A Hundred Years Of Covid: Plague As A Process, Not An Event / Nate Bear
Social critic and writer Nate Bear joins me to discuss his work over the years communicating his insights into the intersections between the ongoing pandemic, human-caused climate disruption, and biospheric collapse. Nate describes how the abandonment of the population to repeated infection, mass illness, and death, is layered into the compounding crises affecting the living systems of the planet today.
Reading Nate Bear’s writings have been a balm for me. His essays are fascinating and educational, citing diverse sets of scientific research and historical accounts that bring our Covid age into a starker clarity. While many of the subjects he chooses to cover are often dire in nature, I find it reassuring to read his honest assessments of the global pandemic and how it intersects with the broader existential and ecological predicaments we face on this planet we all share. As listeners of this podcast have shared with me, having meaningful discussions about—or in the case of Nate’s essays, reading about—our global predicament, and the political, economic, cultural, and historical reasons why it’s occurring, can provide psychological and emotional relief from the inane, obfuscating, trivial bullshit that demands our regular attention.
I wanted to have him on this podcast to discuss several subjects, including the tension within the hearts and minds of many Covid conscious folks right now. There are broad sociological and political reasons pandemic mitigations have been dropped by many governments around the world, to our collective detriment. But undeniably, we find ourselves blaming individuals for not assessing the risks of catching the virus well enough to take up basic precautions, such as masking, testing, and other common-sense measures. We understand that this unwillingness to acknowledge reality and discern risk—taking up the harmful lie that Covid is just “something we must learn to live with”—is harming all of us—disabled and non-disabled, "vulnerable" and "non-vulnerable", young and old alike.
In this discussion, Nate provides an empathic view, framing these frustrations we may have with our fellow humans as understandable, given the circumstances. People should see how much more collectively sick we are; how many of us are not recovering from their multiple infections per year; how compromised our immune systems are. Relationships have suffered, have been fractured and have ended, as the continued insistence to avoid infection is derided as paranoid, or worse, by those you once thought you knew and trusted. Folks should put two and two together, but often don’t, for various reasons.
But even in the field of those interpersonal strains and pains, we must remember, or learn, to direct most of our rage of our present circumstances at our governments and the economic system they serve. They have borne out this crisis. And the same way we are being screwed by the unmitigated spread of Covid, we and future generations are being screwed by accelerating climate disruption and ecological collapse. These connections are extremely relevant. How we conduct ourselves in this plague, what we direct our attention toward, how we take care of ourselves and each other, bears enormously on how we will and do comport ourselves as the collapse accelerates.
Bio:
Nate Bear holds a masters in the history of international relations and worked as a journalist before becoming a PR man for the planet, communicating the science of the climate and ecological crisis for non-profits and activist groups. After working in that sector for a decade, Nate is now a writer and social critic that analyses the intersection between capital, public health, governance, and the overlapping crises of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic, climate disruption, and ecological collapse. Nate writes about these subject in his popular newsletter, Do Not Panic!, on Substack.
Episode Notes:
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Music by Waxie.
