If I lived in Rhode Island I’d be bouncing of the edges by now. Fortunately for me, Maine is a large state with diverse terrain. I can take a pretty long road trip without crossing any COVID-19 boundaries.
This is not true, apparently, for the 2.5 million college students and other travelers who chose to hit the Florida and Texas beaches or otherwise fly for fun March 13 and 14. Their actions caused me to explore something I'm calling, “Theories About the Pandemic – spring break edition.”
Some of these may seem pretty silly and you may find others offensive. Please take them for what they are, the opinions and speculations of a person who has, in the past year, been alone with her thoughts far too much.
My mother, who was not always kind, used to say that people who engage in risky behaviors are enacting natural selection; the parent who lets a child bounce around the backseat of the car without benefit of safety belts is just thinning the herd.
Mom isn't here to theorize about the pandemic, but if she was I can imagine her saying that irresponsible people who travel and congregate unmasked will die, leaving the gene pool to the more respectful folks.
She would be joking, in her acerbic way. Mom fully understood what most thinking people do; not everyone who suffers deserves it. The big picture of thousands of young people congregating on a beach won't tell the story of those individuals who will get infected, who may die, because of the beachgoers' collective carelessness.
One purpose of any disease is to reduce population. We can keep killing microbes, but they will keep evolving until they succeed. COVID-19 has brought a burden of loss on a personal level that is harsh and painful.
If humanity stood more lightly on the planet, it might be enough to return a balance among the various species it hosts, but we are busy creatures and the weigh of all that death hasn’t yet made a dent in the total impact of human endeavor.
If fact, as our lives are threatened we ramp up our efforts to increase both in numbers and impact. Each time we reach the limits of the energy sources we've exploited in the past, we find new ways to increase activity, attempting to build our way out of the natural boundaries of our power.
If we can't get to the top of a mountain on foot, we either build a road or launch a drone, invading the space we might otherwise fail to occupy.
If we're bored with our surroundings we remodel and terraform, adding more than 600,000 tons of demolition debris to the planet's burden each year. If that doesn't work, we do what I did last week and get in the car, burning gas for a change of scene. If that doesn't work, we get on a plane and hit the beach.
We can think about the impact later, when we're back in our classrooms checking out websites like yaleclimateconnections.org or learning about the new and different (or old and previously unconsidered) ways our activity harms the world in which we live.
We act as though the whole universe was just one big game of Facebook, where we can unlike the parts that annoy us and let the algorithm feed us information that confirms our own opinions. It's a lot for the natural systems of creation to deal with, and so easy for us to just not listen.
A friend tells me the environment needs at least 50% of us to pay attention, if we're going to make the changes that will allow us to live as healthy organisms in a healthy world. Compare this to the 20% who, Pew Research says, claim to be making efforts to live sustainably. It's unclear what those efforts are and whether they, in fact, reduce our impact in any real way.
For example, while using photovoltaic panels decreases water consumption and atmospheric carbon, manufacturing them adds hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, methyl chloroform and acetone to the waste stream.
Workers who build the panels, usually in countries-of-color, face risks associated with inhaling silicon dust. Disposing of solar panels may add gallium arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide and cadmium-telluride to whatever waste-disposal system we might be using 25 years from now, when the 95,000 acres of solar panels now installed or being installed have become too inefficient to be considered profitable.
Even if we agree on what a sustainable course of action looks like, a 50% investment of concern may not be enough.
Our bicameral and bipolar system of legislation actually requires a larger consensus to support any effective, long term changes and while we're getting the news from data-driven machines that focus on current popularity and profitability we're unlikely to find that level of understanding and accord.
So, maybe Mom was right. Maybe, while they put their friends and neighbors at risk, “irresponsible people” are doing what is necessary to return us to a balanced place relative to the rest of creation. That assumes the only choice we are facing is either to mask up and take the vaccine, for what may be the greater good, or let the procreating pathogen do its thing and thin us out.
I'm hoping that, before we find ourselves face to face with an even more harsh and painful reality, we can learn to live within the boundaries of a generous, but limited planet.
Shlomit Auciello is a writer, photographer and human ecologist who has lived in Midcoast Maine since 1988. Letter From Away has appeared online and in print, on and off since 1992.
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