The Virus Checks Its Behavior

The comparison between humans and a planetary virus gets made often enough that it’s lost its edge, but losing the edge doesn’t make it wrong. Every other species manages to exist inside the ecosystem; we chew through rainforests and animal populations and each other with a consistency nothing else achieves. And recently we’ve started editing the evolutionary code itself, because apparently there were still corners of existence we hadn’t broken into yet.

Earth Day today—over 150 countries acknowledging it, which counts for something. And there are signs, slow and grinding as they are. Organizations like Greenpeace have been at it long enough to actually move the conversation. The kind of person who used to ignore all of this is now arguing about CO2 emissions at the pub, which isn’t idealism but it’s movement. Even the greyest corporate managers are starting to register that dead planets don’t sustain economies.

There are a lot of kids running around right now who are going to inherit whatever we leave them. I’m not particularly hopeful about what that looks like. Maybe the generation after them gets something worth inhabiting—a planet we’ve managed to stop actively destroying. That requires a lot more than anything we’ve pulled off so far. A lot more.