The New Diseases of Civilization

One of "the four horsemen of the climate endgame" strikes my own family. Also: pilgrimage to wilderness refugia and desert tortoises.

Welcome! I’m Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It and co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass. This newsletter focuses on sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance. You can subscribe for free. Paying for a subscription supports my writing and organizing work, and gets you access to behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.

Wilderness. Land of elk, wolves, bears, trout, toads, deer, mountain lions, woodpeckers, stones, rivers, lakes, mountains, forests, and meadows. Photo by the author.

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Last month, my father contracted a rare bacterial infection.

Vomiting and severely dehydrated with what we believed was a virulent stomach flu, he checked into the hospital, but within days, developed jaundice, significant weight loss, fatigue, pain, and multiple organ failure.

It took 17 days for doctors to finally diagnose him with “Weil’s Disease,” a severe form of leptospirosis, or infection of Leptospira bacteria.

Leptospirosis is a what’s called a zoonotic disesase — an illness transmitted from animals to human beings — and is transmitted via contaminated water, and is most common in the tropics. In Washington State, where my father lives, there are between zero and five cases of leptospirosis annually among a population of 7.8 million. Nationwide, there are between 100 and 200 cases per year, mostly in Hawaii.

But that is changing.

Medical research has shown that global warming is “lengthen[ing] the seasons and expand[ing] the geographical areas for optimal survival and transmission of leptospires,” since the bacteria “are able to survive for longer periods of time in higher temperatures and humid environments.” And leptospirosis isn’t the only disease which is spreading due to global warming. Lyme, malaria, dengue fever, and West Nile virus are also expanding.

As one scientific study stated, “[T]he“four horsemen” of the climate change end game are likely to be famine and undernutrition, extreme weather events, conflict, and vector-borne diseases.”

Climate change is leading to shifts in disease transmission and range, but other factors are also influencing disease spread. Research shows that “biodiversity loss appears to increase the risk of human exposure to both new and established zoonotic pathogens” such as AIDS, Ebola, SARS, MERS, Nipah, Hendra, and COVID-19 by destroying habitat and leading to unusual wildlife behavior. These are some of the costs of the “growing human encroachment on nature” — logging, agricultural development, overhunting, and urban sprawl.

A 2020 report from The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) says that “to avoid future pandemics, humans must urgently transform our relationship with the environment” including, according to their recommendation, by expanding protected areas.

Diseases of Civilization: The Consequences of Ecological Destruction

There is a term in medicine — “lifestyle diseases” — that refers to the illnesses that are almost absent in tribal and land-based communities, but which have become common in agricultural societies and especially modern civilization.

These diseases include diabetes, heart disease, obesity, stroke, COPD, hypertension, depression, colitis, Alzheimer’s and other dementias, irritable bowel syndrome, asthma, cancer, and even acne. That list includes 6 of the top 10 leading causes of death globally.

Rather than calling these lifestyle diseases, I prefer the original term, “diseases of civilization,” which captures that these illnesses have social origins. Yes, they may be linked to individual lifestyle behaviors like diet and exercise, but they are also associated with factors which are largely or entirely outside of our control, like chemical pollution, urbanization, mechanization, industrial agriculture, and so on. These forces act upon our communities and our individual bodies largely without regard for our personal choices, leading to one Cornell study to find that water, air, and soil pollution cause 40% of all human deaths worldwide.

The phrase “diseases of civilization” also captures an important idea once articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” With the growth of civilization and resulting ecological harm leading to increases in communicable diseases, perhaps it is time to begin referring to illnesses like COVID-19, influenza, and leptospirosis as diseases of civilization, too.

A Viral and Bacterial Paradise

Of course, disease is not a modern phenomenon, and non-industrialized societies suffer more than their share of illness. But what is clear is that much of disease as we know it today is linked to the origins of civilization roughly 7,000 years ago. One meta-analysis looking at 11,000 sets of ancient human remains across Europe and the Mediterranean found “a general decline in health” that “began to worsen markedly” as the agricultural Roman and Greek empires spread through the region.

Part of the reason for this is that civilization — societies based on large populations supported by agriculture and living in dense settlements known as cities — provides the perfect environment for infectious disease to thrive. From the Black Death to tuberculosis to COVID-19, the history of civilization is racked with periodic pandemics and annual waves of disease.

