On COVID

by Jason Kaufman

I regularly reflect on the “naturalness” of pandemic. Like a hurricane, pandemic is something to which we must submit, and against which our human defenses have clear limits. Like drought, the emergence of zoonotic diseases is tied to our greedy consumption of and encroachment into the natural world. Amid the tragedy, there is a special power in a reminder that the Earth and its nature generates forces far greater than what we as humans can conceptualize, anticipate, or ultimately triumph over.