of Venice actually look like water again! Even wildlife trafficking and consumption is down. All of this is happening because we’ve been forced to push pause on an economic system that “creates” stuff at the price of destroying natural systems and our planetary life support structures. The respite being delivered by the pandemic-induced time-out could be no clearer evidence that we have built a global economy that is dependent upon the destruction of our planetary life-support systems.

The Coronavirus is the most immediate, but it is not the biggest threat before us. The bigger issue, and far greater challenge and opportunity, is what the COVID-19 crisis reveals about our fundamentally unsustainable, consumption-driven global economic system. If we really open up to taking a hard look at that, we have the potential to shift from crisis to evolution.

As nations begin to think through how to ramp up economic activity in the wake of the pandemic we will likely hear the dangerous but familiar rallying cry of “buy, buy, buy, grow, grow, grow.” If the sole focus is to just get things going like they were before we will simply return to the perilous delusion that economic growth trumps the health of the planet. We must get very clear and innovative in considering the type of economic growth we want and the type we do not want, such as highly polluting, poor paying industries and disposable plastic widgets.
I’ll be posting a more detailed piece of growth of what and for what in days to come.   In the meantime, I see four major steps and opportunities in handling this crisis.

• First, put everything into controlling the virus and protecting front-line workers and directly supporting people who have lost jobs and income.   . The Trump administration failed us disastrously by, once again ignoring science and the advice of advisors who were urging major action as early as January – now we need a full-court press to catch up. At the same time we need aggressive, non-pork economic support and stimulus. Congress just passed a massive and essential economic stimulus package. It remains to be seen exactly what is in it but it does include direct payments to citizens and I am delighted to note, it does not include bailout of the cruise ship industry.

​As soon as we can get better access to testing and masks, etc., there should be a massive retraining of workers from currently devastated industries like restaurant and hospitality into health care and elder care support positions.

Given that President Trump finally listened to scientific advisors and acknowledged that the health threat will require the social distancing policies for at least another month, the economic implications for the record number of laid off workers is going to be very severe. We will need a number of additional stimulus packages just to help people meet basic shelter and food needs. As I wrote in an earlier post, this is a time we should be seriously considered a Guaranteed Basic Income approach.

There will likely also need to be measures to try to prevent implosion of the banking and financial transaction systems. We must not let this implode to the point where banks lock people out of accounts, ATMs are shut down, etc. as has happened in the collapse in Greece in 2015.

• Second, as I noted above, while industry is at a slow down this is the time to put people to work upgrading, cleaning up and reducing carbon footprints of manufacturing facilities. Funding for these measures would be a smart component of governmental economic stimulus packages.
• Third, develop and invest in a massive workforce transformation campaign. This should include some of the lasting changes that are likely to result from this unprecedented time such as the shift to remote working, the increase in online shopping and associated delivery options. Another aspect of this should be an aggressive shift from employment in non-essential, highly polluting industries to employment that is productive for society.
• Fourth, as we clear the immediate crisis, gain control of the virus, develop a vaccine, we need to be very strategic about the kind of economic growth we pursue. This would be the perfect time to implement some version a Green New Deal that would provide jobs, business opportunities by tackling climate change, income inequality and the poverty pandemic.

Some areas to consider. The coal industry continues to clamor for governmental aid to overcome a steep decline in demand due to growth in renewables and the natural gas boom.   The coal industry makes the claim that it absolutely critical to securing a domestic supply of affordable electricity and providing jobs. Based on this claim, as reported by Reuters, the industry has requested executive action from the President to suspend or reduce royalties and reduce its legal obligations for environmental clean up of mining sites and health assistance to victims of black lung disease.

Meanwhile the renewable energy industry is facing severe downturns as a result of the pandemic. The Solar Energy Industries Association has reported it’s the solar industry could lose up to half its workforce due to the virus because a significant share of solar jobs is dependent on large projects being built that are likely to be out on hold. Similarly, the wind industry was set to have a record-breaking year this year but is now facing massive scale backs due to the virus.

