Pandemics, Technology, and
hope
By Rachel Robison-Greene
The story
of COVID-19 is the story of human growth and development, for better or worse. At the time of this writing, millions of people have contracted the disease and hundreds of thousands of people have died. This event was not unpredictable; many have warned that, given the increasingly globalized environment in which we live, a global pandemic was all but inevitable. It’s easy to blame the whole thing on extremely bad luck; perhaps it’s simply the indifferent universe throwing us a flaming curveball that casts light on the absurdity of the human condition. This response is too easy, and it absolves human beings of their responsibility too quickly. This event has everything to do with the way that human beings view their role in the natural world, and the way in which we developed technology that served to fortify our position. Practices such as globalization, deforestation, encroachment into natural spaces, and poaching of exotic animals set the backdrop against which the coronavirus tragedy unfolded. Coronavirus is a zoonotic disease; it can jump from one animal to another. There is an ecology of disease, so it is unsurprising that when we mess around with ecological systems, diseases spread. This is just one hallmark of a new epoch, one in which the human relation to the natural world has fundamentally changed. Long before anyone anticipated coronavirus, philosopher Hans Jonas commented on this change. He argued that our newfound technological prowess reveals that “the nature of human action has de facto changed, and that an object of an entirely new order—no less than the whole biosphere of the planet—has been added to what we must be responsible for because of our power over it.” If Jonas is right, how ought we to respond to this terrible power? Is there a way for us to use technology as a creative, constructive force, rather than a destructive one? In his Sand County Almanac, conservationist and environmental philosopher Aldo Leopold described a set of contrasting paradigms: “the conqueror versus man the biotic citizen. Science the sharpener of his Photo by Pixabay.
FALL 2020 I UTAHSTATE
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