This is the Tom Hartman program.

So there's this fascinating story over at the nation right now, the nation.

The nation.com, of course that website by Sonia Shaw, it's titled,

It's time to tell a new story about coronavirus.

Our lives depend on it.

The subtitle, the way we talk about contagion matters. It shapes how societies respond and

whether many of us will survive. I should add you are a science journalist or the

author of the book Pandemic,

Tracking Contagion from Colorado to Ebola and Beyond.

Your fifth book just out in June,

the next great migration, Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move.

And of course this piece here, website Sonia Shaw S-O-N-I-A-S-H-A-H-G-C-C-O-O-A-H-G-O-O-O-N-I-A-H-G. The story has always fascinated me. I wrote a book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, basically about our relationship to nature is like

one of our most destructive stories. What is the story we're telling ourselves

about coronavirus right now and what are we getting wrong?

Well I think since pretty much the work of invasive germs that kind of encroach

upon passive and unsuspecting populations.

If that's our story, that's sort of our paradigm and our narrative about how we understand

infectious diseases and that shapes our response, which is then to either try to repel those microbes or moving.

If it's in people, we say close the borders, keep them out.

We can scapegoat certain populations of being the ones who are carrying it and

we try to exclude them. And then the other part of it is we try to come up with killing chemicals

to kind of surgically target and destroy these invasive kind of foreign seeming external germs.

...