I am currently reading Kyle Harper’s quite stimulating book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, and come across an interesting idea that to me speaks to our current situation.

Historians have been thinking about disease and its relationship to human history for some time. For me, an entry into this literature was Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange of 1972, though scholars will tell you that the systematic analysis was pioneered by W.H. McNeil in his 1976 book Plagues and Peoples. (For an overview, see A.G. Carmichael, “Infectious disease and human agency: an historical overview,“ pp. 3-46 in Scripta Varia 106 (2006); here is a link.)

In these formulations from the 1970s, the idea was that, in the Neolithic, once the agricultural revolution had set in, humans lived in discrete settled areas with some real distance between them, and this allowed distinctive germ pools to emerge. When large scale long-distance trade emerged, the microbes in these germ pools traveled with trade, and this led to “convergence of the civilized disease pools.” Thus, most of the large pandemics across time—though not all—have bene pandemics caused by inter-human frontiers; that is, different communities of humans “contact” each other and viruses new to one side or the other erupt. Thus the “Columbian Exchange,” for instance.

What is interesting, is that in recent decades, with the emergence now of the new pathogens over the past 30 or 40 years, from HIV-AIDS forward, these pathogens are not coming from the consequences of the domestication of animals (hence, the agricultural revolution) in heretofore discrete human populations; these are coming from non-domesticated animals, wild animals, and it signifies a new situation in the human relationship with nature. No longer are we trying to carve out archipelagoes of human civilization, within which we try to manage small fractions of the natural world. Instead, now, in the Anthropocene, we have expanded our contact with the natural world and far more global and ambitious ways.  Some of this is in David Quammen’s popular book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (2012), but I think a better and richer account can be found in Ron Barrett and George Armelagos’s An Unnatural History of Emerging Infections (2013) (findable here).  

With this Coronavirus, that's what we're seeing--not a virus that has jumped out of one local viral pool populated by one community of humans, but something that comes entirely from outside the human world, to all of us.  

Anyway, it's an interesting thought.  Wash those hands!