The problem is a more general one, beyond this particular terroir. Why are so many figures on the bien pensant Anglophone left adopting anti-ecological politics that advocate technologies that are as inseparable from their funders as the looms were from the mill owners in the age of the Luddites ? Why are these positions serially platformed by allegedly critical podia, time and again, even as their logics are symmetrical to those underlying efforts to force meatpackers back to COVID-infested processing plants, where all that labor is « saved » ? There’s a through line from Trump to what counts in much of the Global North as the far left.

Clearly the interminable omission reflects an inability to center the voices of the actually existing ecological and anti-systemic movements in the core and periphery alike. Soul Fire Farms, the Savanna Institute, and the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance in the core are rendered invisible, as well as the more discomfiting and openly anti-imperialist La Via Campesina, which expresses solidarity with crucial fortresses for humanity’s struggle for a better future such as Venezuela, Cuba, and the now-fallen Bolivia.

Compare such calculated disappearances with the Minnesota Farmers Union’s recent efforts to breach the rural-urban divide in the other direction :

You’ve no doubt heard about the killing of George Floyd this week by a Minneapolis police officer. This horrific act and ensuing protests and property destruction have been hard to process, not just for those living and working in the Twin Cities Metro, but all Minnesotans and Americans.

There’s a lot to reckon with and soul-searching to do to ensure that, at an absolute minimum, nothing like this ever happens again. We have to do more than say that we condemn it, which we do. This comes on top of a deadly pandemic that has disproportionately harmed people of color, including in agriculture and food sectors.

As always, we are here as a community, ready to listen to whatever is on your minds and hearts. Do not relegate this to simply an urban issue. We can’t go back to the previous « normal » post-COVID—this makes it even clearer why. We call on our public officials to fight back against all injustices they can, and for everyone to reflect on why injustice persists.

Perhaps such soppy sentiments make us agroecologists « appreciate simplicity, » not to say clarity, to borrow a condescending aphorism from a « radical » anatomy in favor of the Bolivian coup. We leave that for others to judge, if in the glare of a bank of bright bulbs shining light therapy right to left upon the pandemic.

The bad takes on COVID wend across the political continuum into the more recognizable left. Superficially more grounded anatomies of the crisis have leapt atop the backs of the dead animals and broken landscapes that did indeed help produce the pandemic. But in a classic riding trick, the acrobatics suddenly switches mounts mid-ride to characteristically Eurocentric hobbyhorses from which to herald imperium-old edicts on how to live, eat, and die.

Should we eat meat, with source livestock an apparent driver in the emergence of deadly pathogens ? Documentarian Astra Taylor, environmental historian Troy Vettese, and political scientist Jan Dutkiewicz—TVD, for brevity’s sake—answer in the negative : « Individually, we must stop eating animal products. Collectively, we must transform the global food system and work toward ending animal agriculture and rewilding much of the world. » With anthropogenic global warming already taking carbon dioxide levels through the roof, meat was already an easy target. It’s a synecdoche for effete gluttony, the emblem of a global class divide, an easy piece of fat—and protein—to trim from wealthier consumption baskets, and a neat way to merge individual ethical consumption and world ecology.

The anti-meat crusade has apparently received an unintended and misused push from recent ecological and epidemiological work on the likely origins of the pandemic. These analyses traced how the interaction across confined animal feeding operations, monoculture doppelgangers, fading forests, and antimicrobial marination has produced a petri dish of new diseases. Out of this combination, one virus after another easily jumps from animal populations to humans.

Pre-pandemic, TVD fellow travelers rejected such political ecology, which in their psychologizing dismissal « often romanticizes what are seen as anti-modern subsistence livelihoods on the margins of global capitalism. » But now, given the obvious realities on the ground, a pandemic strain that hopscotched from bat caves on the other side of the world into the lungs of urban workers they champion, the ecomodernists (again to no reputational damage given their golden tickets) have turned to folding in the analyses they previously characterized in the most scurrilous terms as if they approved all along.

