The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Invisibility of Nature
Artwork by Sophia Baraschi-Ehrlich
by Michael McCarthy
As rampant urbanization increasingly severs humanity from the living world, naturalist Michael McCarthy explores the ways in which the “anthropause,” ushered in by the coronavirus, has—on an unprecedented scale—made nature visible again.
“COVID-19 had wrecked, if only temporarily, so many human artifacts; it had stopped business, trade, travel, sports, education, entertainment, and social gatherings of all kinds—but it hadn’t stopped the spring.”
SOME KEY TURNING points in human history are not taught in schools, and here’s one. You could reasonably say it was with the invention of farming twelve thousand years ago that we began to separate ourselves from the natural world. Previously we had been an integral part of it: as hunter-gatherers we were wildlife, we were animals, like all the other animals around us—albeit with larger brains and language—as the cave painters of Chauvet and other prehistoric caverns so grippingly make clear. The rhythms and sounds and smells of nature were the only ones we knew; our delights were the delights of nature; our problems and our perils were the ones that nature threw up. But with farming came food surpluses, and with surpluses came settlements, and settlements became towns and then cities; and now towns and cities hold more than four billion people, where we are so far separated from the natural world that nature is not only forgotten but increasingly invisible.
The growing invisibility of nature is a topic that is little regarded by the general public, since such public concern as there is focuses—understandably—on nature’s degradation and destruction. This year we have seen the most drastic estimate yet of the damage human society is causing to the web of life across the globe: the biennial Living Planet Report, published in September by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, estimated that between 1970 and 2016, global populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles plunged on average by 68 percent. It is scarcely to be believed: in less than a human lifetime, more than two-thirds of the vertebrate wildlife of the world has been wiped out. (The condition of invertebrates is probably even worse, but we do not have the same sort of comprehensive figures.)