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But nature isn’t an idyllic land of animal villages constructed by evolution. Species’ niche-building ways have always brought them into contact with each other. “Nature is ruled by processes like competition, predation, and mutualism,” Naeem says. “Some of them are positive, some are negative, some are neutral. That goes for our interactions with the microbial world, including viruses, which range from super beneficial to super harmful.”
Ultimately, nature works out a truce. “If the flower tries to short the hummingbird on sugar, the hummingbird is not going to provide it with pollination,” Naeem says. “If the hummingbird sucks up all the nectar and doesn’t do pollination well, it’s going to get pinged as well. Through this kind of back and forth, species hammer out an optimal way of getting along in nature. Evolution winds up finding some middle ground.” Naeem pauses. “If you try to beat up everybody, though, it’s not going to work.”
Guess which species is the bully? “There’s never been any species on this planet in its entire history that has had the capacity to modify its niche the way we have,” Naeem says. Our niche—cities, farms, factories—has made the planet into a zoological Manhattan. Living in close proximity with other species, and their viruses, means we are going to rub shoulders with them. Dense living isn’t for everyone. But a global economy is. And with it comes an intercontinental transportation system. A virus doesn’t have a nationality. It can travel as easily from Arkansas to China as the other way around. A pandemic is an inevitable outcome of our modified niche. […]
“False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.” ~~Sam Harris (2016)
At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—The D Brand:
Ask any person on the street what a Republican stands for, and you’ll get a single answer — smaller government and lower taxes, family values, and a strong national defense. We can quibble about the GOP’s real commitment to those values, but at the end of the day, they form a strong brand around which the GOP’s entire agenda can be framed.
Ask 10 people what the Democrats stand for, and you’ll get 10 different answers. Ask me what the Democrats stand for, and I’ll stare back speechless.
The GOP has been brilliant in distilling their brand into three points, and I have been arguing that Democrats need to follow. Except that in a stroke of inspiration, I was able to distill the Democratic brand into a single short sentence:
Democrats are the party for people who work for a living
