Humanity has behaved like a parasite on planet Earth, sucking out all of the goodness from the forests, the oceans, the land and laying its waste at the feet of Mother Nature. It fills the rivers with poison and the seas with plastic. It has spent almost two centuries creating the kind of cloying atmosphere that leads to boundless desertification, washes islands away, and promotes the release of yet more cloying gases from the frozen extremes. Humanity is the parasite that cages and curates all the others species with which it shares the planet, draining the life from them, and reducing its diversity through anthropocenic mass extinction.
In the light of such ongoing devastation perhaps, some outside agency thought, what the planet needed was a bit of pest control…
How about a fast-spreading illness that forces the parasite to curtail the parasite’s airborne activities? One that stops it spreading its pollution along arterial conduits with its countless gas guzzlers? One that shuts down its commercial and industrial activities that the planet might begin its recovery? One that reduces the resources available to the parasite and forces it to retreat into its domestic shells? One that even stops it allowing its bird-killing secondary pests into the outside world?
It seems that already atmospheric aberrations are already declining, the rivers are clarifying, the stars are coming out in numbers not seen for decades, the birds are singing, and wildlife is gently extending its range into the parasite’s silent cities.
Is the world healing?
Might the parasite evolve to adapt to its ecosystem in the wake of this anti-pestilence? To live in greater harmony with the rich diversity of all life on Earth? Might it settle into a more subtle existence, one that does not wreak havoc and devastation but one that speaks harmony and remediation?