As we think through how to keep people employed and get them back to work here’s an interesting comparison. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the coal industry employed 50,600 people in February, down 35 percent from ten years ago. According to the Energy Information Administration coal-fired power plants generated 23.5 percent of U.S. electricity last year, down from over 44 percent ten years earlier.

By contrast renewable energy has been growing steadily. It produced 17.5 percent of U.S. electricity last year. According to the Solar Foundation, solar alone employed over 249,800 people in 2019. Add wind, geothermal, etc. and it is clear renewables dwarfs coal in employment. An another fossil fuel note, the oil industry has been massively subsidized by the federal government for decades and with new technologies in drilling there is now a global glut of oil and prices have plummeted. Not even accounting for the environmental damage caused by fossil fuel extraction and consumption, the economics don’t add up.

It seems to me a solid plan to add stimulus to industries of the future and to support people currently employed in industries that are in decline to transition into new, more needed and secure career tracks.
Another aspect of Green New Deal type of stimulus package could include attaching strong climate, environmental and fair labor requirements to industries that do get bail outs and stimulus funding. After the 2008 financial crisis, President Obama required General Motors and Chrysler to implement stringent new fuel economy standards in exchange for the bail-out money they received. This was a huge step forward in auto efficiency and competitive strength for the U.S. auto industry.

Make no mistake, this current economic time-out is going to have lasting effects and it is going to require massive public investment and rethinking to recover. Now it the time not just to try to go back to normal, but to stimulate economic growth that will benefit all of society. This is the time to create jobs doing what society needs to have done – rebuilding our infrastructure in a way that reduces global warming pollution, cleans our air and water and increases resiliency to the environmental changes already underway, building and repairing affordable housing, restoring wetlands, rivers, forests and beaches, strengthening local agriculture and community businesses, caring for our elderly populations.

If this seems too big to take on remember, the coronavirus pandemic is a force of Nature; the economy is not! The economy is a human construct. We created it and we change and shape it all the time. We invented it so we can reinvent it. The goal should not be to restart the economy but to reset it.
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A final note: down the road a ways we are going to need to figure out how to deal with a staggering amount of national debt by most major nations. Prior to the pandemic crisis a vast percentage of the much-touted growth in GDP has been accomplished through unprecedented increases in debt. Debt is now growing at a skyrocketing scale with the various stimulus and bailout measures that nations of the world are implementing to deal with the coronavirus situation. On the other side of the crisis the debt burden will be a truly unmanageable and unstable situation, which, though tricky, is yet another potential lever for fundamental economic reset. I will be doing an article about the need to shift past GDP, and especially debt-driven growth, as a metric of economic success in my next article.

BE WELL Everyone!
Cylvia

The first crisis point of the COVID-19 disaster was figuring out how to respond, after being caught flat-footed, to the immediate health threat. Now that the death curve in many places has begun to flatten and the scope of economic disaster is hitting home, we are approaching crisis point two, which is all about how we move toward “reopening” the economy.

In the next weeks, as the economic pain and fear increases, the clamor to “get back to normal” is going to ramp up. Some politicians, sensing political opportunity, are already stoking that foment. The outcry for normalcy will certainly gain momentum.

The point that must be recognized and discussed, that begs our attention, is the fact that “normal” was killing us.

Most of our politicians and the for-profit media portray the economic disaster we are currently facing as strictly Covid-caused. It’s not. For many, many Americans the “normal” economy was already broken long before the first patients fell ill.   C-19 is merely revealing fundamental flaws in societal and economic norms that have been eroding upward mobility, impoverishing entire communities and devastating the environment.

Before the onset of the pandemic more than fifty percent of all Americans were living paycheck to paycheck with little or no savings.  In other words more than half of us were already living below or near the poverty line – half! Most at that marginal level were working long hours and multiple jobs just to pay monthly expenses, stay slightly above water and do their part to keep the economy growing. You could certainly make the argument the economy wasn’t really working for them; rather they were working their hearts out to feed the status quo economy.