Such systems—these incubators for viruses, huge biological emitters of CO2 and methane, rampant deforesters, and living beings suffering amid the cruelty of enclosed industrial animal camps—merge into a pithy command from TVD : No, don’t eat meat. The team suggests we plow « public-directed investment » into « both plant-based meat alternatives and cellular agriculture, » or, in other words, lab meat, a product that so far exists primarily among venture capitalists, a few labs, and red-washed ad copy lauding it as a socialist wonder food from Keynesian Green New Deal cookshops.

Key questions are greased over, restricting, as sociologist Andy Murray describes, the very discourse lab meat proponents claim they wish to open up. Who is this « we, » for one, and even, what is meat ? Veganism and animal rights, to which one needn’t object as ethoses on their face, are reflexively deployed here to conflate objects and processes. There is no thing, meat, that has uniformly negative ecological, social, or epidemiological consequences. Meat only has in common that it comes from living creatures, and animals, just like people, can only be fundamentally understood in relation to the material environments within which they live, are loved and cared for, or maltreated and abused, and, in the case of most food animals, killed.

The question of « Should we eat meat ?, » therefore, appears very different among different sets of « we » and the different relations « we » have with such animals.

There are millions who might bridle at, or whose lives would be simply upturned and devastated by, enforceable commands that they simply cease meat production and consumption. Tunisian camel herders in the semi-arid steppes of the Jerid who rely on herding for day-to-day survival, or Bedouins in the northern Gaza Strip, have not been consulted about how they feel about an order from the Global North—in this case from Harvard and Johns Hopkins direct—to stop eating meat or engaging in the meat trade. Nor, in the other direction, have these researchers asked if such meat is substantively identical to the confined feedlots they rightly condemn.

[…]

A herd of examples stampedes to the horizon, but the point on that front is clear enough. Advocating intervening in the Global South and blithely demanding adopting capitalist technology in the name of a socialist Half-Earth, as does Vettese, who orders that it « must be from pasture that an eco-austere world will derive the land needed » for tree planting, is a form of « natural geo-engineering, » developed according to specific values, specific devaluations, and pathological externalizations. These are not the no-brainers their advocates presume. Compulsory veganism and lab meat, endorsed by prominent social democrat Green New Dealers, among them UPenn sociology prof Daniel Aldana Cohen, consents to the brute confiscation and erasure of peasant and pastoral particularisms in the name of « universal » ideals : rewilding Earth upon the bones of supposedly atavistic peoples poor and brown.

Even before COVID-19 arrived in the United States, it was apparent that in deploying the virus as a propagandistic parry against China, conservatives and liberals alike would make matters worse by imposing an opportunity cost. By crowding the social space with saber-rattling, the United States would fail to take notes about the outbreak and China’s responses pro and con—so as to make adequate and internationally teamed preparations.

Certainly it’s a bipartisan miscalculation borne more out of structural decay than mere hubris or bad data, but the problem extends across the sweep of respectable politics. These broader cultural pathologies, entwined into the literal pathologies of the pandemic, are on full digital peacock display beyond Chang and his ilk. The near entirety of the chatter sphere manifests a primal incapacity to adapt a holistic social and ecological perspective. Little subtle, flexible, and capacious thought—capable of encapsulating both the technical-policy-public health sphere of prevention and prophylaxis and the social-ecological-civilizational domain of responding to the problem from the bottom up—is on offer. No one is caught dead taking the lead of the world’s most affected dispossessed, who might know something about such thinking.

One instead traces a long arc of incompetence, reductionism, social triage, capitalist Mad Hatter logic, technicist tomfoolery, and rank opportunism. From the privatized right to the public left, influencers political and academic have been studiously incapable of responding to the crisis. Against all notions of political ecology, the pandemic is a « Chinese virus » on the right wing or an « act of God » on the left, removing off the board any notion of refounding our agrarian practices or the other modes of social reproduction that together drove the emergence of COVID-19.

In 2011, science journalist Laurie Garrett wrote on the « alarming regularity » of accidents in biosafety labs around the world. The accidents are as much a matter of numbers as any one lab’s poor safety record. A 2013 Princeton University study showed an increasing global population exposed to the risk of accidents from biosafety laboratories pursuing studies of some of the world’s most dangerous diseases.

