Months decompose into months and years exhale in years. Those word are from an Emily Dickinson poem, Forever Is Composed Of Nows. Breath in. Ask yourself what are you breathing. Breath out. Pollen, dust, industrial and fossil fuel particulates, even a continuous drizzle of airborne micro plastic’s is raining down upon you relentlessly. Breath in. Trying not to think of the damages. Breathe out. Knowing that is the tip of the pollution iceberg. Breath in. As the wind lifts the invisible dust as your feet pound the pavement, their vibrations shaking that dust excitedly. Breath in. As you walk your motion causing eddies of forces making all the dust around you swirl. Cough. Are you infected with the Coronavirus. Breath in. If you were you just unleashed any number of viral droplets. Breath out. Oblivious to the invisible random game of colliding ping pong that is going on around you. Breath in. The droplets collide staying temporarily aloft as they ricochet off of every other micro particulate there is. Breath out. As those and other particulates impact the eyes of a passing stranger thirty feet away. Breath in. Your feet launching droplets from another infected persons passage, bouncing them into other particulates, giving them a temporary lift, a chance to find a fresh host. Breath out. Unaware of the woman’s handbag they have landed on. Breath in. Oblivious to the dance of collisions that an opportunistic virus can exploit. Breath out. The woman’s bag brushes against her child’s head. Breath in. Unaware of terms like false airborne, or any of the frictions or vibrations that create this chaos of collisions. Breath out. You are just one of billion’s of upright walking monkey mammals on planet Earth, oblivious to the tapestry of invisible dust you are walking through. Breath in.

Anyone who dabbles in physics loves dust, dust creates all the planets and stars we can see with our naked eyes and beyond that. If I go full on Biophysicist spiritual about dust, well the mind writing these words is simply another bi product of stardust. Dust is even a vital component in the formation of black holes, and black holes don’t even allow emergent time to function properly. That is how important dust is. Sadly as much as I would like to scribble dust related words here, I can’t as this piece is about many of the environmental factors that are aiding a nasty bugger called the Coronavirus, which is retailing everywhere humans are. It goes a lot deeper than all of those dusty collisions that give a virus an opportunity to hitch a lift to your nasal passageways or throat. This article is about the anthropocene, and it is simply about the impacts that we have had negatively, impacts that are enabling this virus too, basically this piece is about damage.

Air quality has been particularly poor and over the last decade, this situation has escalated to the point where most of us reading this will have a few years or more shaved of our lifespans. Globally many millions of people die prematurely because of poorer air quality. The first point of impact is of course the lungs, respiratory problems are increasing globally above the scales of our population numbers. This has also created a lot of the people with the pre existing conditions, that we know are in for a rough ride with this virus. However we also know from other animal studies that the many pollutants have health impacts beyond the lungs. The immune system we are hoping can fight the Coronavirus is one of the other biological systems that is damaged by pollutants. As a diverse species this can even impact our ability to breed, and has been seen to effect the brain development is children. Google it and you will find a mass of studies, the results are startling. I am not going to delve into any of this in great detail as the point of these words is a heads up, if you disbelieve them check the asthma rates yourself. Check the science. Look up the word bioaccumulation, then look in a mirror and apply it to yourself.

Plastic’s are a particular problem, they are already a recognisable geological layer, and as they gradually separate they become micro plastic’s, micro plastic’s that can be measured on the nanoscale side of microscopy, think of them with your next breath. If they are small enough they can and will enter your system. Picture a virus or bacteria hitching a temporary lift on them. Plastics don’t exist in nature, but trust me nature will randomly make use of the man made just as readily as it does everything else. Evolutions will happen around them, but think about the potential it has for your body? As yet the science on this is unclear but the evidence from our oceans isn’t. Pretty much the entire animal chain is infested with plastic’s, but this is also happening in tandem with pollution, over fishing and the increase in carbon that is causing ocean acidification. Yeppa, the climate change reality is actually another problem, as the natural worlds systems that normally absorb a lot of our emissions, are reaching a feedback point, the point where they can’t physically absorb much more.

