CARIBOU AND CORONAVIRUS: WHY LOCKDOWNS ARE FUNDAMENTALLY ANTI-SCIENCE

About 35 years ago, while I was hitch-hiking in the late afternoon at the edge of Victoria, British Columbia, a typically amiable, forty-ish, brown haired, average-sized Canadian rocking a dark t-shirt and a bushy mustache stopped for me. His name was characteristically Canadian, like Trevor or Nolan. Having seen my backpack, Trevor guessed that I was going to the West Coast Trail to hike for a week. I confirmed his suspicion.

Leaving Victoria, we drove west toward Trevor’s small town. He invited me for a cold one at the local tavern before I would seek the additional ride(s) I needed to go Into the Wild.

Sitting at the bar, Trevor told me that in Victoria a few hours earlier, he had witnessed a man die of a heart attack on the sidewalk. People surrounded the motionless decedent before slowly, silently dispersing.

With a faraway look in his eyes, Trevor told me that afternoon’s experience reminded him of his old job as the live-in maintenance man of a tall natural gas derrick/rig on Manitoba’s snowy, icy plains. Helicoptered in, he worked two weeks on, two weeks off. He was required to descend from his aerie at regular intervals and check the rig’s drill to make sure that it had not frozen in the subzero temperatures.

Recalling that solitary setting and period, Trevor said that, given the land’s flatness and its treeless winter whiteness, his field of vision spanned many square — this was Canada — kilometers. Against this stark, vast, empty landscape, he could see herds of dark-furred caribou trudging across the snowy horizon. On some shortened winter days, he could see the same herd walk from sunrise to sunset.

A few years before meeting Trevor, I had seen a TV documentary about the caribou migration. It’s an arduous journey, spanning hundreds of miles connecting feeding grounds, breeding grounds and locations with survivable winter temperatures. Along the challenging route, caribou herds face many perils, including intense warm weather swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, voracious wolf packs, and crossings of swiftly flowing rivers, sometimes while surfing on thawed ice chunks. Above all, caribou must move their large bodies long distances through deep snow and bitter cold. During the migration, some frail, slow or unfortunate herd members drown, are eaten or just wear out.

Comparing the migration to the man dying on the sidewalk, Trevor told me that as he gazed from his elevated work station, he occasionally saw a single caribou collapse onto the snow. The herd’s other members would reverently encircle their fallen companion and pause. Then the herd would walk on, leaving their prone comrade’s dark, motionless body alone, and prominent, against the frozen, white ground. As the hours passed, many kilometers separated the herd from the deceased caribou.

Many metaphors have been invoked to describe the passage from life to death, or new life. But the scene that Trevor painted was more apt and powerful than any metaphor I had heard or could conjure: an individual lives among a group for a long time, falls out and is remembered. Then the group marches on without him. It must, in order to survive. Ultimately, no individual caribou will survive unless the herd survives. Same with people and the societies they inhabit.

America’s Coronavirus Lockdown is deeply dysfunctional. Systems Ecology and human community both rest upon the understanding that, in the group’s journey through life, some members will die. Yet, the society must sustain the environment and communities needed to sustain the individuals that live within the larger society, including those born to replace those whose lives have ended.

Lockdown supporters repeatedly invoke the “Science(!)” mantra. But it’s fundamentally unscientific to shut down a society to purportedly, marginally extend the lives of a relatively small number of individuals who have already lived a long time or who have illnesses that would inevitably shorten their lives. Coronavirus has, nearly without exception, victimized an elderly, health-challenged cohort, and only a small fraction of that group. Science supports self-quarantining by this distinct minority of at-risk people. Science disfavors barring the vast majority of people from doing what they must to preserve normal, functional, collective economic and social life and individual mental health. New York and New Jersey, the states with, by far, the highest Corona death rates were/are the two most-locked down.

Additionally, science should compel us to accept that living things die. Stephen Jenkinson, author of the renowned book, Die Wise, and a counselor to the terminally ill, states that dying is an inherited moral, political, and spiritual obligation owed to other members of the human community. While Americans have created a culture of individualistic consumerism, death is not a personal choice to be exercised only when one is ready. In his song, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” the Rev. Gary Davis emphatically agrees. So, by their conduct, do all other animals and plants.

On one level, Jenkinson and Davis’s perspectives on death are profoundly countercultural. Most Americans have internalized Dylan Thomas’s exhortation to “rage against the dying of the light.” Yet, given the recently heightened unwillingness to accept death even during old age, one must wonder why America has sent millions of very young people to fight and kill other young people in wars.

Regardless, it has recently become fashionable, or politically convenient, to express not only sadness, but outrage, about elderly people dying; to even assert that the elderly were murdered by politicians “with blood on their hands.” If they were candid, many who now rail against the deaths of aged strangers would admit that they were not previously troubled by such deaths and seldom visited nursing homes. Many now expressing horror about Coronavirus deaths might until recently have said, or thought, that octogenarians had had a fair chance at life. They may even have considered merciful the passage of those who had lost cognitive function and/or lived in isolation.

Only three months ago, most people didn’t notice that 7,452 Americans and 146,400 other humans died each day. Overall, despite the Coronavirus media barrage, the pandemic has scarcely altered death rates. To begin with, most are not infected. Of those infected, about 99.8% of non-old, non-ill will survive. Given their ages and health status, the vast majority whose deaths were attributed to Covid-19 were already not long for this world. Coronavirus is pulling forward, by a few weeks or months, deaths that would have occurred even without infection.

Those who express sadness about Coronavirus death statistics might instead celebrate that there will be over 1.5 million more Americans on December 31, 2020 than there were on December 31, 2019. As 353,000 people are born daily, global population will grow by 81 million this year.

Meanwhile, the Lockdowns have put over 40 million people out of work. They have also caused much isolation, boredom, depression, anxiety, domestic and substance abuse and other unhealthy behaviors, which, along with recently increased homicides, will raise mortality. Beyond those effects, the Lockdowns have deprived hundreds of millions of people of hundreds of millions of irreplaceable life experiences and have deeply compromised education. Lockdowns are making many more — not fewer — people vulnerable.

But some institutions and individuals are profiting, or stand to profit, handsomely from the Lockdowns: news media outlets, Internet retailers, lawyers, vaccine makers and insincere and opportunistic politicians. Typically, these people and enterprises have guaranteed incomes and commensurately broader life choices. Simultaneously invoking, and yet selectively ignoring, science, these crisis profiteers and other Lockdown supporters have caused tremendous, unnecessary, lasting damage to the larger society and, consequently, to the individuals who live within it.