Reflection on the impact of COVID-19 on economic growth vs ecological limits
"One characteristic which streptomycin seems, unfortunately, to share with many antibiotics is that of rapidly inducing in susceptible organisms a high resistance to the drug. This is a subject which obviously offers interesting prospects for analysis." Sir Howard W. Florey Penicillin Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1945
What can be learned so far about the COVID-19 outbreak?
What can be learned so far from the way information goes from science to health department that shared with press and mass-media, before the public and interacts information? And, the causes why a virus can cause disorder wiping out a complex system? The critics towards the handling of the Coronavirus I would like to address is first, the lack of taking scientific reports seriously by health departments. That provide journalist and mass-media with info not taken into consideration the importance of scientific research of the 2003 outbreak of SARS and since ever since caused panic. Media high and low on the search for readers often leads to finding the bad and make it worst and good to best. Secondly, how the audiences, make, transform or have their detachment practices that can reconfigure informational structure in social and political direction.
Syndemic interactions
Third, the issues of some syndemic interactions—such as the one between diabetes and SARS outbreak (2003). The changes in biochemistry, damage to organ systems originated by one disease, such as weakening of the immune system, promotes the progression of another (source Rickerts et al. 2006), and in the hospitals poorly mechanical ventilation systems. The impact of sociophysical environments. Fourth, as a result of various physical effects of being subject to discrimination, suffering social rejection, enduring stigmatisation, and internalising oppression. The "sociophysical "environment in which people live— that is, their conscious experience of their surrounding community, including issues of danger, stress, comfort, and appeal—is also an essential determinant of their health. Feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness in a community found good predictors of health risk and health status. Can we learn in time? (source Plagues and Epidemics Infected Spaces Past and Present Edited by D. Ann Herring and Alan C. Swedlund. Published 2010 Brgb Publishing).
The Anthropogenic climate change
The Fifth, the anthropogenic climate change started with the industrial revolution in the 1850s. It continued growing ever since—the total consumption of non-renewable sources of energy at the catastrophic level. With help from the invisible hand of Adam Smith (Wealth of nations published 1776), economic thinking supports the wrong view. How the non-science of financial go before science just prove global corruption politically and organisationally at all levels. The increased temperature (one degree) last one hundred years. The confirmed science of nearly all Earth Science occupation Global warming caused by putting heavier weight on economics growth before ecological and the collapse.
The lack of responsibilities to take actions on agreements
Sixth, failing to act after the non-binding Agenda 21 (Rio Earth Summit 1992). Lack of any commitment of policies to move towards sustainable development at the governmental and local level. The disaster of The Kyoto Protocol (2005) adopted the 1997 Third Session Conference of the Parties (COP), and repetitive downer of Paris climate agreement (starts 2020). The leadings nations irresponsible acts, CO2 emissions (per capita) for Saudi Arabia (16,3T), Australia (16,2T) and the U.S. (15,0T) (source Union of concerned scientists ucsusa.org )
Economic growth without Ecological limits
Ecological understanding of limits and stress vs capital accumulation of material wealth is needed. Economic growth without Ecological limits; "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" famously said, Albert Einstein. Many find the view wrong; it is not. Thanks to Darwin. Epigenetics, evolutionary biology, coevolution and survival of the fittest. And above all Buddhas view on how everything is interconnected and ever-changing. All major religions emphasis on slow is safe and fast is dangerous. Historical data shows a repetitive pattern of disorder and order.
Darwin said "the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to other and distinct species, is that we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the steps. The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists when Lyell first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and great valleys excavated, by the slow action of the coast waves. The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations". —Ch XIV, On the Origin of Species
Bush Defence strategy after September 11
After September 11 the Bush administration became the first in U.S. history to implement a national defence strategy against biological threats. In the same year, the U.S. Congress also approved the largest ever funding project for biodefense research, to be carried out over the following decade. The legislation, going under the name of Project BioShield, authorised $5.6 billion for the purchase and stockpiling of vaccines and drugs against bioterrorist threats, granted the government new authority to initiate research programs, and gave it special dispensation to override drug regulations in the face of a national emergency. At the same time, a more secretive initiative was underway to establish four research centres for the testing of biological weapons defences. The United States, it seems, was preparing itself for an attack of epidemic proportions.
U.N. and AIDS
The U.N.'s decision to redefine AIDS as a security issue is symptomatic of a broader shift in international relations discourse, where the spheres of life and War are tending to merge. As such, the "global AIDS threat" pertains to a whole spectrum of neologisms—from human to biological to ecological security—proposed in the late 1980s and 1990s as a way of reconceptualising strategy in the post-Cold War era. (source Life as Surplus Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era by Melinda Cooper. Published 2008 by the University of Washington Press).
