(Just) Breathe
These spring mornings, the birds awaken me early since my wife and I sleep upstairs with the door and windows open, the air cool enough to give the room a slight chill but also add to a sound sleep. At 4:30 or so they begin, their little chirps and songs growing ever more in number (and louder) by about 5:00 AM. On some of those mornings I get out of bed and step outside to listen, almost feeling like an uninvited guest, an intruder trying not to break the silence of the moment; and every once in awhile I will find the moon partially hidden behind a gauzy sky and see the once-invisible gusts of wind become exposed by sheets and sheets of leaves in the trees. They come like rogue waves, those gusts, the air still for just a bit then brushing over you like a large blanket being gently fluffed from the dryer, moving the trees ever so gracefully and forcing them into a dance, and leaving me puzzled as to how something this gentle is able to move these massive 60-foot objects that refuse to budge no matter how hard I push. The birds, unseen, continue unabated as if the waving branches on which they perch are not a nuisance but a home, perhaps the shifting and swaying being enjoyed more than I can imagine. It is spring and they welcome it, much as I do. As Pink Floyd (of all groups) wrote: Breathe, breathe in the air, don't be afraid to care...all your touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be.
It would almost appear that the world is ready to breathe again, and not just we humans on lockdown or restricted outdoor access, but the world itself. Oceans and forests and animals are likely also puzzled at this "pause" they're experiencing, this lack of ships and planes and cars, this lack of people on the trails and streets, this world not so much of what was but perhaps a world of what could be. As I continue to plow through the lengthy 1155-page version of Stephen King's The Stand where a pathogen proves 94% lethal and basically decimates the human and domesticated animal population (but leaves most everything else alone), King writes of a warning given long ago to one of the book's survivors: He's come out the other side. That was all. No one can tell you what goes on between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just...come out the other side.
We are there now, stepping outside to a new world, a world of birds chirping perhaps, but also a world of hurt, a test of our resilience and of how strong we are, not only for ourselves but for others, a world now ready to challenge us to see how long we can hold out. It's as if things were okay for awhile but now it's crunch time and press briefings and virus updates do little to soothe the reality that tough times may be ahead...jobs, money, bills, electricity, food. As that song in Cabaret said: When you haven't any coal in the stove and you freeze in the winter and you curse to the wind at your fate; When you haven't any shoes on your feet, your coat's thin as paper and you look 30 pounds underweight. When you go to get a word of advice from the fat little pastor he will tell you to love evermore. But when hunger comes to rap, rat-a-tat rat-a-tat at the window...See how love flies out the door. Less shown on the news are the lines of cars and carts lined up, not those at Costco but those waiting for boxes of food at the donation centers. What's inside those boxes is unknown but is graciously accepted; there may be a bit of meat and some fruit and canned goods, but all of it will be unconsciously letting them know that that "snacking" and randomly nibbling is out. This food will have to last, at least until the mail arrives and, one hopes, it will be good news and not more bills. An eviction notice to get out of the house or apartment, the power is going off, none of that matters now because all you may be thinking about is how you will feed your kids...or yourself. It is truly a struggle...
And as if that wasn't enough, there's another side to all of this, a struggle just to breathe at all. Said National Geographic: Early in the course of the disease, many patients’ lungs remain stretchy, like a balloon, so they can breathe freely in and out. As their oxygen levels slowly decline, their breathing rate gradually increases to compensate, which blows out loads of the body’s carbon dioxide. The result is a sneaky onset of hypoxia, with some patients developing dangerously low levels of oxygen without the increases in carbon dioxide that would commonly alert the body to the problem. “In almost all clinical experience that physicians have, problems with the lung involve both problems with oxygen absorption and carbon dioxide elimination,” says Richard Levitan, an emergency physician who volunteered to spend 10 days treating COVID-19 pneumonia at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. “This disease is different.”...Some patients are running so low on oxygen, health-care workers would normally expect them to be incoherent or in shock. Instead, they’re awake, calm, and responsive. They chat with the physicians. They use their cell phones. While the basic physiology behind why these patients don’t immediately feel short of breath is well understood, scientists are still trying to come to grips with exactly how COVID-19 ravages the body, and why this disease, in particular, can quietly take your breath away.