The study, conducted by health geographer Thomas Van Boeckel and colleagues, showed the population living within the commuting field of BSL-4 labs increased by a factor of four from 1990 to 2012. The fields summed together encapsulate nearly 2 percent of the world’s population. Any escape infection could potentially seed an outbreak able to hop upon the global travel network to infect the rest of the world in short order. Since 9/11, thousands of new BSL-3 and -4 labs have been built for studying pathogens. The team noted a particular surge in Asia, describing, among others, new labs in Taiwan, Singapore, Pune, Bhopal, and, listed in the appendix, Wuhan.

The lab bubble appears to have arisen out of a combination of legitimate concerns about emergent infectious diseases, the return of « respectable » biowarfare research, the ideological demands of the War on Terror, and the next iteration in Keynesian military economy. The sum effect includes producing the very threat of outbreak the labs were ostensibly set up to stop. Expanding such labs in number and geographic extent bends rare events like viral escape toward inevitability. The labs represent a political logistics folding in calculated dangers that science propaganda spins away as so much conspiracy theory.

In 2004 alone, four separate SARS escapes were reported _out of the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing. In 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology used a « less virulent » SARS strain to test lab disinfectants. Are we going to pretend such things don’t happen ?

You can find a dossier that an anonymous group of self-identified researchers put together in favor of the lab accident theory here. I find some of its inferences and criticism on target and others unconvincing.

[…]

So, what is the Solomonic choice here ? All the contending parties—the United States and Chinese governments, the EcoHealth Alliance, scientists, and conspiracy theorists alike—can piss off. Because they told us all to do so ourselves and are attempting to dump responsibility on each other, letting the whole gang escape. Allowing such hubris to continue to run amok would be an act of self-destruction beyond the COVID pandemic and what climate change already has in store for us.

[…]

Philosopher Alain Badiou writes of liberal parliamentarianism’s neo-Kantian opposition of truth and opinion. In the spectacle of debate, we are allowed to struggle over opinion, the core of the extreme center’s politics, but truth is never up for grabs, we’re told. It’s instead locked away in journals and think tanks that the state and philanthrocapitalists own. And the plebs—left coughing on their couches, not from ritual fire but a virus, their pains and sorrows untrue because these are carefully left undocumented—are never allowed access to the official story as a matter of first principle.

Consciously or not, by devious intent or the best of intentions, in accepting what appear diametrically opposed premises that in actuality are scattered together around the dictates of capital and the imperial states that serve it, the various factions of power—money, political class, the latest in colonial medicine—all back some version of expropriation or empire building that regularly spring deadly diseases. By this season, Midvinter 2019, that Great Game finished off a drag race of protopandemic SARS across lab and field alike.

One strain of the many still circulating got out. I’m betting this round that pandemic SARS emerged along the increasingly industrialized wild animal commodity chain from hinterlands and border towns as far south and west as Yunnan. On the last leg of its domestic tour, the virus made its way to Wuhan by truck or plane and then the world.

J : There’s been a rumor of a biological trade war between the United States and China. It has gained momentum after disputed social media talks on U.S. patents, articles published in Granma and mutual accusations of the Chinese Foreign Minister and CIA agents against each other. How do you see this circus ?

RW : Such utterly unfounded accusations are part and parcel of what I call pandemic theater. The efforts we just talked of to control populations within-country are rivaled only by attempts to pin blame for the present pandemic and its socioeconomic ramifications upon other countries. These are all modern updates on calling diseases after an international enemy, now spun into vast, unsubstantiated conspiratorial theories aimed at fast-talking debunkers into exhaustion. What were previously simplified into piquant aliases, such as the Spanish flu or the French disease, are now wound into stories about Wuhan labs or biowarfare gone amok.

Much as for UFOlogy—space saucers, aliens, and the like—perpetrators of such frauds and their dupes are seeking a means by which to avoid grasping the material roots by which capital-led modes of production are increasing our vulnerabilities to the emergence of multiple pathogens of pandemic or near-pandemic capacity. We’ve seen in rapid succession, upon deforestation and development, H5N1, SARS-1, H1N1 (2009), MERS, H7N9, Ebola Makona, Zika, African swine fever, and now SARS-2 exit out of marginalized wild reservoirs across poultry and livestock and into human populations. Blaming an enemy allows rulers to avoid having to blame themselves for the sudden surge in multiple deadly diseases.

