The Smallpox Virus (magnified)

From an Article by Kyle Harper, Inhabiting the Anthropocene, October 18, 2017

>>> Professor Kyle Harper’s recent book, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, is now available from Princeton University Press. This blog post expands from Harper’s work on the Roman Empire to look more broadly at the long history of interaction between human societies and pathogenic microbes. ###

In AD 166, the city of Rome was invaded by an unfamiliar enemy. Invisible to the naked eye, this enemy was more destructive than any the Romans had ever encountered in their long history. We cannot yet say with certainty what this microorganism was, although most historians strongly suspect that it was the debut of the smallpox virus, Variola major. (Hopefully, in coming years the pathogen’s DNA will be recovered from an archaeological sample, allowing a definite identification). In the meantime, the best testimony is furnished by the prolific medical writer, Galen, who lived through the pestilence and described a disease characterized by a ghastly pustular rash wrapping the entire body, a drawn out course of infection, hemorrhagic cases, and high mortality. There are simply few pathogens that are capable of accomplishing what this germ did. Within a few years, the disease rampaged from Egypt to Britain, from the Danube to the Sahara. The ancient witnesses report horrific mortality, and while accurate numbers are elusive, it is not unreasonable to think that the pestilence – known as the Antonine Plague – carried off 7 or 8 million victims in the Roman Empire. It was the single worst mortality event, in absolute terms, up to that point in human history.

The Antonine Plague struck the Roman Empire at its very apex. On the eve of the pestilence, the Roman Empire was the most powerful state in the world. Roman rule stretched from the shores of the Atlantic to the hills of Syria, from beyond the Danube to the first cataract of the Nile. One in four humans alive inhabited the empire’s borders. They enjoyed a rising standard of living, right down to the outbreak of the pestilence. The great mortality was no Malthusian meltdown. It was a bolt from the blue, a sharp bend in the course of history, triggered by the appearance of an emerging infectious disease from beyond the frontiers. The Antonine Plague was a demographic catastrophe. It did not topple the Roman Empire, nor did it condemn the empire to inevitable doom. But it did mark a turning point, a transition to an age characterized by sharper social and political challenges. In short, the mighty Roman Empire was transformed by a microscopic germ.

How are we to understand a biological event of this magnitude, which might deserve to be considered history’s first true “pandemic”? The answer, I would suggest, takes us to the heart of what Michael Gillings and Ian Paulsen have called “the microbiology of the Anthropocene.” The Antonine Plague occurred at the intersection of human and natural factors. If the disease was indeed smallpox, the agent of the pestilence evolved, relatively recently, in Africa, from an ancestral rodent Orthopoxvirus, and entered the Roman Empire as an evolutionary newborn. It was carried into the empire on the trading networks that had grown up in the first centuries, connecting the lands lying around the Indian Ocean. The Red Sea was a major theater of Roman trade, bringing spices, silks, ivories, slaves, etc. into the empire, in massive quantities. This trading network, the scene of incipient globalization, also brought germs. The Antonine Plague, then, was the conjuncture of human transformation of the planet with random, evolutionary events far beyond human influence.

Gillings and Paulsen show how we might apply the concept of the Anthropocene to the study of microbial organisms. They propose a framework in which human transformation of the earth’s systems has come to dominate the ecological and evolutionary conditions of microbial life. Gillings and Paulsen are concerned with the effects of human civilization on all microbial species, and they catalogue six principal ways in which human alteration of the environment has impacted bacteria, viruses, and protozoa: (1) the reconfiguration of the human microbiome, due principally to radical changes in the human diet; (2) the spread of antibiotic resistance, an evolutionary response to the widespread use of pharmaceuticals; (3) the transformation of global geochemical systems, including nitrogen and carbon cycles; (4) dispersal and disease (of most immediate interest here); (5) global warming and ocean acidification; and (6) the intentional human manipulation of microbial DNA. Gillings and Paulsen propose a timeline of human interference in which the rise of agriculture marks the beginnings of a Paleoanthropocene, the Industrial Revolution stands at the threshold of the Anthropocene proper, and the last 50 years should be considered the Great Acceleration.