Unfortunately, this new corona virus may do more than damage the lungs. Said CNN a week ago: Doctors treating coronavirus patients are seeing a range of odd and frightening syndromes, including blood clots of all sizes throughout the body, kidney failure, heart inflammation and immune complications. "One thing that is both curious and evolving and frustrating is that this disease is manifesting itself in so many different ways," said Dr. Scott Brakenridge, an assistant professor on the acute care surgery team at the University of Florida College of Medicine. This new virus may also affect your brain, your hands, your feet, even your eyes, said Bloomberg. Some people lose their sense of smell, a symptom termed anosmia; said Discover: It’s still unclear to scientists how widespread anosmia is among COVID-19 patients, which typically causes a fever, dry cough and difficulty breathing. And whether it can be a useful way to track the spread of the disease is still to be determined — leaving researchers eager to gather as much data on the symptom as possible. (It turns out that our noses have two nerves that capture odors, olfactory and trigeminal; the olfactory nerve captures simple odors like honey and vanilla while the trigeminal nerve captures odors like bleach and onions.) As to smells, this corona virus itself may emit a specific smell, something which researchers are training dogs to uncover said Smithsonian. So what about those touted drugs, remseivir and hydroxychloroquine, which are supposed to help battle this virus? Said Bloomberg Prognosis on April 24th: ...remdesivir must be infused in a hospital or doctor’s office once a day for 5 to 10 days; it would be very inconvenient for most people with Covid-19 who are suffering at home...Historically, antivirals like remdesivir work best when given early, before the virus has gotten out of control. As to hydroxychloroquine, the immune-suppressing malarial drug, the Washington Post reported: Clinical trials, academic research and scientific analysis indicate that the danger of the Trump-backed drug is a significantly increased risk of death for certain patients. Evidence showing the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating covid-19 has been scant. Those two developments pushed the Food and Drug Administration to warn against the use of hydroxychloroquine outside of a hospital setting last month, just weeks after it approved an emergency use authorization for the drug.
The problem with all of this is that there appears to be much more hidden underneath the surface of this virus and its "solutions". In a somewhat related view of what rests deep below the surface, Smithsonian did a piece on our melting permafrost and how some scientists are racing to discover its secrets: What lies inside the icy cavern seems more and more like a captive, rare animal, an Earth form that might soon be lost...Permafrost is one the weirder concoctions of the Earth’s Ice Ages. In the abstract, it sounds like a simple substance—any earth material that stays frozen for two or more years. In reality, it is a shape-shifting material that underlies about 24 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere—from the Tibetan Plateau to Siberia and parts of Arctic and sub-Arctic North America. Now many such areas are becoming both volatile and fragile. Permafrost can be hard as bedrock, but when it thaws, if it’s rich in ice and silt, it can morph into something like glue or chocolate milk or wet cement. In its frozen state, it can hoard materials for thousands of years without allowing them to decay. It can suspend bacteria in a kind of cryo-sleep—still alive for millennia.* Added a piece in The New York Review of Books: About a quarter of permafrost will thaw by 2100 even if warming is limited to well below 2 degrees; if emissions continue at their current rate, close to 70 percent of permafrost will melt...Over his thirty-five years of temperature monitoring, Romanovsky (Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost specialist doing research in the North Slopes area of Alaska) has seen a staggering rise of 3 degrees Celsius in permafrost twenty meters below the surface. At this rate of warming, the permafrost will rise above 0 degrees Celsius by mid-century at the latest. “Nobody was expecting this, and most people would be surprised to see this happen so soon.” (Romanovsky has published a study documenting thawing at permafrost sites in the Canadian Arctic to depths that weren’t expected, according to most models, until 2090.)**
The above review had this surprising detail: The vast majority of the earth’s ice lies at the poles. While mountain glaciers hold less than one percent of the world’s ice, equivalent to a potential 1.4 feet of sea level rise, the Antarctic continent is home to 87 percent of the world’s ice by volume, or almost two hundred feet of potential sea level rise. Greenland has 10 percent of the world’s ice—and over twenty feet of sea level rise. All is indeed not as it seems on the surface. Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist put it this way from an excerpt from her book as told to ELLE: If we live to be 100, then we're going to be here well into the next century, and that sounds really strange, I know. Because when you talk about the future today, it usually means in just a few years time...In the years 2078 and 2080, we (she and her sister) will celebrate our seventy-fifth birthdays. If we have children and grandchildren, perhaps they'll celebrate those birthdays with us. Perhaps we'll tell them what it was like when we were children. Perhaps we'll tell them about all of you...You keep saying that the children are our future, and that you would do anything for them. Such things sound full of hope. If you mean what you say, then please listen to us -- we don't want your pep talks. We don't want your presents, your package holidays, your hobbies, or your unlimited options. We want you to seriously get involved in the acute sustainability crisis going on all around you. And we want you to start speaking up and telling it like it is.
