The coronavirus has encouraged many terrestrial communities to carry out extraordinary lives. The first cases of contagion of this virus were detected in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 and at the end of January 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a “state of health emergency”, mainly due to the lack of infrastructure, hospitals, medicines, etc. that poor countries may have to deal with the problem. Due to the rapid global spread of the disease in the coming weeks, on 11 March the WHO declared the situation a pandemic and the Western countries also began to adopt their sanitary and legal measures. In the case of Spain, the “state of alert” was declared by the central government on 14 March, by royal decree, and we know the consequences that this is having on our lives. I do not want to give an opinion on whether these measures are the most appropriate to deal with the scourge we are experiencing, but rather try to make a collective reflection on what the threat we face and how we could reconcile it with the discourse of the ecological crisis.

Few may doubt that if COVID-19 has a characteristic that characterizes it, it is a rapid ability to spread, to “act globally”, and to generate negative effects on some bodies (at least on people’s biological bodies) as they spread to the person’s death, in some cases. Although he doesn’t know exactly how it has been “created”, although he doesn’t know what it looks like, although he doesn’t know what it can do, he has made everyone dance. Infected cases have been recorded in the databases of each state, and I assume that the same will be true of patients who have had one or the other evolution, who will receive diagnoses and descriptions of symptomatology in each case and the effects explained. However, I would say that what worries us most about this whole drama is not that there are another 100 or 1000 deaths, but rather the uncertainty generated by this “state of threat”, the lack of knowledge of when the situation can be stabilised and the new conditions that will arise after stabilisation for many people and business sectors (not forgetting the harshness of the concern and suffering of people who live well from the consequences of the virus).

In this regard, I believe that COVID-19 has similarities with the problem of the ecological crisis, because what the ecological crisis faces us is not the problem of something that is already known (for example, a mechanical problem, although many understand it, the ecological crisis) that we can solve by taking concrete measures. On the contrary, we have seen a world of “global threats”, which we cannot take action with the means we had until now for social control (State, Science, Economy and Integrated Technology Scheme). We have to realize that the salvation of mankind is not something given, but something that must be dealt with at all times (I would say that it is something that is difficult for us to understand the modernized Westerners). The rarity of the climate cannot be understood only in the change of temperature experienced by the mass of air of the Earth; with the dragging of this indispensable material that maintains a large number of living beings of the Earth, and its consequences, closer and distant, sooner or later. In addition, in this case, the similarity between climate and COVID-19 is that both are hard to see and live like this in terrestrial bodies. What happens is that although their “body” is unknown (difficult to define and define, which changes at every moment, difficult to control, said in very short terms), they affect many collectives of the earth.

With both the weather and COVID-19, I would say that, first of all, we are seeing effects; we notice changes and transformations in the bodies that they produce. In the case of climatic conditions, the rarity of the air that we need to breathe, the change in temperature conditions, the deterioration of the duration of many living beings… What I mean is that this atmosphere that maintains the bodies of the Earth that we “know”, has in itself an action that is not a “mere scenario”, but is in action, creating and recreating conditions. In the case of COVID-19, on the other hand, the effects are increasingly known and, through practice, the collectives of the world are learning how to protect themselves against it. It's a sign that the actor of the action is making fame, but without controlling how far its effects can go. In both cases, it seems to me that what we need to think about is that, first, we start to detect effects on bodies that are known to us (they can be immediate as in the case of coronavirus or they adopt extensions in time and space, as in the case of climate), and later, we bring to light the causes of those effects through work, that is, we identify the actor.

This seems to me to be truly distinctive in order to shed some light on the “ecological madness” that we are experiencing. We are very used to believing that the causes produce effects, and that, therefore, time goes from the past to the present, giving its consequences. At a time when we are still immersed in the ecological crisis, we are beginning to feel that we are suffering the consequences of the actions and then we are doing the work of knowing the actors of those actions, what they are and what they can do. The ecological crisis is proving that it is impossible to think that we all share a Nature and control the laws of that Nature (causes). The material relationship between bodies is impossible to understand with schemes already carried out from the past to the present. On the contrary, with the material body present, I believe we must understand that in time it does so from the future to the present, and in this way we would see that it is the only way to “collectivize” or to “socialize” the transformation of the materials perceived in any collective. In fact, we would collectively "form" the shape of the bodies that cause action. How else? Is it possible to know the shape of the Earth if the problems, concerns and interests that occur in each case are not worked and compounded collectively?

It is still difficult to give a “controlled” diagnosis with COVID-19. Despite its threat, it seems to me that it is in our interest to look at the “environment” of the virus, not because it is not vitally important to analyse its biological consequences, but because we should reflect on which land we are prepared to defend at a time when situations of “urgency” and “emergency” have become more and more frequent. I am referring to the actions of the materials that make us when we say land, rather than the land geogen fica.No it goes without saying that, despite being in confinement, we consider that some “actions” are more necessary than others: having healthy foods, having medications, having security to protect the collectives, flexibility and solidarity with what is different … . If so, will it give us enough time and encouragement to know how to position ourselves in these increasingly common exceptional situations in which we live with the coronavirus? If we do not compose the body before us (with challenges and threats) with a proper and relocated socialization, in exceptional circumstances we will increasingly find ourselves, adrift. That is the madness of the ecological crisis.

Iker Azagirre

Environmental scientist.