It's funny, you know. When it comes to my own world, I'm far too quick to read doom and gloom into it. In the wider world I strive for balance. Of late--meaning through this Breadbin's duration--that has meant, more often than not, wading through gloomy waters, for the simple reason that our society has up until very recently been afflicted with a case of irrational optimism. Roughly two hundred years spent vacuuming up ancient sunlight has blinded our civilization to certain home truths: one, we live on a finite earth; two, we are consuming finite resources on that earth at a rate commensurate with one and a half earth's worth of population; three and most pertinently, the last ten or so generations of humanity are a huge anomaly in the historical record of our species (which stretches back some 5300 generations).
There are many people who believe that what has happened to information will soon happen to power, i.e., it will become virtually unlimited and trivially cheap. So help me, I've actually had someone point out how little energy their Android uses and how much it does with that little energy as proof that we are becoming super-efficient. This is an example of incredibly blinkered thinking.
Yes, your phone uses almost nothing...in and of itself. But the internet you access with it?
There have been many advances in things like solar power over the years. None of them really mean a whole hell of a lot, for many reasons, but the biggest one is ERoEI: Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Theoretically, the sun provides us with more energy than we could ever use. Reality intrudes, however, when you look at all the energy you have to expend to harvest solar energy. Look at this chart. It really tells a couple of tales. One, you'll note that hydroelectric power is still the best return on energy invested out of the bunch; coal isn't far behind, because we largely abandoned large-scale coal (at least in the West) when oil supplanted it. Oil used to have a truly remarkable ERoEI--you'll note from the chart that it is shrinking, and the rate at which it is shrinking is accelerating.
Note this does not mean we're going to "run out of oil". We will, however, and sooner than you think, run out of cheap oil. There will come a point when oil's ERoEI is 1:1--the energy you put into the system of extraction equals the energy you get out of it and no more.
At that point, we're fucked. Unless we figure out how to run our server farms on hydro and coal, Solar ain't gonna cut it, I'm sorry to say.
What does any of this have to do with Ebola? I'm getting there. The point is to try and get you, dear reader, to think systemically. Our world is so hellaciously complicated and we feel so infinitesimally small in it, that it's hard to even comprehend the various interlocking systems that make it up. Quite understandably, we tend to think only of the little part of the world we can see and hold. That part, not-so-coincidentally, is made up mostly of machines: the rise of oil has allowed us to outsource first our physical labour, and later our thinking.
But the world is not a machine, nor even a group of them: it is instead a living system.
Our entire culture is oriented toward machines, not living systems, and what defines a machine is precisely that it’s meant to do exactly what it’s told and nothing else. Push this button, and that happens; turn this switch, and something else happens; pull this trigger, and the buffalo falls dead. We’re taught to think of the world as though that same logic controlled its responses to our actions, and then get blindsided when it acts like a whole system instead.
--John Michael Greer
I don't often directly quote the Archdruid whose report you'll find in my sidebar, mostly because once I get started doing that it's kind of hard to stop. If you don't read him...you should. His mind is both wide and deep and even if you disagree with his thinking on any issue, you'll really have to think to articulate why.
If you reframe your thoughts of the earth so that it and everything in and on it constitutes a single, interconnected living system...within that framework it's all too easy to see our civilization, which is not in harmony with nature in any meaningful way, as living on borrowed time. Periodic pandemics are part of the natural order of things and we're overdue for one. Perhaps Ebola is it.
I can hear the scoffing from here. "Ebola is a western African problem, nothing we have to worry about here." I've been hearing that since February. (The underlying, totally unconscious racism inherent in that statement is truly appalling: you'll never hear anyone say it's only a bunch of niggers, but they may as well. How do you think our media would be covering this Ebola outbreak were it centered somewhere in Europe, or in Florida, maybe? Or California. Do you think spokespeople would get away with saying it's really only a Californian problem, the rest of us don't need to concern ourselves with it?)
"Ebola hasn't killed very many people." Strictly speaking, true. Malaria has killed more people since the weekend than Ebola has in the entirety of its known existence, and you don't hear daily malaria updates. But that's partly because malarial infection rates are close to a constant and the rate of Ebola infection is doubling every twenty days. At that rate, the projected number of cases by January, 2015 will be 1.4 million. Probably not a good idea to do the math after that, not if you want to hold on to your sanity.
"But Ebola is only spread through contact with bodily fluids over a comparatively short period of time". Again, true, and thank Whatever for that. This virus is too virulent for its own good...it kills people before they get a chance to infect lots more people.
Here's the thing, though. By now I'm sure you've heard that a man infected with Ebola waltzed through a Dallas airpot, cha-cha'd into a local hospital, was promptly misdiagnosed and sent on his way with some pointless antibiotics, only to find himself back in hospital a few days later and very sick indeed. Nobody asked him until comically late in this dance routine just where he'd come from, either at the airport or the hospital, and ha-ha, sources now tell us he's come in contact with about a hundred individuals. That they know of.
Again, the chance of actually infecting these people is pretty low. They could have shaken his hand, even given him a hug, without being at risk. And now he's safely in isolation.
What if he didn't get back to the hospital in time?
What if there's another breach like the ones at the airport and the hospital? Really, that's just shoddy. A man presents at a hospital with Ebola-like symptoms and nobody thinks to ask him if he's been anywhere near the outbreak lately? That kind of nonchalance could conceivably get people killed.
But the thing that really gives me pause is the Hajj.
The Hajj is the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. It is mandatory if you're one of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. Not everybody makes that trip each year, of course, but a sizeable fraction of them do--and then they go home again, spreading anything they may have picked up with them. Completely unknowingly, in the case of Ebola: its incubation period is between 3 and 21 days, meaning you might contract the disease and wander all over the place for up to three weeks before you get sick. It's important to note you're not contagious during this period...but it does suggest that cases of Ebola will start popping up like popcorn all overt the world right about soon.
But Ken! Guinea and Liberia are nowhere near Saudi Arabia!
No, they aren't. The major outbreak is on the other side of the continent, not even close to Mecca. But Sudan is, and over a month ago Sudan banned all reporting of Ebola. Why? Who knows. South Sudan is listed as among the countries dealing with the contagion. Sudan isn't. But there's no media reporting in Sudan, and there hasn't been for over a month. I find that highly suspicious.
Per Wikipedia, 97% of the population of Sudan is Muslim and thus must take the Hajj at least once in their life as a condition of their faith. It's not far, not for them.
I'm not saying there is a seething mass of Ebola-in-waiting descending on Mecca as we speak. I'm saying it only takes a few cases to cause some serious disruption. And as for our thinking that our high tech health care systems over here can deal with an Ebola outbreak? Not on any serious scale, they can't. Most hospitals don't have adequate isolation wards to deal with anything like this. And Dr. Human Error seems to be everywhere, just when he's not needed. Granted it's Fox News drumming up fear, but North America's Patient Zero supposedly puked "all over the place" on his way to hospital (for the second time). Lovely news. Just lovely.
I am not telling everybody it's time to PANIC!!!! I'm suggesting that you ignore things like this at your peril: that the insulating sense of superiority we have cultivated here in the West is largely illusory. The earth is a living system, after all, and living systems have immune systems of their own.
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