For many of us wearing or not-wearing masks, and the news making it sound as if we are pulling apart rather than pulling together, I have found a bit of the opposite. People graciously provide space when passing on the sidewalk or handing you a receipt or a wiped-down shopping cart. People talk through their masks and there is no stigma, no judgement. All things will change. But buried beneath all of this, all of our changing attitudes and changing lifestyles, resides history. This has happened before, not only with surviving plagues and disasters, but with ice ages and volcanic eruptions. The vast Roman Empire capitulated (said Smithsonian: Perhaps 10 percent of 75 million people living in the Roman Empire never recovered. “Like some beast,” a contemporary wrote, the sickness “destroyed not just a few people but rampaged across whole cities and destroyed them.”), London capitulated (watch a fascinating short paper-cutout history of London from National Geographic), Pompeii capitulated. Just watching the virtual tour of Pompeii's new discoveries (as taken from the Italian Pompeii Sites) bear in mind two things, how large the city was (and that's only what's been excavated) and how deep the hardened brick-like ash covered the site (seen when the drone flies over the cranes still working on the excavation). It's a bit humbling to see our lives and history shrunk down to just a few minutes, entire civilizations, entire cultures, entire cites and nations all passing before our eyes in seconds. Stepping back in this way, it is nice to be able to blink and clear our eyes, to see our world and our possibilities and ourselves in a new way, to view this new virus as a chance to change and a chance to come to a new realization that we may not just be entering a turning point of history but may already be well into it. We as individuals may feel that we in fact make little difference in the scheme of things, but one thing that we all have and have always had, is the ability to make a decision. What direction we head now is only up to us...
*Viruses can also lay hidden only to emerge again in a different mutation; the herpes virus that leads to chicken pox can stay dormant for decades or more in our bodies but is able to emerge in a different form as shingles.
**Added the review: The latest “Arctic Report Card,” released at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December, concludes that global permafrost has already crossed a sobering threshold: it has become a net carbon emitter, on the order of one to two billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. The cumulative evidence amounts to a “smoking gun” indicating that the carbon feedback loop has already begun, said Ted Schuur, the researcher who wrote the chapter on permafrost...In addition to carbon, Arctic permafrost holds enormous quantities of naturally occurring mercury. As it thaws, that neurotoxin will be released to the environment, available for dispersal through ocean food chains. There are still other nasty surprises lurking in the cryosphere. The US Army lugged an experimental nuclear reactor to power its research and development operations at Camp Century, in the northwest part of the Greenland ice sheet, in 1960. The reactor was removed, but radioactive coolant left behind when the camp was abandoned in 1966 will one day flow in subterranean channels to the sea. The meltdown will give rise to some fearful symmetries, too: that ice will become seawater that, as sea levels rise, eventually submerges and disseminates toxic chemicals from chemical plants, oil refineries, and industrial sites along the US coastline, from Florida to Texas.
Addendum: This TomFoolery video has gotten a lot of play (as in 5 million+) but it's quite well done in presenting a new fairy tale, one which Greta Thunberg might well tell her children about how her world changed in just a few short years...during these times, it is indeed a breath of fresh air.
It would almost appear that the world is ready to breathe again, and not just we humans on lockdown or restricted outdoor access, but the world itself. Oceans and forests and animals are likely also puzzled at this "pause" they're experiencing, this lack of ships and planes and cars, this lack of people on the trails and streets, this world not so much of what was but perhaps a world of what could be. As I continue to plow through the lengthy 1155-page version of Stephen King's The Stand where a pathogen proves 94% lethal and basically decimates the human and domesticated animal population (but leaves most everything else alone), King writes of a warning given long ago to one of the book's survivors: He's come out the other side. That was all. No one can tell you what goes on between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just...come out the other side.
