We Need Ecosocialism to Stop the Next Pandemic
Our future is not just one of more ferocious storms and drier summers, but more virulent, deadly epidemics.
Photo by Edwin Hooper.
Powerful storms, shifting precipitation patterns, rising temperatures and oceans: these are the kinds of phenomena we typically associate with climate change. But earth systems are interwoven with each other and with our own bodies in complex ways such that the “climate” crisis will inevitably manifest in less purely climatic phenomena. One recent example of this: the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, COVID-19 reminds us that we need a decolonial ecosocialism not only to restore something like normal climatic conditions, but also to prevent the next pandemic before it begins.
Readers of The Trouble will already know that the climate crisis is driven by racial capitalism. Growth economies have extracted and polluted to such an extent that various earth systems are spiraling away from stable, long-established patterns, precipitating hotter summers and cataclysms like Hurricane Maria. Yet capitalism’s impact on life on this planet also manifests on a more intimate, embodied level. When you transform an acre of forest to monocrop production, you reshape soil composition, plant, animal, and insect assemblages, the surrounding microbiome, and ultimately the makeup of the very bodies of those who eat the final product or work to harvest it. Though abstractions like nature and society sometimes occlude our ability to see this, capitalism is an intervention in the “web of life,” a reshaping of diffuse micro- and macro-biological processes.
Evidence suggests COVID-19 emerges from one such capitalist shift in the materiality of life. Western media coverage of the “wet markets” in Wuhan has often amounted to little more than ethnocentric revulsion or suspicion toward “wild meats,” a category more cultural than biological. Yet we might put aside the “wet” for a moment and focus on the “market” bit of that compound term as speaking to COVID-19’s origins in capitalist relations. At COVID’s root is likely a market driven surge in pangolin (or other kinds of) hunting, a phenomenon that has pushed hunters into new habitats and precipitated new kinds of proximate interactions with different microbiomes. This would match a documented pattern. We know with certainty that deadly diseases like Ebola, HIV, SARS (another coronavirus) and Zika are all “zoonotic” in origin, and that capitalism features in each of their origin stories in different and complex ways. These are capitalism’s epidemics, biological consequences of its perverse reshaping of life on Earth.
This phenomenon can be understood through an emerging field on the “ecology of disease.” Rather than seeking to understand maladies in isolation, studies in this field situate pathogens within their environmental context, as entities with ecological niches. Lyme disease, to offer another example, only began to trouble the Eastern United States when suburban sprawl precipitated a fragmentation of continuous forest and a decline in predator populations (like wolves, foxes owls, hawks), culminating in a massive increase in white-footed mice, a major carriers of Lyme disease. The ecology of disease also reveals that most emerging diseases are not strictly “new” so much as new to (certain) humans. When extractive industries penetrate the few remaining biodiverse corners of the planet, often flouting Indigenous sovereignty in the process, they upend the existing tangle of biological relationships between humans and nonhuman life. Deforestation, suburban encroachment on animal habitats, the enclosure of common lands, an incorporation of local hunting into broader supply chains: all these shifts endemic to capitalism can create novel opportunities for pathogens to jump from animals to humans without accumulated immunities.
While some might pin the blame for these diseases on “civilization” or humanity writ large, as with environmental issues generally, this fails to adequately distribute blame. These shifts were precipitated by settlers, capitalists, or people with constrained options because of capitalist-imposed scarcity, often against the wishes of other humans. That specificity matters. Just as with environmental degradation more generally, the situation in relation to zoonotic disease transmission is looking increasingly dire. Though you have probably heard that the last 60 years have seen a major rise in global temperatures, you might have missed that in that same time period there was a near quadrupling in the number of new diseases emerging per decade, nearly 75% of which are zoonotic. At this rate, our future is not just one of more ferocious storms and drier summers, but more virulent, deadly epidemics.
More than any other intervention, an ecosocialist society is best fit to quell the next global pandemic on various fronts. For one, socialism aims to do away with the racialized, gendered, and classed forms of oppression that constitute the most profound comorbidities for these pandemics. The disproportionate death rate of COVID-19 among Black and Native Americans is a grim reminder of just how much disease spread relies on existing forms of racialized precarity and structural violence. A socialist society would also tend to the ill without reliance on profit; socialism can assure quality care for every single person and test on a massive scale. Though we are working with imagined counterfactuals, its seems clear a socialist health system would not, as one example, nix a project to build cheap, effective ventilators, as did for-profit corporation Covidien when it bought Newport Medical Instruments to prevent competition with its existing, more expensive ventilator. Pandemics ultimately owe much of their spread to the inequities and perverse incentives of capitalism.
A socialist society would yield a different human ecology. A decolonial ecosocialist world would remedy many of the very ecological forces that ultimately culminate in pandemics like COVID-19. Zoonotic diseases are not innately bad. They are microbiological organisms launched out of established ecological niches by capitalism. In preserving biodiversity, chartering sustainable modes for meeting human needs, democratizing and redistributing the labor of food production, arresting the extraction of fossil fuels and other mineral resources for sale on the market, an ecosocialist society would (re)build ecologies of mutual human and nonhuman flourishing.
Critically, the ecology of disease does not suggest that people must somehow stay away from “nature.” People—especially Indigenous people—have lived and continue to live with those species that harbored the ancestors of COVID-19 or Ebola for millennia. The problem stems from the rapid shift in the nature of those interactions, from local consumption to global commodity circulation, or in the case of settler occupation, the near total undoing of established relations and rapid, widespread habitat destruction. A just ecosocialist society must abide by and learn from Indigenous laws and procedures. Indeed, recent insights within the ecology of disease might amount to what Kim TallBear calls “settler epiphanies,” belated discoveries of truths settlers might have known sooner had they sought to learn from Indigenous life and knowledge instead of attempting to eradicate them at every turn. In North America, this means ecosocialism begins with “Land Back,” a rebirth of Native sovereignty, of acting in alignment with the laws of the Indigenous people on whose land one lives.
In building an ecosocialist world, drawing further from TallBear’s thinking, we need not more “American Dreaming,” faith in the redemptive promise of capitalist progress, but “caretaking relations,” a kind of radical, mutual care between human and other-than-human. A decolonized ecosocialist society can discern and act against the common colonial and capitalist processes that are making our climate hotter and our planet—and people—sicker. Either we build an ecosocialist world, or we die, by fire or malady, with capital.
John Favini is a writer and PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Virginia.
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