To avoid the worst outcomes here on out, disalienation offers the next great human transition : abandoning settler ideologies, reintroducing humanity back into Earth’s cycles of regeneration, and rediscovering our sense of individuation in multitudes beyond capital and the state. However, economism, the belief that all causes are economic alone, will not be liberation enough. Global capitalism is a many-headed hydra, appropriating, internalizing, and ordering multiple layers of social relation. Capitalism operates across complex and interlinked terrains of race, class, and gender in the course of actualizing regional value regimes place to place.

At the risk of accepting the precepts of what historian Donna Haraway dismissed as salvation history—« Can we defuse the bomb in time ? »—disalienation must dismantle these multifold hierarchies of oppression and the locale-specific ways they interact with accumulation. Along the way, we must navigate out of capital’s expansive reappropriations across productive, social, and symbolic materialisms. That is, out of what sums up to a totalitarianism. Capitalism commodifies everything—Mars exploration here, sleep there, lithium lagoons, ventilator repair, even sustainability itself, and on and on—these many permutations are found well beyond the factory and farm. All the ways nearly everyone everywhere is subjected to the market, which during a time like this is increasingly anthropomorphized by politicians, could not be clearer.

In short, a successful intervention keeping any one of the many pathogens queuing up across the agroeconomic circuit from killing a billion people must walk through the door of a global clash with capital and its local representatives, however much any individual foot soldier of the bourgeoisie, Glen among them, attempts to mitigate the damage. As our research group describes in some of our latest work, agribusiness is at war with public health. And public health is losing.

Should, however, greater humanity win such a generational conflict, we can replug ourselves back into a planetary metabolism that, however differently expressed place to place, reconnects our ecologies and our economies. Such ideals are more than matters of the utopian. In doing so, we converge on immediate solutions. We protect the forest complexity that keeps deadly pathogens from lining up hosts for a straight shot onto the world’s travel network. We reintroduce the livestock and crop diversities, and reintegrate animal and crop farming at scales that keep pathogens from ramping up in virulence and geographic extent. We allow our food animals to reproduce onsite, restarting the natural selection that allows immune evolution to track pathogens in real time. Big picture, we stop treating nature and community, so full of all we need to survive, as just another competitor to be run off by the market.

The way out is nothing short of birthing a world—or perhaps more along the lines of returning back to Earth. It will also help solve—sleeves rolled up—many of our most pressing problems. None of us stuck in our living rooms from New York to Beijing, or, worse, mourning our dead, want to go through such an outbreak again. Yes, infectious diseases, for most of human history our greatest source of premature mortality, will remain a threat. But given the bestiary of pathogens now in circulation, the worst spilling over now almost annually, we are likely facing another deadly pandemic in far shorter time than the hundred-year lull since 8. Can we fundamentally adjust the modes by which we appropriate nature and arrive at more of a truce with these infections ?

In a kind of bioeconomic warfare, agribusiness can prosper when deadly influenza strains originating from their own operations spread out to their smaller competition.
No conspiracy theory need apply. No virus engineered in a laboratory. No conscious acts of espionage or sabotage. Rather we have here an emergent neglect from the moral hazard that arises when the costs of intensive husbandry are externalized.

Pathogens, however, are no mere protagonists, battered to and fro by the tides of human history. They also act of their own volition, if you’ll excuse the anthropomorphism. They display agency. And they have by virtue of their evolutionary changes forced agribusiness to the bargaining table, a place where that ilk, given their successes, think they excel. The resulting agreement is written as no treaty or contract nor even in anything we would recognize as communication. It is found instead in a form of xenospecific convergence. The two parties have maneuvered into an agriculture of mutual interests, at times reacting forcefully within each’s own domain in the other’s favor. One thinks perhaps such convergence could be at best unconscious. An emergent epiphenomenon, maybe. I discovered otherwise, and that’s the shock. No virus engineered in a lab, no plan to purposely spread influenza, but a conspiracy of man and microbe nonetheless, with humanity and many a wildlife population at stake.