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The Real Story of the Covid Catastrophe is Larger Than You Know
Covid may soon be the least of our worries
Our planet is screaming a message at us, and Covid is part of that communication. The death of nature and the appearance of Covid are all part of the same thing.
I’ll never forget the day the trucker called into my radio show. It was at least a decade ago, and he identified himself as a long-haul trucker who regularly ran a coast-to-coast route from the southeast to the Pacific Northwest dozens of times a year.
“Used to be when I was driving through the southern part of the Midwest like I am right now,” he said, “I’d have to stop every few hours to clean the bugs off my windshield. It’s been three days since I’ve had to clean bugs off my windshield on this trip. There’s something spooky going on out here.”
The phone lines lit up. People from Maine to California, from Florida to Washington state shared their stories of the vanishing insects where they lived. Multiple long-haul truckers listening on SiriusXM had similar stories.
We had just moved to Portland at that time, living on a floating home in the Willamette River, and the air was often filled with bugs and swallows, small insect-eating birds that fly as fast and sometimes as erratically as bats. A neighbor had a “swallow house,” a box on a pole by the side of her home with a dozens small holes in it where the swallows made their nests.
A bit more than a decade later, now living on the Columbia River in Portland, I haven’t seen a swallow in at least two years. The swarms of gnats, the mosquitoes, butterflies, beetles and moths that marked spring and summer for most of my 70 years, from Michigan to Vermont to Georgia to Oregon, all seem to have largely vanished.
But that’s only part of the story.
The insect apocalypse that the world is now experiencing and the Covid pandemic are all of one cloth. We humans have exceeded the capacity of this planet that we have conquered, and it is beginning to bite us back.
For the first several hundred thousand years of human history, our population slowly grew to around 5 million people at the dawn of the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. From that…
