Awful to contemplate, impossible to ignore

It is a grim way to acquire the 15 minutes of fame that Andy Warhol alleged everyone would have in the future, writes Breda O…

It is a grim way to acquire the 15 minutes of fame that Andy Warhol alleged everyone would have in the future, writes Breda O'Brien.

A three-year-old boy in Hong Kong, a 25-year-old man in Iraq, a woman aged 20 in China, and a man aged 29 in Greece, all came to public attention only because they are four of the victims of avian flu.

A pandemic has something apocalyptic about it that both appals and fascinates us. Stories about the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed more people than the first World War, most of them aged between 20 and 40, are at once too awful to contemplate and impossible to ignore.

It does not help that experts seem resigned to the fact that, if the threat of avian flu somehow passes, it is a case of not if, but when, another pandemic will strike. Not unnaturally, it scares the wits out of us.

READ MORE

One theory is that avian flu causes a "cytokine storm". In other words, an immune system attempting to meet the challenge of the virus may overreact, which results in severe lung damage. Such a dire scenario forces us to face, however unwillingly, our lack of control over our fate, and the arbitrary nature of life and death.

Since the flu originates in wild birds, and is so devastating to humans, it also reinforces the ambivalent attitude that we have to nature.

While most people find being in a natural environment soothing, at some level we are uneasily aware that nature would function quite well without us, and that Tennyson may not have been too far off the mark when he described it as "red in tooth and claw".

We are conscious of nature's potential to threaten our very existence. It does not take the terrifying power of a tsunami to remind us, given that a winter stroll in the mountains can become life-threatening if the weather deteriorates dramatically.

There are, of course, other aspects of our relationship with the environment. Unease at how it can threaten our existence is matched by our guilt that humans sometimes seem like marauders in paradise, leaving a swathe of destruction in their wake.

The despairing, mud-covered faces of Filipinos who survived the landslides that killed some 1,800 others are a reminder, if we needed one, that we cannot simply destroy whole forest habitats through logging if we do not wish to unleash horrific consequences.

However, some seem touched less by guilt than by greed, like the fishermen who continue to illegally deplete fish stocks in pursuit of short-term profit. Yet none of us can afford to point the finger; our lifestyle in the developed world blithely ignores the damage done elsewhere.

We must have coffee, whether or not growers are forced into virtual monoculture to sell their products abroad. We must have hamburgers, even if rainforests are being razed to produce beef, leading to the destruction of species at an unprecedented rate.

Fr Seán McDonagh, in his thoughtful book, The Death of Life - The Horror of Extinction, traces some of our failure to act adequately as stewards of creation back to another pandemic, the Black Death. There was already a view in medieval times that the world was a "valley of tears".

The phrase is taken from the beautiful Salve Regina, a text which is often attributed to the 11th-century monk Hermann the Lame, a paraplegic whose every movement caused him pain.

Far from encouraging people to engage with the world and its challenges, the "valley of tears" mentality is much more likely to lead people to withdraw from the world and concentrate on an interior life.

Then came the Black Death, which ravaged 14th-century Europe, killing some 25 million people. In places like Florence and Venice, it wiped out half the population in a few weeks.

The horror of the disease was commonly interpreted as a punishment from God.

Seán McDonagh says: "The only protection against it was to embrace a spiritual theology based on prayer, asceticism, mortification and a withdrawal from engagement with the world". In his view, this negative view of the world continued almost right up to Vatican II. As he points out, this belief in the split between the spiritual and the material was mirrored in and often surpassed by the Protestant tradition.

The end result was that, although there are many strands in Christianity that celebrate and revere the gift of nature, the dominant theology was more likely to justify exploitation of the earth's resources.

Seán McDonagh says his own "conversion" to ecological awareness happened while living for 12 years as a Columban missionary among the tribal T'Boli people in the Philippines. That part of his book takes on a grim resonance given the landslides of recent times, as he describes in harrowing detail how greed led to deforestation.

"Although profits from logging were astronomical, they benefited only a few elite families. It is estimated that between 1960 and the late 1970s a mere 480 timber licensees enjoyed a staggering profit of US$42 billion."

The consequences, however, have been massive. The Philippines was one of the most bio-diverse places on the planet. Medicinal plants have been found there to treat asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure and tuberculosis. The wanton destruction of habitats means that many potential cures for disease have been lost for ever.

The way we treat the environment is proof that human beings are not rational creatures. Seán McDonagh's thesis is that, if the destruction continues, we may have already threatened our own survival as a species. We quake in terror at the prospect of a pandemic, but continue blithely to act in ways that may lead, sooner rather than later, to our own annihilation.

The news on the environmental front is so bad that most of us are overwhelmed. Yet being overwhelmed is not an excuse, if it results in our treating this irreplaceable planet as a giant dump.