We are there now, stepping outside to a new world, a world of birds chirping perhaps, but also a world of hurt, a test of our resilience and of how strong we are, not only for ourselves but for others, a world now ready to challenge us to see how long we can hold out. It's as if things were okay for awhile but now it's crunch time and press briefings and virus updates do little to soothe the reality that tough times may be ahead...jobs, money, bills, electricity, food. As that song in Cabaret said: When you haven't any coal in the stove and you freeze in the winter and you curse to the wind at your fate; When you haven't any shoes on your feet, your coat's thin as paper and you look 30 pounds underweight. When you go to get a word of advice from the fat little pastor he will tell you to love evermore. But when hunger comes to rap, rat-a-tat rat-a-tat at the window...See how love flies out the door. Less shown on the news are the lines of cars and carts lined up, not those at Costco but those waiting for boxes of food at the donation centers. What's inside those boxes is unknown but is graciously accepted; there may be a bit of meat and some fruit and canned goods, but all of it will be unconsciously letting them know that that "snacking" and randomly nibbling is out. This food will have to last, at least until the mail arrives and, one hopes, it will be good news and not more bills. An eviction notice to get out of the house or apartment, the power is going off, none of that matters now because all you may be thinking about is how you will feed your kids...or yourself. It is truly a struggle...
 |
| Photo of Covid-19-damaged lungs: George Washington Hospital |
Unfortunately, this new corona virus may do more than damage the lungs. Said CNN a week ago: Doctors treating coronavirus patients are seeing a range of odd and frightening syndromes, including blood clots of all sizes throughout the body, kidney failure, heart inflammation and immune complications. "One thing that is both curious and evolving and frustrating is that this disease is manifesting itself in so many different ways," said Dr. Scott Brakenridge, an assistant professor on the acute care surgery team at the University of Florida College of Medicine. This new virus may also affect your brain, your hands, your feet, even your eyes, said Bloomberg. Some people lose their sense of smell, a symptom termed anosmia; said Discover: It’s still unclear to scientists how widespread anosmia is among COVID-19 patients, which typically causes a fever, dry cough and difficulty breathing. And whether it can be a useful way to track the spread of the disease is still to be determined — leaving researchers eager to gather as much data on the symptom as possible. (It turns out that our noses have two nerves that capture odors, olfactory and trigeminal; the olfactory nerve captures simple odors like honey and vanilla while the trigeminal nerve captures odors like bleach and onions.) As to smells, this corona virus itself may emit a specific smell, something which researchers are training dogs to uncover said Smithsonian. So what about those touted drugs, remseivir and hydroxychloroquine, which are supposed to help battle this virus? Said Bloomberg Prognosis on April 24th: ...remdesivir must be infused in a hospital or doctor’s office once a day for 5 to 10 days; it would be very inconvenient for most people with Covid-19 who are suffering at home...Historically, antivirals like remdesivir work best when given early, before the virus has gotten out of control. As to hydroxychloroquine, the immune-suppressing malarial drug, the Washington Post reported: Clinical trials, academic research and scientific analysis indicate that the danger of the Trump-backed drug is a significantly increased risk of death for certain patients. Evidence showing the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating covid-19 has been scant. Those two developments pushed the Food and Drug Administration to warn against the use of hydroxychloroquine outside of a hospital setting last month, just weeks after it approved an emergency use authorization for the drug.
The problem with all of this is that there appears to be much more hidden underneath the surface of this virus and its "solutions". In a somewhat related view of what rests deep below the surface, Smithsonian did a piece on our melting permafrost and how some scientists are racing to discover its secrets: What lies inside the icy cavern seems more and more like a captive, rare animal, an Earth form that might soon be lost...Permafrost is one the weirder concoctions of the Earth’s Ice Ages. In the abstract, it sounds like a simple substance—any earth material that stays frozen for two or more years. In reality, it is a shape-shifting material that underlies about 24 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere—from the Tibetan Plateau to Siberia and parts of Arctic and sub-Arctic North America. Now many such areas are becoming both volatile and fragile. Permafrost can be hard as bedrock, but when it thaws, if it’s rich in ice and silt, it can morph into something like glue or chocolate milk or wet cement. In its frozen state, it can hoard materials for thousands of years without allowing them to decay. It can suspend bacteria in a kind of cryo-sleep—still alive for millennia.* Added a piece in The New York Review of Books: About a quarter of permafrost will thaw by 2100 even if warming is limited to well below 2 degrees; if emissions continue at their current rate, close to 70 percent of permafrost will melt...Over his thirty-five years of temperature monitoring, Romanovsky (Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost specialist doing research in the North Slopes area of Alaska) has seen a staggering rise of 3 degrees Celsius in permafrost twenty meters below the surface. At this rate of warming, the permafrost will rise above 0 degrees Celsius by mid-century at the latest. “Nobody was expecting this, and most people would be surprised to see this happen so soon.” (Romanovsky has published a study documenting thawing at permafrost sites in the Canadian Arctic to depths that weren’t expected, according to most models, until 2090.)**
The above review had this surprising detail: The vast majority of the earth’s ice lies at the poles. While mountain glaciers hold less than one percent of the world’s ice, equivalent to a potential 1.4 feet of sea level rise, the Antarctic continent is home to 87 percent of the world’s ice by volume, or almost two hundred feet of potential sea level rise. Greenland has 10 percent of the world’s ice—and over twenty feet of sea level rise. All is indeed not as it seems on the surface. Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist put it this way from an excerpt from her book as told to ELLE: If we live to be 100, then we're going to be here well into the next century, and that sounds really strange, I know. Because when you talk about the future today, it usually means in just a few years time...In the years 2078 and 2080, we (she and her sister) will celebrate our seventy-fifth birthdays. If we have children and grandchildren, perhaps they'll celebrate those birthdays with us. Perhaps we'll tell them what it was like when we were children. Perhaps we'll tell them about all of you...You keep saying that the children are our future, and that you would do anything for them. Such things sound full of hope. If you mean what you say, then please listen to us -- we don't want your pep talks. We don't want your presents, your package holidays, your hobbies, or your unlimited options. We want you to seriously get involved in the acute sustainability crisis going on all around you. And we want you to start speaking up and telling it like it is.
