Is Humanity a Virus?
Identifying the origin of an idea is a trying task. As you follow the line back into the recesses of history, the idea might lose substance. It might shed the solidity given to it by years of scientific refinement. But it’s still there: a fluid form, a shapeless something waiting to be cast into a mold. The farther back you go, the more you see the thinkers of old attempting to describe the textures, colors, and hard edges of a thing based only on its shadow.
This is true for human knowledge as a whole, and it’s for individual beliefs. When I search through the folds that make up the mess of grey matter called my mind in hopes of finding that the first moment when I came to believe something, I can never seem to identify a particular instant of inception. The ideas seemed to always be floating there in some form or another, slowly becoming more definite the more I experienced, read, and understand. An expanding awareness and vocabulary waved away the haze until I could see with clear eyes what was always there before me.
This is how it was, how it’s always been, with my understanding of the Earth. For centuries, Western science said the planet was just a ball of water-bearing rock encased in air with living things lumbering about its surface. That description felt incomplete to me. It said a lot about how things were in isolation without defining their relations.
The more I saw and experienced of the Earth, the more I knew it wasn’t the hunk of inert rock that geologists, physicists, and astronomers describe it as. In 2016, I can remember wandering around my college campus late at night wondering how I’d explain to someone my belief in a living Earth. Not just geologically active, not just home to life, but itself as alive as you and I, one enormous entity within which we all lived. I am not the first, the last, nor the only person to believe this. Many others see Earth as a living system, but from this premise, they come to incorrect conclusions about what this means about human nature, assuming us to be viruses when we’re anything but.
Each person reaches the initial premise on their own path. I arrived at it thanks to the physiology and geology I studied at different times of my young life. With the awareness they offered, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the Earth and the human body. The forests as lungs. The rivers as arteries. The atmosphere as skin. The soil as muscles and ligaments. The puzzle was coming together.
A couple of years later, I read Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock, where he describes his Gaia Hypothesis: the testable, scientific notion that the Earth maintains a “dynamic equilibrium” and is therefore alive. Reading Lovelock’s book was the first time I came to understand that many others had reached the same conclusion about our living planet long before I was alive. Before Lovelock couched the idea in rigorous science, Henry David Thoreau expressed the same sentiments in Walden. And before Thoreau, Indigenous peoples across the world understood the interconnectedness of life within Earth’s breathing body. There was even a time when this was the common understanding of mankind, until monotheism and science conspired to convince people that the world was a ball of rock that man was meant to rule.
However, the understanding of Earth’s living reality has slowly returned. This awareness has been helped along by images of our planet sent down from satellites and accelerated even more as we see industrialism’s impacts reverberate around the planet. However, this dawning knowledge has many coming to conclusions about humanity contrary to my own.
Whereas seeing the Earth as a complex, living being increased my reverence for our world and caused me to wonder what the highest purpose of humans might be within this body. Others saw our present impact and assumed it to be the role we were always meant to play.
The world, as it is, is sick. The planet displays new symptoms every day: fever in the form of heatwaves, hemorrhaging in the form of floods, inflamed lungs in the form of wildfires, dehydration in the form of drought. As we play doctor to diagnose the problem and trace the symptoms back to their source, we discover one, conclusive cause: an atmosphere imbalanced by excessive emissions. The emissions, of course, originate in industry. Many thus conclude that humanity itself is the sickness. They then point to deforestation, pollution of land and water, and extinction of various species as additional evidence. Their case rested, they comfortably call humanity either a virus or a cancer doomed from the moment we evolved to infect our heavenly host and bring about its demise.
But is it really that cut and dry? Has this always been the fate we were doomed to fulfill? Is humanity a virus?
Given the evidence in favor of the affirmative, it seems simple enough to answer, “yes”. Yet below the surface the question, “is humanity a virus?”, asks what it means to be human. The question asks about human nature. Is it our nature to extract and exploit and corrupt whatever we come across? Many in the West would say yes. I, for one, vehemently disagree.
