The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Invisibility of Nature – Michael McCarthy

Emergence Magazine Podcast

Emergence Magazine

Spirituality, Science, Religion & Spirituality, Natural Sciences, Society & Culture

4.7 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Just as modern science is catching up to the ancient understanding of our deep emotional and physiological relationship to the living world, the twin forces of urbanization and technological advancement are pulling our bodies and our attention away from the elements and rhythms of nature that are so essential to our well-being. In this narrated essay, naturalist Michael McCarthy explores the ways in which the “anthropause” ushered in by the coronavirus has—on an unprecedented scale—made nature visible again, even as the world’s growing cities increasingly sever humanity from the living world. “Perhaps the most significant way of all in which nature has come back to us during the pandemic,” he says, “is that people turned to it themselves.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence
0:08.1	magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day
0:14.7	Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.
0:31.6	Michael McCarthy is a journalist, naturalist, and the author of the Moth Snowstorm,
0:41.9	and the Consolation of Nature, Spring in the Time of Coronavirus.
0:48.8	In this essay, Michael reflects on the coronavirus against the backdrop of rampant urbanization that has increasingly severed humanity from the living world.
0:53.5	He explores the way in which the anthropos, ushered in by the pandemic,
0:58.5	has, on an unprecedented scale, made nature visible again.
1:17.2	Some key turning points in human history are not taught in schools, and here's one. You could reasonably say it was with the invention of farming 12,000 years ago that we began
1:22.6	to separate ourselves from the natural world.
1:26.4	Previously we'd been an integral part of it. As hunter-gatherers,
1:30.3	we were wildlife. We were animals like all the other animals around us, albeit with larger brains and
1:35.6	language, as the cave painters of Chauvet and other prehistoric caverns so grippingly make clear.
1:41.9	The rhythms and sounds and smells of nature were the only ones we knew.
1:46.4	Our delights were the delights of nature, our problems and our perils were the ones that nature threw up.
1:52.2	But with farming came food surpluses and with surpluses came settlements, and settlements became towns and then
1:59.4	cities, and now towns and cities hold more than 4 billion people,
2:03.6	where we are so far separated from the natural world that nature is not only forgotten, but increasingly invisible.
2:10.6	The growing invisibility of nature is a topic that is little regarded by the general public, since such public concern as there is,
2:19.2	focuses understandably on nature's degradation and destruction. This year we have seen the most
2:25.1	drastic estimate yet of the damage human society is causing to the web of life across the globe.
2:31.3	The biennial Living Planet Report, published in September by the World Wildlife
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