Rescuing the Climate is Complicated

By SAM URETSKY

Rob Wallace is an evolutionary epidemiologist who unpacks the origins of the novel coronavirus pandemic. It is tempting to say that such plagues have always been part of the human condition. That would be wrong.

To this end, Wallace focuses on the how and why of corporate agribusiness that destroys nature as the driver of emerging infectious diseases, from African swine fever to Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, Ebola, E-coli, foot-and-mouth disease, hepatitis E, Listeria, Nipah virus, Q fever, Salmonella and Vibrio, Yersinia, Zika and scores of influenza variants.

Speaking of the flu, Wallace notes near the end of “Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19” (Monthly Review Press, 2020) that industrial hog and poultry production began with the influenza pandemic of a century past. As he argues, deadly infectious diseases emerge in part from systemic processes of environmental deforestation and destruction.

This is maltreatment of animals, people, soil and water. The process defines and describes modern capitalism as it expands from Europe, Japan and the US to China and nations such as Brazil.

In a preface, the author shares his suffering from the coronavirus. I think that this choice grabs readers.

Wallace recounts contracting the virus as he seeks wage-income. He as a dissident scholar is a part of the migrant labor force.

Written in a linear fashion over the first half of 2020, the author develops his main idea that corporate agribusiness in pursuit of return on investment is releasing pathogens into the human population via the invasion of the natural world. Wallace tracks the implications of capitalist agricultural production, distribution and consumption that is harming the web of life.

The systemic drive to speed up return on investment is the culprit. Corporate selections in the Global North connect with land use actions in the Global South. Animal and human welfare be damned.

Wallace explains how we are susceptible to the pathogens that such a social-political structure creates. The ensuing novel coronavirus cases, deaths and variants are evidence, though obscured by the scientists, whose livelihoods rely upon enabling the corporate forces of destruction driving zoonotic viruses.

Meanwhile in the US, a political duopoly has defunded public healthcare. Instead, we have the medical-industrial complex, a for-profit industry with a political class hell bent on perpetuating it. Underpinning this death spiral are circuits of capital spanning the planet, as Wallace documents.

According to him, a systemic process of capital accumulation of which corporate agribusiness is a part puts animals and humans at-risk of infectious diseases, plagues of the 21st century. Modern transportation such as air travel simply accelerates this trend.

Wallace in part faults mainstream epidemiologists who serve capital for sugarcoating the political and social causes and consequences of industrial farming. One example that he cites in 678 citations is multi-story hog hotels in China to feed a growing nonfarm labor force of peasants leaving rural communities.

This process of peasants becoming wage-laborers to make commodities for sale on the global market replicates on a massive scale what Marx analyzed in England of yesteryear. In a final essay, “To the Bat Cave,” Wallace co-writes with Deborah Wallace, a public health ecologist, they consider the evolutionary history of bats and humans as a lens with which to grasp the transmission of the novel coronavirus. There are surprises here.

There are also mentions of alternate approaches to what ails people and the planet. La Via Campasina is a global peasants’ movement that Wallace writes about as an antidote to corporate farming and habitat destruction.

I recommend this helpful book. Reading it can expand your thinking on the ecology and society in an era of lethal pandemics.

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2021

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