At the same time, Income inequality in the U.S. was off the charts. Over the past fifty years, the highest earning twenty percent of households have steadily brought in a greater portion of overall income in the country. In 2018, the top twenty percent captured more than half of all income in the country. Income inequality in the U.S. is higher than any other G-7 country including the UK, Japan, Italy, Canada, Germany and France. Now more than ever before achieving the American Dream depends upon your zip code. Due to imbedded biases toward the wealthy and privileged, “upward mobility” in this country is constrained, as never before, by income, race, and where we currently live. We have accepted as normal a Robin Hood society, in which wealth is systematically distributed upward from the poor to the rich.

Meanwhile, this same economic system that was failing millions of Americans, relied upon chewing up natural resources and ecosystems at a relentless, rapacious pace. The large-scale sacrifice of environmental health for economic growth was also accepted as normal. It should serve as a stunning existential wake-up call that the only real winner in the COVID-19 crisis at this point is the planet. Air pollution is down; climate change emissions have dropped precipitously; water pollution is down. Even wildlife trafficking and consumption is down. All of this is happening because we’ve been forced to push pause on an economic system that is fundamentally unsustainable in that it grows by destroying natural systems and our planetary life support structures.

Here’s yet another aspect of normal that should give us serious pause. COVID-19 shows that our status quo economic system is devastatingly fragile. For the massive numbers of people at or near the poverty line loss of a job means immediate crisis. The public support programs being pushed out now, while essential, are adding to a level of national debt already unprecedented and which we have no real idea how to deal with. In fact, the bulk of economic growth over the past couple of decades has largely been debt driven, and that was viewed as normal. Add to this, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry stopped manufacturing antibiotics because they don’t turn as much profit as other, less universally necessary drugs; we now get 97 of our antibiotics from China. Meanwhile Big Pharma, artificially hikes rates of certain life-saving drugs and, like big Oil, gobbles up millions in federal subsidies each year. Our seemingly robust U.S. economy was a house made of cards and COVID-19 blew in a mighty wind. It was a stress test for our current economic system and the system failed; this economy of, by and for the ultra-wealthy was eviscerated by a virus.

In a powerful cautionary tale, remember that after the great recession of 2008, for the most part, we did just go back to normal; we got the economic engine churning again and through hard labor, escalating environmental destruction, propping up Wall Street and the finance industry, blowing open oil and gas drilling, and mushrooming the chasm between the ultra-wealthy and all the rest of us. And, well, that led us to where we are today.

Just because a thing is normal doesn’t mean it’s good.

We have before us a decision of epic magnitude. We can let the discomfort and fear overwhelm us and put all of our energy into getting things back to the way they were, or, we can take a stand for creating a new normal. This is the biggest challenge and opportunity of our era.
Right now, as we are still, mostly, in this abnormal space of relative stillness, with life-as-we-have-known-it on pause, is the perfect time to ask what would we like “normal” to look like?

• What kind of work would we like to do?
• How much would we like to work?
• Do we really need to drive to work everyday?
• What kind of businesses would we like to see in our community?
• How and how much would we like to travel?
• Are we really OK with so much wealth in the hands of so few?
• Are we really OK with the ecological destruction that has been normalized?
• What actually makes us happy?

It is so critically important to remember the economy is not an act of God or a force of Nature. It is a human-made construct. We invented it and groom and redirect it all the time. That means we can reinvent it, now.

Let’s not waste this crisis. Let’s not let all the lives and livelihoods lost just be collateral damage of a broken system but rather the impetus to create anew a world that works better for all of us.

​We need a new normal and there has never been a better chance to create one.

The COVID-19 crisis is a reminder that humanity is inextricably connected to one another and the other species that share this planet with us. As the virus tears across the globe, nations are helping other nations and states helping other states. This is both an act of compassion and wise self-interest since the virus is no respecter of race, walls or national borders. Conflicts between nations have fallen into the background as we gather around a common enemy. It’s a bit as if space aliens have shown up and all the sudden we have a bigger problem than fighting with one another.