The neoliberal revolution
In the 1980s President Ronald Regan let the bull loose on Wall Street, in what later became known as the neoliberal revolution. At the same time discoveries in life science such as molecular biology, microbiology and cell biology promising a new era of technological advantage, forecasting without limits. It is a dramatic transformation unfolded in political, social, and economic spheres. Blinded by the accumulation of capital in the neoliberal experiment sought to undermine and shift the existing foundations of economic growth, productivity, and value. The unethical behaviour became the norm, as undemocratic alliances between state-funded research in private new technological sectors; financial capital sought to secure enormous investment the U.S. interventions. It created conditions for life science patenting and accumulation of capital closer to the reproduction of life without questioning the possibilities or interrelationship between economic and biological growth.
A weakened U.S. Empire
A trend today as the U.S. is under pressure from various groups, defenders of freedom such as Julian Assange (prison Belmarsh U.K.) and Edward Snowden. The Arabic countries cases such as 1953 Iranian coup d 'état, later 1979 fifty-two American diplomats and citizens were held hostage in the American embassy in Iran for 444 days from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981. (source Ian Hostage crisis Wikipedia ). Followed by the Iran-Contras scandal. Oliver North found guilty in trials. The given by President Ronald Regan. The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, when an American Airlines Boeing 767 loaded with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Centre in New York City during the Tuesday morning. Followed by yet another plane hit, a second Boeing 767—United Airlines Flight 175—appeared out of the sky, turned sharply sliced into the south twin tower (source history.com).
War on Iraq
Two years later in 2003, the so-called War on terror led to the Iraq War, initiated by President George W. Bush and the U.K. prime minister Tony Blair. It was false information based on the non-existing chemical weapons, exposed by Katharine Teresa (Gun)was a British translator who worked for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). In 2003, Gun leaked top-secret information to The Observer, concerning a request by the United States for compromising intelligence on diplomats from member states of the Security Council, who were due to vote on a second United Nations resolution on the prospective 2003 invasion of Iraq. The case against Katharine Teresa took a surprising turn in the court. The prosecutor suddenly dropped the charges. Gun's lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC, threatened to use disclosure to put the legal basis of the War itself on trial. The secret papers would have exposed Bush and Blair for planning an illegal war (sources Wikipedia Kathrina Gun).
Where does life begin?
Where does life begin and where do (re)production end and technical invention begin, when experience put to work at the microbiological or cellular level? The unknown complexity, evolution, coevolution, survival of the fittest became commodities of intellectual property laws on life itself for the sake of accumulation (capital desire). Not even questioned the belonging of new drugs that already used for thousands of years in India and other places. The U.S. innovation culture declined, and the empire position as a focal point of world economic and imperialist power weakened.
The limits to economic growth depended on ecological factors
Limits to economic growth depended on ecological factors. The most vital limits of which two kinds, consisting not only in the depletion of non-renewable resources but also in the steady environmental build-up of toxic, nonbiodegradable wastes. "The reason that growth, and especially exponential growth, is so insidious is that it shortens the time for effective action. It loads stress on a system faster and faster, until coping mechanisms that have been able to deal with slower rates of change finally begin to fail" (Meadows et al. 1992). The conclusions of the 1992 report, however, remained substantially the same: "to sustain life on earth, economic growth would need to respect ecological and biological equilibria." (source Life as Surplus Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era by Melinda Cooper. Published 2008 by the University of Washington Press).
Capital Accumulation
Going back to Karl Marx's still fertile reflections on crisis, limits, and growth, to discern what is peculiar to the neoliberal moment in capital accumulation. It did not discuss the growth of life itself. However, according to Marx: "The drive to overcome limits and relocate in the speculative future is the defining movement of capital, according to Marx. Yet there is one limit that capitalism never escapes—the imperative to derive profit and thus to recapture the "new" within the property form. For Marx, capitalism is inherently counter-productive. It cannot expand into a new space-time of accumulation, beyond its actual limits, without bringing this one internal limitation along with it". Marx's theory of capitalist transformation points to the dual nature of the debt relation: where capitalism promises, on the one hand, it devalues on the other. The creation of surplus population, of a life not worth the costs of its reproduction, is strictly contemporaneous with the capitalist promise of more abundant life.
NASA space biology program
The importance of the NASA space biology program lies in the translational role it is playing between speculative science and (post)industrial applications. The recent years NASA has become increasingly present in funding and initiating research and development in the areas of extremophile science, bioremediation, and alternative fuel technologies. And as Margulis points out, even the Gaia hypothesis is finding its way into academic science programs and funding proposals, now that it has taken on the more respectable guise of astrobiology and earth systems science (Margulis 2004). The bio-strategy was a result of James Lovelocks Gaia hypothesis. At the beginning of the 1960s, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) asked the scientist James Lovelock to participate in a scientific research project aimed at trying to find evidence of life on Mars, working with the project setting up a design for a spacecraft to Mars. James hypothesis, the Earth itself was a live organism. The ideas evolving during the years of science culminated in 1979 with the publication of the book
Gaia hypothesis
In Greek Mythology, Gaia is the goddess of the Earth. Lovelock theory ended with a thesis that Earth is a physical and chemical condition is self-regulating; oceans and atmosphere are life itself. Gaia evolves according to Darwinian laws of self-selection, a fine-tuned, interrelated to create conditions conducive to the growth of the planet. If human life on Gaia extinguished, the Earth self-regulates to maintain life, and possibly other forms of life within it (Source Gaia hypothesis Eco-Fashion Encyclopedia ).