In contrast, while members of tribal communities undoubtedly contracted zoonotic illness from interaction with wildlife at times, such infections would rarely have spread very far. This is why pre-colonization indigenous nations in North and South America, which had far-flung trade networks but lived mostly in relatively small communities, had no resistance to measles, whooping cough, influenza, pertussis, and smallpox; these illnesses originated in Europe and Asia, amid vast cities with large populations of humans living in close proximity with domesticated animals. When they were introduced to the modern hemisphere — and sometimes deliberately transmitted to native communities — tens of millions died in what are known as virgin soil epidemics.

Whether we are speaking of bacterial or viral infections that affect human beings or fungal diseases or insects that attack trees (such as Chestnut blight or the Emerald ash borer), the introduction of non-native species into an environment can have extreme consequences.

Mortality

Disease and death are themselves natural processes. Populations of all species are balanced by limitations in resource availability, habitat, predation, and — yes — by disease. This is not polite to say, because as human beings with compassion, we feel the suffering of people who are sick and we want to avoid suffering ourselves. But it is nonetheless true.

One of the primary principles of medicine is that proper diagnosis leads to proper treatment. This idea is just as valuable in environmentalism. As I have written about extensively in the past, civilization — growing populations of human beings living in cities and supported by mass agriculture —is unsustainable. Our modern way of life will not last. There are dozens of examples from the last 7,000 years of civilizations growing, undermining their own ecological foundations, and then collapsing.

The difference today is that modern civilization is global, and technology means that impacts are no longer localized to the forests, grasslands, and watersheds of particular regions. Rather, they are planetary. That means the collapse that is coming (in fact, it has already begun) will be consequently larger.

Collapse is not monolithic or simple, but rather is complex and progressive. It has many elements, some of which we might welcome—like reductions in industrial fishing, collapse of the fossil fuel industry, and recovery of oceanic dead zones—and some of which will be tragic: food shortages, political instability, breakdowns in social order, and greater disease.

The forces pushing us towards collapse may be irresistible. But we do, nonetheless, have choices. We can choose how to move forward in light of the processes that are playing out.

My father is recovering, now, and has returned to his daily habit of walking off trail through the woods. This morning, walking with my father through a remnant old-growth forest, I asked him how the experience of this illness has changed him.

Off-trail, we picked our way through trailing blackberries. As he stepped over a fallen log, he told me that he has been thinking about accepting his own aging and powerlessness in the face of death.

There is something liberating in accepting the inevitable. It doesn’t mean despair. It doesn’t mean giving up. It just means giving up on what will not happen. And that can give us the freedom to live not only in the present moment, but to act for future generations.

My nephews greeting their grandfather when he returned home.

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Afterword

Refugium (n): an area in which a population of organisms can survive through a period of unfavorable conditions, especially glaciation.

Confronting the truth of what is happening to our planet is profoundly destabilizing, and fighting to change it is very difficult. Sojourns to the wilderness keep me sane. For me, going into the wild is a pilgrimage, but even more so, it is a return home, a return to being fully human.

In an era of global warming, urban sprawl, plastic pollution, and 8 billion people, wild places becomes even more precious. These places and the beings who live within them offer us an opportunity to learn the ethos of reverence. Leaving behind the internet, cars, traffic, commerce and grocery stores, deadlines, calendars, phone calls, my soul seems to finally catch up with my body. The wild can be found in even the busiest city, but the experience is far more profound where habitat is large and intact, where megafauna and predators roam, where landscapes stretch away uninterrupted to the distant horizon.

This video is short, rambling, and unfocused, reflective of my mind unwinding from years of pressure and my body slowing to the rhythms of sunrise and sunset, shifting weather patterns, finding shade in the heat of the day and sleeping as dusk falls. It is a brief glimpse into one of my summer wanderings in the high mountains.

As one friend, Don, commented:

If we don't already, we must learn to savor every precious moment of this miracle, the natural world in which we are immersed. If we lose the capacity to love the source of our existence then we will stand by while it is destroyed.

Just as much, I believe we must cultivate the capacity to look at what we’d rather not see: to walk in clearcuts, to visit places that are condemned to destruction for housing developments, to find the plastic-choked remnants of the urban stream.

If The Desert Tortoise Could Speak

My friend Justin

@McAffee

, a talented filmmaker, made this beautiful short film about the Desert Tortoise. It’s worth your time.