Interesting facts about the lockdowns that are happening globally include cleaner air and less emissions. The planet Earth is actually vibrating less than usual too, like all of our industry, all of our cars, all of our tramping feet, have actually come to a standstill, a standstill that can actually be measured by our overall vibrations being reduced across the whole of our planet. Humanity en masse has been declawed by this tiny virus folks. Online I keep reading the apocalypse word, always applied to the Coronavirus, the Coronavirus isn’t even close to an apocalypse, and besides the apocalypse has been going on for a long long time before this pandemic hit, it’s been going on with Humanity declaring war on nature itself, humanity has been trying to destroy itself for a long long time, and happily tried to take Momma nature with it. Guess what, nature has bitten us back.

Almost every wild species of animal is in decline because of us, as we hunt the bigger ones, we destroy the habitats for others. The recent Ebola outbreak was probably as a direct result of an animal population being displaced, moving closer to us or us to them. This new pandemic was never an if it would happen, our behaviour to the natural world guaranteed it. Hunters have to go further afield to poach their prey, thats what caused the 2002/4 SARS outbreak. As we as a species chase the latest flatscreen, then watch a deliriously inaccurate wild life documentary, a documentary that never shows the utter devastation that we have wrought upon nature. Forests gone, wetlands gone, river systems gone, reef systems gone, as camera persons have to trek further afield each year to find the pristine environments for their documentaries. The oceans that you will see in a lot of documentaries are so much eye candy and Finding Nemo. The reality is plastics, acidification, melting glacials, dredged lifeless sea beds and even a lack of oxygen in massive stretches of sea water. Even H20 is struggling to cope with our excesses.

Initially it was thought that the Coronavirus we are dealing with, jumped from Bat to Pangolin and then Pangolin to human, it didn’t. However lets look at the multi millions a year illegal trade in wild Pangolins for a moment. I will re emphasise the word illegal here. All of the eight Pangolin species are on the endangered list. Some have been placed on that list to protect them, from us. In 2013 a ship ran aground in the Philippines, it contained 10 tonnes of frozen Pangolins. They are hunted for their scales, scales that traditional Chinese medicine practices believe can treat a variety of medical conditions, they are also a luxury food in South East Asia and China. In Africa Pangolins are used in traditional African medicine too, and also sold as a bushmeat for ritual and spiritual purposes. They are now believed to be the worlds most trafficked animal and could account for up to 20% of all illegal wildlife trade, flash forwards to 2017 and officials in Cameroon burned three tonnes of poached Pangolin scales. Thats equivalent to ten thousand Pangolins. Plus Pangolins do not do well in captivity, as they do not adapt to alternative foods, and end up stressed depressed and malnourished, all of which results in shorter lifespans. Big up to the illicit wildlife poachers, really, it’s not just Elephant’s and Rhino’s, nope even harmless little ant eaters have to duck when humanity goes for the profits.

There are hundreds of Coronaviruses out there, all of them infecting none human animals, for now. Bats are generally a good reservoir for Coronaviruses, and the illegal wildlife trade is rubbing shoulders with a hoard of viruses all the way through its supply chain. When the animal variant is finally identified it will be clearer, but our abuses have resulted in this situation. Full godammed stop. Online and in the media are a lot of optimists saying that the world will change after the pandemic. Think about it, do you want to go back to the world as we knew it? Humanity is a brilliant species but we are not a mature one. We have abused our own environment, our own air, and our whole planet. Like journalists when they see a free bar. Like teenagers on free drugs. Like an out of control upright walking monkey mammal in a field of bananas. A hundred years from now, the Coronavirus may be seen beneficially, it may be seen as a point where humanity woke up and finally grew up, a turning point because if we can beat this Coronavirus, which we can, then we can tackle climate change, we can tackle poverty, we can tackle our own greed, we can tackle our traditions when they are misguided, we can tackle our lack of respect for the natural world, we can tackle our social psychologies, we can tackle our current model of capialism, and we can tackle ourselves too. We can tackle every issue written of here and we can live fuller lives using less, and we may even be able to breath fresh air again.