We are not the virus
5 minute read
As we began to go into quarantine in March, it was hard to escape discussion of the environmental implications of the pandemic and shutdown. Some of these effects, like lower emissions in Los Angeles, turned out to be real; others, like clearer water in the canals of Venice, ended up being mostly illusory.
These stories of environmental revival in our relative absence—true or not—spoke to a deeply-rooted idea in our culture, and people latched on. This culminated in a collection of tweets that spread widely across the internet, all with a similar theme: nature does better without us. This idea was quickly ridiculed in the form of memes that became even more popular. Today, “nature is healing, we are the virus” reads like the setup for yet another quip.
The idea that people are the problem is not new. There is a throughline from the Bible to Malthus, from “The Tragedy of the Commons” to The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, each of them seemingly implicating us all in environmental degradation. The film mother! (2017) brings together many of these different threads. Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream), it received mixed reviews from critics and was unpopular among many viewers in spite of a cast laden with big names. The film is a drawn out allegory based on the Book of Genesis, retelling key parts of the Christian creation story and the fall of man through a narrative centered on a couple’s house being increasingly overrun with strangers.
The story here is straightforward. The characters of “Him” (Javier Bardem) and “mother” (Jennifer Lawrence) are representations of God and Earth, respectively. Outside of their house, we see unspoilt nature, green and thriving. But one small change—the introduction of a third character, simply called “man” (Ed Harris)—presages a decline that continues unabated from that point forward.
Man, a stand-in for the biblical figure Adam, feels a deep connection to the poetry written by Him, but mother is immediately wary, feeling faint and collapsing soon after his arrival. Mother sees man as an uninvited intruder even as Bardem’s character welcomes this stranger into their home. It quickly becomes clear that her instincts were correct; Harris’ character lights a cigarette inside the house and brazenly continues to smoke even after mother requests that he stop. Mother’s visceral reaction suggests that she experiences the smoking like a personified Earth might react to the first humans to set fires. Man’s presence casts a shadow over everything, and mother begins to see black mold spreading from the baseboards throughout her home. The area surrounding the house, once lush in greens and cast in brilliant light, is now concealed in shadow.
A new character called “woman” (Michelle Pfeiffer) appears and, together, man and woman are truly awful. They are obnoxious, inconsiderate, demanding, and intrusive. Mother takes some sort of medication to cope with the stress, presumably a metaphor for an Earth trying to heal itself from trauma and return to a state of equilibrium, but she cannot keep up with the damage they cause. She tells Him that she is going to kick man and woman out of their home, to which he replies: “Yeah? And where will they go?”
Characters representing Cain and Abel (portrayed by real-life brothers Domhnall and Brian Gleeson) show up soon after, and the entire situation quickly devolves. From this point forward, the viewer is trapped within an “intense, intensely pleased with itself, and intensely dumb” sequence that includes a sex-trafficing ring and protestors clashing with police outfitted in riot gear, all of which takes place within the house. The onslaught of imagery is disturbing to say the least.
But, of course, Aronofsky might argue that the metaphor should be disturbing. We are supposed to get a taste of what mother nature has had to deal with because of us. By inserting the character of mother into a story we’ve told ourselves for millenia, Aronofsky makes the case that God has been an overly-permissive father to humanity, and that the planet has been the one to bear the consequences. In this light, mother’s subsequent violence and destructiveness—a metaphor for our impending climate crisis—seems completely justified by the end of the film.
This is a clean, simple narrative of a pristine planet and of destructive humans. There is something appealing about this simplicity and the certainty it provides. It seems to convey that all of this, the world as it is now, was inevitable, and there’s something freeing about this perspective. By rooting the problem in humanity as a monolith or in “human nature” itself, all of us seem to be relieved of culpability.
This idea is reinforced by the language we use. Many climate scientists have proposed that we are now living in a new geological epoch, which they call the Anthropocene. The idea is right in the name: we live in the “age of humans.” They argue, quite rightly, that we have moved into a new period in which humanity has impacted planetary systems, up to and including the biosphere itself, in detrimental ways that are likely to severely limit the planet’s capacity to sustain life in the future. The work produced on the Anthropocene highlights not just the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, but also numerous other systems that have been upended through human activity, including mass extinction events, ocean acidification, and ozone depletion, among others.
While much of the research on the Anthropocene fulfills an important role by cataloging environmental decline, this work is, in general, ill-equipped to provide insight into the underlying causes behind the catastrophic changes now underway. The relatively narrow conception of history that these scholars draw on means that they have little choice but to blame “human nature” for environmental decline. The effect is to treat humanity as a single, collective actor, which leaves us with few alternatives. If the problem is anthros—or us—what can we possibly do? We will never be able to escape the fact that we are human.
Anthropogenic climate change arguments feed into a widely-held sense of fatalism surrounding ecological degradation. But the relationship between humans and nature these scholars depict and that we see modeled in mother! is inaccurate. Human beings lived on this planet and modified their surrounding environment for millennia without altering planetary systems in ways that threatened their survival. Environmental degradation isn’t the inevitable product of human activity, or even modernity.
Rather, it results from a particular relationship with nature, itself a product of a particular kind of economic relationship. Capitalism, a system that is premised on endless growth, commodification, and labor exploitation, is inherently at odds with our finite planet. It prioritizes profit not just over people, but over all life. Humanity is fully capable of reorganizing our relationship with nature, but doing so will require addressing the virus of capitalism.