Survival of the fittest
The term survival of the fittest not mentioned before the fifth edition 1869 on Origin of the species, it was not Darwin but, Wallace who pointed to the famous phrase written by the philosopher Herbert Spencer. "Biology and evolution of life by random DNA mutations, epigenetics the personal reading of genetic materials a defence system (survival of the fittest) by natural selection is a war against us we cannot win. Just as the sequence of everyone's DNA is unique, the series of each species' DNA is unique. Every evolutionary change between species, from physical form to digestive metabolism, is due to—and recorded in—changes in DNA. So, too, is the "paternity" of species. DNA contains, therefore, the ultimate forensic record of evolution".
The pattern recognition of the universe
The human species history found in ecological evolution, and it witnesses evidence of bad as good times. The vast materials prove the immense diversity and differences recorded in the reading of DNA codes, in studies of the animal kingdom, trees, plants and all life, according to Sean B. Carol. "DNA evidence is also revolutionising the study and understanding of human origins and early civilisation. While the sequencing of the human genome has grabbed most of the headlines, it is the decoding of the genes and genomes of other primates and mammals that enables us to interpret the meaning of the human text. Our genes tell tales of clues to both how we are different and how we evolved to be so. "Many genes bear the scars of a natural lection. Of the battles our ancestors fought with the germs that have plagued human civilisation for millennia" (source The Making of the Fittest DNA and the ultimate forensic record of evolution by Sean B. Carroll published 2006 by W. W. Norton & Company).
Waste production and microbial evolution
The production of waste is so inescapable, Lovelock's collaborator the biologist Margulis agitates, that the history of microbial evolution read as a succession of catastrophic pollution events, several much higher than the contemporary hazard such industrial waste. The point becomes legitimate to ask what is meant by the term "life" in these theories. For biosphere theorists Margulis, Lovelock, and Sagan, life manifests itself most powerfully in the relentlessly divisible, mutable world of microbes. Their rereading of evolution thus concludes with the certitude that microbial life will out survive all limits to growth. Indeed, it will out survive humans and quite possibly the end of the Earth: "Neither the existence of species nor species extinction is a property of bacteria. "Although individual bacterial death is continuous, fierce pressures on the moneran kingdom as a world-wide gene-exchanging enterprise led to the rapid exchange of natural biotechnologies. We have seen enormous population growth rates and in general, the ability to persevere with metabolic talents intact even during the most severe planetary crisis" (source Margulis and Sagan 1997).
Other environmental scientists go still further and recommend the adoption of strategies for incorporating biological growth into the very infrastructure of production: the enormously popular work, Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, THe book outline vision of an economic future in which the specific ability of life to self-regenerate. Transform "detritus into life"—would be mobilised as a means of overcoming the waste products of industrial production (source How to approach a sustainable fashion design? buddhajeans.xcom).
Evolution and coevolution continue
For these theorists, the accumulation of waste products, although fatal to life forms, will never be enough to stop the evolution of life itself. Indeed, the continuing development of life—life's very capacity to innovate— is intimately dependent on periodic waves of environmental crisis. Presence creates its limits to growth only to expand beyond them: "It is an illuminating peculiarity of the microcosm that explosive geological events in the past have never led to the destruction of the biosphere. Indeed, like an artist whose misery catalyses beautiful works of art, large catastrophe seems to have immediately preceded major evolutionary innovations. Life on Earth answers threats, injuries, and losses with innovations, growth and reproduction. With each crisis, the biosphere seems to take one step backwards and two steps forward—then two steps forward being the evolutionary solution that surmounts the boundaries of the original problem."
Finally, a quote from the series of posts Do we have a story crisis: "To function safely in a complex world we tell ourselves 'essential lies. It is reasons says Goleman, individual and collective. Very few people stand outside or even want to torture their minds with things that make us uncomfortable; it's in the interest of psychological self-preservation. We choose to ignore things and fail to mention them because most people dislike conversations that bring up unpleasant facts that include all of us. On the other side, people can discuss other people's problems, especially if they are irritated about how they deal with it. One can recognise it when listening to other people talk on their phones about issues of others. We like to talk about other problems, not our own." (source Do we have a story crisis? Part Four Population Control by Kenneth Lyngaas published 2018 ) The full story https://wp.me/p1UV8C-bfD