WHAT WORLD AWAITS US?
RADICAL CHANGE Chomsky: "This is a critical moment in history, a crisis of civilization is at work"
“When we burn the Amazon to get land for agriculture, when we exterminate wildlife in China and do similar things, we come in contact with wildlife, and they carry new kinds of diseases that people are not ready for. As long as people keep doing it, diseases will come, ”Shaikh explaine
The coronavirus pandemic is the result of human impact on nature, just as its global spread is the result of neglected health systems. If people want to reduce the consequences of similar diseases in the future - and they will continue to appear - it must enable the health care system in every corner of the planet. And that is only a small part of the problem: no less and no more, if humanity wants to survive at all, it must radically change the current organization of society. Such messages - some of them, paradoxically, obvious - have been arriving in recent weeks from many intellectual centers, in which scientists warn that a pandemic could have been avoided, that there is less profit race in the world and more common sense, prudence and humanity .
"We are at a critical juncture in human history," said Noam Chomsky, a linguist and activist who has been warning for decades about the devastating consequences of militaristic capitalism greedy for money and power alone.
In a Skype conversation after the pandemic with Srecko Horvat, an activist for the European Democracy Movement DiEM, Chomsky said that "the good side of a pandemic, perhaps, is that it could encourage people to think about what kind of world we want." Chomsky is aware that a pandemic is "a serious threat that we must not underestimate," but he does not forget that there are much more serious and devastating dangers that the pandemic has never eliminated, moreover: the danger of nuclear war, "closer than ever," and the danger of irreversible consequences of global warming.
“We must not forget that the coronavirus is only a small part of the natural threats that lie ahead. They do not destroy life as fast as the coronavirus does today, but over time they will damage life to the point where our species will no longer be able to survive. And that will not happen in the distant future, "warned the cult philosopher and one of the greatest linguists of the last century. 'We are threatened with much greater catastrophes than the coronavirus. The crisis of civilization is at work, "Chomsky said. According to him, the alternatives are as follows: on the one hand, high-tech brutal autocracies, and on the other, "radical reconstruction towards the humane world for human needs, not for profit".
A better world
Chomsky argues that the Covida-19 pandemic "could have been prevented." "It has long been known that pandemics like this threaten. The information existed. Back in October last year, just before the outbreak of the pandemic, simulations were conducted in the US, but nothing happened. It is a betrayal of political systems, due to a colossal error of the market. The dangers of some type of coronavirus have long been known. Laboratories around the world could prepare for this. Why not? Because the market was sending the wrong signals. The private tyrannies of corporations, in this case the pharmaceutical industry, had no interest in seeking a vaccine; it was more profitable for them to produce new body creams. "
In the current crisis, on the other hand, humanity is threatened by the "nightmares of fascist tyranny." But this is not necessary: “It is possible that people will organize and engage for a better world that, of course, will also face enormous problems: nuclear war has never been closer, and environmental problems whose consequences cannot be remedied. . ”But, the thinker concludes, the present moment may be the last for humanity to become aware of the“ deep dysfunctions of the entire socioeconomic system ”.
Allana Shaikh, a health adviser at the World Health Organization (WHO) and author of What Kills Us: A Practical Guide to Understanding the Biggest Global Health Problems, spoke at TED talks on the pandemic in recent days. Her recipe largely coincides with what Chomsky recommends: "If we really want to slow the outbreak of epidemics and reduce their impact, we must ensure that every country in the world is trained to recognize new diseases, treat them and report them, to get to know the world." People, Shaikh says, are being killed by imbalances in health systems: when an Ebola epidemic broke out in Sierra Leone, the country had 120 doctors; eleven of them died of the infection. The African state of Chad has "three and a half physicians per hundred thousand inhabitants"; for comparison, “only one hospital in Dallas has a thousand doctors.
New diseases
Allana Shaikh also spoke about the causes of this pandemic, but also about the prospects for the future. 'There will be more epidemics. It's not a question of' maybe ', it's a matter of certainty. And it is the result of the way we humans treat the planet. Human choices lead us to that, "she said. According to her explanation, in addition to the fact that global warming creates more favorable conditions for the development of viruses and bacteria, human destruction of the last wild habitats on the planet causes "zoonoses", animal diseases that can spread to humans, to do so.
“When we burn the Amazon to get land for agriculture, when we exterminate wildlife in China and do similar things, we come in contact with wildlife, and they carry new kinds of diseases that people are not ready for. As long as people keep doing it, diseases will come, ”Shaikh explained.
A similar analysis was published these days by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a global environmental organization dedicated to preserving the environment. “There is a very close link between epidemics that pose a serious threat to the human population and the epochal scale of the loss of nature caused by human activities. Many diseases, such as Ebola, AIDS, SARS, bird flu, swine flu and the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), are not entirely accidental disasters, but are an indirect consequence of our impact on natural ecosystems. These ecosystems "play a fundamental role in regulating the transmission and spread of infectious diseases such as zoonoses, meaning they are key to sustaining and nurturing life on Earth, including our species." Are we destroying natural ecosystems - and human action has significantly changed and 66 percent of the marine environment, bringing about a million animal and plant species to the brink of extinction - we upset the balance, and allow animal diseases to spread to humans. »Globally, scientists are aware that among the causes of the spread of infectious diseases, such as Ebola, Marburg hemorrhagic fever, SARS, MERS, Rift Valley fever, Zika and many others, there are important factors such as habitat loss, creating an artificial environment, wildlife trade. animals and the general destruction of biological diversity. "
Predatory behavior
Danijela Dolenec, an environmental activist and lecturer at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb, spoke about the problem for our paper, pointing to the fact that the states, reacting to the pandemic, literally abolished the usual way of life overnight. He considers this an important realization: “Politically, the COVID-19 pandemic is important because it shows that societies and states can dramatically change the way they function, and that it is possible to implement far-reaching measures of regulation, cooperation and change of collective and individual behavior. I think it is important to be aware of this, because at this point it becomes harder to claim that any alternative to the status quo is utopian, unrealistic and impossible. "Yet, according to Dolenec," this pandemic is not a good example of social transformation. , and exposes the working class to the crisis the most.
Although the central economic dogmas of the decade have been temporarily suspended, governments are now intervening primarily to ensure a return to the status quo. Dolenec warns that, in times of political pluralism and opposition competition, . The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, has suspended its decisions, citing it as an "economic measure to fight the virus." In Croatia, Dolenec sees a prime example of "predatory behavior" in the move by Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandic, "who, amid severe isolation measures and halted economic activity, announced the sale of Zagreb Holding's assets on Veli Losinj, Krk and other top locations on the Adriatic coast."
Therefore, our interlocutor argues, the "political pressure of the progressive forces" - what Chomsky calls "organizing and engaging the people" - must now be required for investments by governments to save the economy to be directed at "the public interest and the reduction of inequality." "We should not allow states to once again, as in 2008, pump fabulous sums of money into the private sector without providing returns in terms of public interest and benefits for the majority of citizens," Novi list writes .
In the short term, it is about preserving employment, but in the long run we are talking about "sustainability and equity" - "building a society that measures its success primarily by the level of welfare of the population, not economic growth rates." radical changes in the way we produce and use energy, transport and food, and reduce carbon emissions ”; it is also necessary to »strengthen the public sector, especially in the field of health and social care, but also research, education and culture. Otherwise, we are continuously collapsing our capacities for shaping our own future ", says Dolenec. Familiar and noble, common sense ideas - the tragedy is, of course, that they always sound so utopian
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