I refuse to see humanity as either a virus or a cancer. We are, at worst, a collection of cells that has lost track of their function and become hyperactive, like the brain cells in an epileptic prone to sudden spasms or the white blood cells in a patient with an autoimmune disorder where the body attacks itself. The autoimmune disease of modern humans is not our original nature.
For three-hundred-thousand years we existed in relative harmony with the rest of the world. We were no more violent, no more vicious, than any other omnivorous predator. Along the way, as we hunted and gathered, we discovered the ability to mimic the animals around us and create tools to do what they do and solve the problems we faced. Eventually, we created civilization and began to truly transform landscapes, albeit on a small scale at first. In some parts of the world, this transformation was for the better; in others, for the worse. It was what people believed that determined how they treated the world around them. And one day, long ago, one group came to believe the Earth was theirs to use and abuse to whatever end they saw fit. Over time, this belief gave birth to colonization which spawned industrialization and thus one small segment of humanity began to poison the planet on a massive scale.
The world as it stands today was shaped entirely by the forces of colonization and industrialization. The Judeo-Christian belief that the Earth is man’s dominion justified the actions. It was colonization’s drive to divide the world into understandable, governable, exploitable segments that gave rise to much of modern science. It was imperialism’s need to satisfy its endless impulses that turned tropical forests into plantations doomed to leach the land of life and lushness. It was the economics’ urge to assign value to everything that taught Europeans to view any land untamed and unworked as worthless. This drive, this need, and this urge persist today.
As empires expanded and populations grew, so grew the need for infrastructure that could manage imperial portfolios spanning ceans and continents. Thus, from necessity as much as ingenuity emerged the steam engine, the locomotive, the telegram, the power plant, the automobile, the telephone, the radio, the television, and all the other energy-intensive inventions that drove the Industrial Revolution forward.
It was the industries surrounding these inventions of empire that created the climate crisis. The only aspect of these advances that, in my view, can be perceived as stemming from anything inherent to the human condition is a desire to understand the world and make a place for ourselves within it. Neither of these are uniquely human either. While we can only guess at the curiosity of other animals, there are plenty that make space for themselves.
Numerous species manipulate their environments in large and small ways. Bee hives, ant hills, and termite mounds are excellent examples of insects at work carving out a niche for themselves. Many plants do the same: Fig trees dig roots so deep they draw ground water to the surface. Plenty of mammal engage in ecosystem engineering as well – most famously, the beaver.
While many farmers consider beavers a pest, their dams and lodges have been shown to benefit wetlands, the surrounding forests, and almost every animal that passes through the environment they altered. Areas with beavers see deeper ground water penetration, cooler surface temperatures, decreased chance of drought and wildfire, greater biodiversity, and a host of other improvements. By living their best lives, beavers transform landscapes to the benefit of practically every animal around.
Obviously, humans aren’t the only animals capable of reshaping the environment; although, we are unique in the narcissism of our efforts, and in the scale of transformation a minority of humanity has wrought on the world. Industry has turned humanity into a negative forced within the body of our planet because of the self-centered way in which we extract without remorse.
All the ecosystem-transforming efforts of the past several centuries have improved things for only a small subset of humanity. This has not only impoverished nations, it has impoverished the planet. It has weakened Earth's systems and set forth a crisis unlike anything seen before. And while some, in fact many, see this as a sign of humanity’s cancerous condition, I see it as evidence that we’ve lost sight of the true role we were meant to play on this planet.
Instead of assuming a role of dominance, we could assume a role of stewardship. Instead of degrading ecosystems, we could regenerate them. Each is equally within our power. We can help the whole to thrive, so that we flourish as much as the rest. This is how Indigenous people’s lived since time immemorial, and this is what we must return to if we wish to protect our planet. We may seem to be viruses now, but it is within our reach to establish a symbiotic connection that brings peace and prosperity for the whole planet.