For many of us wearing or not-wearing masks, and the news making it sound as if we are pulling apart rather than pulling together, I have found a bit of the opposite. People graciously provide space when passing on the sidewalk or handing you a receipt or a wiped-down shopping cart. People talk through their masks and there is no stigma, no judgement. All things will change. But buried beneath all of this, all of our changing attitudes and changing lifestyles, resides history. This has happened before, not only with surviving plagues and disasters, but with ice ages and volcanic eruptions. The vast Roman Empire capitulated (said Smithsonian: Perhaps 10 percent of 75 million people living in the Roman Empire never recovered. “Like some beast,” a contemporary wrote, the sickness “destroyed not just a few people but rampaged across whole cities and destroyed them.”), London capitulated (watch a fascinating short paper-cutout history of London from National Geographic), Pompeii capitulated. Just watching the virtual tour of Pompeii's new discoveries (as taken from the Italian Pompeii Sites) bear in mind two things, how large the city was (and that's only what's been excavated) and how deep the hardened brick-like ash covered the site (seen when the drone flies over the cranes still working on the excavation). It's a bit humbling to see our lives and history shrunk down to just a few minutes, entire civilizations, entire cultures, entire cites and nations all passing before our eyes in seconds. Stepping back in this way, it is nice to be able to blink and clear our eyes, to see our world and our possibilities and ourselves in a new way, to view this new virus as a chance to change and a chance to come to a new realization that we may not just be entering a turning point of history but may already be well into it. We as individuals may feel that we in fact make little difference in the scheme of things, but one thing that we all have and have always had, is the ability to make a decision. What direction we head now is only up to us...
*Viruses can also lay hidden only to emerge again in a different mutation; the herpes virus that leads to chicken pox can stay dormant for decades or more in our bodies but is able to emerge in a different form as shingles.
**Added the review: The latest “Arctic Report Card,” released at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December, concludes that global permafrost has already crossed a sobering threshold: it has become a net carbon emitter, on the order of one to two billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. The cumulative evidence amounts to a “smoking gun” indicating that the carbon feedback loop has already begun, said Ted Schuur, the researcher who wrote the chapter on permafrost...In addition to carbon, Arctic permafrost holds enormous quantities of naturally occurring mercury. As it thaws, that neurotoxin will be released to the environment, available for dispersal through ocean food chains. There are still other nasty surprises lurking in the cryosphere. The US Army lugged an experimental nuclear reactor to power its research and development operations at Camp Century, in the northwest part of the Greenland ice sheet, in 1960. The reactor was removed, but radioactive coolant left behind when the camp was abandoned in 1966 will one day flow in subterranean channels to the sea. The meltdown will give rise to some fearful symmetries, too: that ice will become seawater that, as sea levels rise, eventually submerges and disseminates toxic chemicals from chemical plants, oil refineries, and industrial sites along the US coastline, from Florida to Texas.
Addendum: This TomFoolery video has gotten a lot of play (as in 5 million+) but it's quite well done in presenting a new fairy tale, one which Greta Thunberg might well tell her children about how her world changed in just a few short years...during these times, it is indeed a breath of fresh air.
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