No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Humanization of Nature and Half-Earth Socialism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 February 2021
Extract
Edward Jenner took the long view. His 1798 treatise on vaccination, which reported a revolutionary new method of preventing smallpox, opened with a medical philosophy of history rather than a description of symptoms or a review of existing treatments. “The deviation of Man from the state in which he was originally placed by Nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of Diseases,” he explained. By this he meant that infectious disease ultimately resulted from human and animal intermingling since the agricultural revolution, an insight anthropologists and epidemiologists have since confirmed. The majority of human pathogens are ultimately zoonoses, originating not at the dawn of the human species but in the relatively recent past. Measles likely evolved from the bovine disease rinderpest seven thousand years ago. Influenza may have started about forty-five hundred years ago with the domestication of waterfowl. Jenner's own specialty, smallpox, probably originated four thousand years ago in eastern Africa when a gerbil virus jumped to the newly domesticated camel and then to humans. The New World's Indigenous nations cultivated countless crops but practiced little animal husbandry, allowing them to live relatively free of disease before 1492. European conquest succeeded in a large part thanks to the invaders’ pathogenic armory of measles, typhus, tuberculosis, and smallpox, which decimated Indigenous populations by 90 percent over the succeeding centuries.
- Type
- Pandemic Roundtable
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2021
References
NOTES
1. Jenner, Edward, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolӕ Vaccinӕ (London: Sampson Low, 1798), 1Google Scholar.
2. Robin A. Weiss and Anthony J. McMichael, “Social and Environmental Risk Factors in the Emergence of Infectious Diseases,” Nature Medicine 10, no. 12 Suppl (December 2004): S70-76, https://doi.org/10.1038/nm1150.
6. Wood, Ellen Meiksins, The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View (London, 2017), 110–11Google Scholar.
7. Pollan, Michael, The Omnivore's Dilemma (New York, 2016), 279Google Scholar.
8. Jenner, Inquiry, 1.
9. Brendan Montague, “How Free Market Economics Was Smuggled into Britain – Alongside Factory Farming,” Desmog UK, 26 September 2014.
10. Smith, C. E. Gordon, “Introductory Remarks,” in Ebola Virus Haemorrhagic Fever ed. Pattyn, S.R. (New York: Elsevier North-Holland, 1978). 13Google Scholar.
11. For the independence versus freedom distinction, see Raymond Plant.
12. E.g. Buck, Holly Jean, After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (London: Verso, 2019)Google Scholar. See also Phillips, Leigh, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff (Alresford, UK: Zero, 2015)Google Scholar.
13. IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report, 2018.
14. David, Benatar. “The chickens come home to roost.” American journal of public health vol. 97,9 (2007): 1545–6. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2006.090431Google Scholar.
15. Power density is a concept of Vaclav Smil's, in Power Density (Cambridge, MA, 2015).
16. A notable exception to this is Appalachian mountain-top removal, which has a power density “well below 100 W/m2.” Smil, Power Density, 107.
17. Smil, Power Density, 247.
18. Even eco-optimists, such as Mark Jacobson, assume underwhelming rates of power density for renewables. Jacobson selects a small sample of the world's most efficient projects, but estimates wind's power density is only 9 W/m². This remains within Smil's range of 5–10 W/m². Jacobson, Mark et al. , “The United States Can Keep the Grid Stable at Low Cost with 100% Clean, Renewable Energy in all Sectors Despite Inaccurate Claims,” PNAS, 114 (26, 2017)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
19. Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2013) “Land Use”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org.
20. Ulrich, Kreidenweis, Humpenöder, Florian, Stevanović, Miodrag, Bodirsky, Benjamin Leon, Kriegler, Elmar, Lotze-Campen, Hermann, and Popp, Alexander. “Afforestation to mitigate climate change: impacts on food prices under consideration of albedo effects.” Environmental Research Letters 11, no. 8 (2016): 085001Google Scholar.
21. Two thousand watts as a rate of primary energy use per person equates to 17,500 kWh per year or 48 kWh per day. Eberhard Jochem ed., Steps Toward a Sustainable Development; Zurich 2006. Surprisingly Smil is quite supportive of the 2,000 W society. Vaclav Smil, Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate (Washington, DC, 2010).
22. Thomas Uebel, “Calculation in kind and marketless socialism: On Otto Neurath's utopian economics,” The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 15 (3): 475–501, DOI: 10.1080/09672560802252354
23. Paul Cockshott. “Calculation in-Natura, from Neurath to Kantorovich” University of Glasgow, May 15, 2008.