At the local level, there is an incredible outpouring of compassion and huge uptick in reaching out to and helping our neighbors. Being suddenly shut off from one another we realize how much we actually value other members of our community. I even heard a BBC report that in some places in Africa gangsters have switched from distributing drugs to distributing food in neighborhoods they normally terrorize.
If we’re lucky, and smart, some of these new ways of being with and toward one another will stick once we’ve made it to the other side of this particular global crisis.

There’s another layer of connectedness this pandemic reveals and that is the direct connection between humans, other species and the planet that sustains us all. Scientists now believe COVID-19 originated in Wuhan China from bats that transferred the virus to another species that then transferred it to humans. The place this likely happened is a place of commerce called a “wet market” because live animals are held there, often stacked on top of each other, to be purchased for human consumption. The most probable intermediary host was a pangolin, otherwise known as a scaly anteater. The pangolin is consumed in many Asian countries for its meat and the scales are consumed for their “medicinal value” believed to cure such maladies as excessive nervousness, excessive crying in children, cancer and sluggish breast milk production in women. The scales are also used to make everything from jewelry to high-end cowboy boots. Pangolins are now the most trafficked wild animal in the world and are critically endangered.

Wet markets are places of torture and terror. Wild and domesticated animals are kept in horrific conditions until selected for slaughter. The cat-sized pangolins are often force fed gravel to increase their weight and then kept balled up hanging or piled in nets. It might not be politically correct to say so, but the practice of consuming wild species due to some myth that it will cure your ills or make you more sexually potent is immoral. Period.

But let’s not fool ourselves that these horrendous and dangerous practices only occur in some far off place. As horrific as wet markets are, they really are no worse than commercial factory farms in the West. Those places are equal in terms of terrible conditions, suffering and terror (and by the way, I’m an old farm girl – I’ve seen it first hand). They are also equally dangerous to human health. The deadly flu pandemic of 1918 is believed to have originated in a massive chicken farm in Kansas. The swine flu pandemic originated in a crowded factory pig farm in Veracruz Mexico.

Forcing animals to live their lives in the torturous conditions inherent to factory farms is immoral. Period. It’s also dangerous to human health.
Not only are these animal factories the original source of pandemic diseases, but they also greatly imperil the people who work in them and the surrounding communities. Right now COVID-19 infections are exploding in these plants and they are finally being forced to shut down. The Smithfield Foods Meatpacking Plant in Sioux Falls Idaho alone is now one of the leading hotspots for infection in the United States. Half of Idaho’s total infections are in workers from that one plant.

To get a peak at the magnitude of this issue, consider this truly staggering current condition. According to a landmark 2018 study by the National Academy of Sciences, by weight humans and our livestock species now make up 96 percent of all mammal life on the planet. Humans ourselves account for about 36 percent of the biomass of all mammals and our domesticated livestock, mostly cows and pigs, account for the other 60 percent. This means that human expansion and our mass cultivation of livestock has reduced wild mammals to only 4 percent of all mammalian life on Earth. Similarly, the biomass of poultry is about three times higher than that of wild birds. This is a profound reshaping of the composition of living creatures on our planet. We tell children’s stories filled with lions and deer and frogs and hedgehogs but a more accurate depiction would be stories populated with caged cows, pigs and chickens. Is this really how we want our world to look and function?

One of the many profound learning opportunities the coronavirus is presenting is rethinking our relationship to animals, particularly those we “harvest” for food, materials and so-called medicines -- the billions of creatures every year that suffer to meet the demand of human consumption at massive scale.

Perhaps there is an opportunity here to repair the bond we share with so many of the creatures that co-inhabit our world. Perhaps these pandemics are the pigs and the pangolins fighting back, Nature saying no more. If we’re lucky, and smart, we’ll listen.

​We are after all inextricably connected to one another whether we realize it or not. The root of the word crisis traces back to the Greek word meaning “to decide,” many monumental decision points are before us at this historic time.