In this post and one to follow, I’d like to explore the smaller subset of microorganisms that are capable of causing disease in humans. There are maybe a trillion microbial species on earth, but most of this wondrously diverse array is indifferent to us. Only something like 1400 species are known (so far) to be pathogenic to humans (over 500 bacteria, some 200 viruses, and assorted other fungi, helminths, and protozoa). These organisms in general possess the molecular weapons – virulence factors – that allow them to evade, subvert, or overcome our powerful immune systems. The background conditions of the physical climate shape and constrain the geographical ecology of pathogenic microbes, but human occupation of the globe has interacted with this natural background to configure the global landscape of germs that exists today. In the largest sense, the global distribution and prevalence of these pathogens is incomprehensible without accounting for human colonization of the planet and our transformation of planetary ecosystems.

Consider, for instance, the WHO’s gargantuan efforts to catalogue the global distribution of infectious disease risk. The assessment immediately reveals that as far as dangerous microbes are concerned, it is not true that “everything is everywhere.” Many species are ecologically specific, and in particular the tropics bear a heavy burden of infectious disease. This pattern is due both to natural factors (i.e., pathogens obey the “latitudinal species gradient,” the greater diversity and richness of all life near the equator) and contingent historical factors (the strong association between underdevelopment and infectious disease risk). You are unlikely to die of falciparum malaria in Montreal. But the regional distribution of pathogens today also reflects the heavy hand of human intervention. Even in the few decades that the WHO has been trying to track these data, some germs have receded in importance (in fact, malaria, in many places) while other germs have emerged (for instance, the Zika virus), both of which are inconceivable without intentional and unintentional human manipulation of the environment. The WHO’s “map” of infectious disease is a product of both nature and human-driven ecological change.

From a germ’s point of view, human transformation of the evolutionary environment extends back millennia. To assess the human impact on the prevalence and diversity of infectious disease, we have to imagine the various mechanisms by which human transformation of the environment has altered the selection pressures operative for pathogenic microbes. In the words of the historian John McNeill, “for all species, on land and sea, the Anthropocene has revised the rules of evolution. Biological fitness— defined as success in the business of survival and reproduction— has increasingly hinged on compatibility with human enterprise. Those species that fit neatly into a humanized planet, such as pigeons, squirrels, rats, cattle, goats, crabgrass, rice, and maize prosper.” The same is manifestly true of pathogenic bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and other parasites. In Part II of this Article, we will classify some of the ways that our species has fundamentally changed the rules of the game for pathogenic microbes.

Subtitle: The Seventh Generation: Survival, Sustainability, Sustenance in a New Nature — Paperback – Published on September 24, 2015

New Book by Jimmy Guignard (Author), M. Jimmie Killingsworth (Foreword)

Book Summary:  Setting of Tioga County in Northeast Pennsylvania

“Pedaling the Sacrifice Zone: Teaching, Writing, and Living above the Marcellus Shale”

Before the dust settles, as many as 100,000 natural gas wells may be drilled into the Marcellus Shale on more than 20,000 well pads in Pennsylvania. Living on seven acres above the shale, Jimmy Guignard tells his story as an English professor grappling with the meaning of place and the power of words as he watches the rural landscape his family calls home be transformed into an industrial sacrifice zone.

From the vantage point of an avid and experienced cyclist, Guignard tracks the takeover, chalking up thousands of miles pedaling through Tioga and surrounding counties. Encountering increased truck traffic on the roads, crossing pipeline construction on the trails, and passing a growing number of flaring gas wells, the author’s rides begin to shape his academic work in ways he found surprising and sobering.

Juggling his roles as disinterested professor, anxious father and citizen, and reluctant activist, he reveals how the rhetoric of industry, politicians, and locals reshaped his understanding of teaching and his faith in the force of language.

Comments on “Pedaling the Sacrifice Zone”

“Navigating terrain, cresting hills, glimpsing wildlife at one turn and drilling rigs at another, Jimmy Guignard literally and figuratively cycles the reader through the fraught landscape of his family’s life in the ‘sacrifice zone.’ This is an essential and approachable book for understanding the impact of the natural gas industry on a place as well as on a people. Emphasizing the power of rhetoric as a tool for understanding the industry, Guignard offers an honest and searching account of what it means to live consciously, energetically, and passionately in a place wracked by technological change, uncertainty, and corporate power dynamics.” —Eileen E. Schell, coauthor of Rural Literacies (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric) and coeditor of Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy

“In Pedaling the Sacrifice Zone, Jimmy Guignard leads us on a nuanced journey through the hard truths and complex narrative frames of Marcellus shale production in rural northeastern America. “Contact! Contact!” Henry Thoreau advised us about our relationship to landscapes. Guignard pedals right up close to the solid earth, the actual world, and where he lives it now sadly smells more and more like cheap gas and high corporate profits.”—John Lane, author of Circling Home

“Pedaling the Sacrifice Zone reads like a mystery novel, replete with fully fleshed out characters who may or may not be guilty of crimes against humanity, a compelling dramatic time line, a hard-boiled, beer-drinking, bike-riding environmental detective, and richly drawn sense of place. So engrossing is the story Guignard tells we almost don’t notice how much we’re learning about fracking, environmental rhetoric, and the coming of age—no, the maturing—of a man who cares deeply about the physical world and what we are doing to it. A lovely mix of scholarship and personal narrative, this book should be required reading for anyone interested in nature writing and the frustrating world of fracking.” —Sheryl St. Germain, author of Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Poem of Despair and Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman.

WVU Distinguished Visitors Lecture:

Prof. Brian Fagan, April 4, 2012, Morgantown, WV

Brian Fagan is emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he has been on faculty since 1967.  He is author or editor of 46 books and over 100 articles in scientific journals. Three of his books are summarized below.   In his lecture at WVU he presented photographs to feature the topics in his most recent book Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind.

He said that the earth has experienced a 25% increase in global drought since 1990, due to global warming. And, severe to extreme drought conditions are expected to continue to increase.  He expressed concern about rising sea levels which will displace tens of millions of people around the world.  Already there are climatic refugees exposed to hunger, disease and death in many countries.  “Then there is fracking …….”  He said that no one knows the full extent of fresh water depletion that will be caused by the hydrofracking of shales for natural gas development nor the amount of water that will be contaminated.

Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind,  by Brian Fagan 

Book Review, Publication Date:  June 2011.

This book surveys water management, alighting on every continent and chronologically spanning from the advent of irrigated agriculture to the water works of modern cities like Phoenix, Arizona. He critiques the common impression that centralized control of water, such as that which conjured Phoenix into existence or, in ancient times, Roman aqueducts and Chinese canals, is the main theme in the story of humanity’s capture and distribution of water. He favors a bottom-up view, suggesting that local solutions to water problems were consolidated by civilizations, not invented by them. He describes village-scale technologies to support that viewpoint, going into archaeological analysis to underscore how communities such as Bali, the Maya, and Angkor Wat invested their water sources with sacredness. Well might they have ritualized water, for Fagan recounts how science indicts drought as the agent of various civilizations’ downfalls and a forewarning of our own. Supplying intriguing historical background, Fagan well informs those pondering freshwater’s role in contemporary environmental problems. — Gilbert Taylor

The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, by Brian Fagan

Book Description from Amazon, Publication Date: March 3, 2009

This book takes up how the earth’s previous global warming phase reshaped human societies from the Arctic to the Sahara—a wide-ranging history with lessons for our own time. From the tenth to the fifteenth century the earth experienced a rise in surface temperature that changed climate worldwide—a preview of today’s global warming. In some areas, including western Europe, longer summers brought bountiful harvests and population growth that led to cultural flowering. In the Arctic, Inuit and Norse sailors made cultural connections across thousands of miles as they traded precious iron goods. Polynesian sailors, riding new wind patterns, were able to settle the remotest islands on earth. But in many parts of the world, the warm centuries brought drought and famine. Elaborate societies in western and central America collapsed, and the vast building complexes of Chaco Canyon and the Mayan Yucatán were left empty. The history of the Great Warming of a half millennium ago suggests that we may yet be underestimating the power of climate change to disrupt our lives today—and our vulnerability to drought, writes Fagan, is the “silent elephant in the room.”

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization, by Brian Fagan

Book Description from Amazon, Publication Date: December 29, 2004

Humanity evolved in an Ice Age in which glaciers covered much of the world. But starting about 15,000 years ago, temperatures began to climb. Civilization and all of recorded history occurred in this warm period, the era known as the Holocene-the long summer of the human species. In The Long Summer, Brian Fagan brings us the first detailed record of climate change during these 15,000 years of warming, and shows how this climate change gave rise to civilization. A thousand-year chill led people in the Near East to take up the cultivation of plant foods; a catastrophic flood drove settlers to inhabit Europe; the drying of the Sahara forced its inhabitants to live along the banks of the Nile; and increased rainfall in East Africa provoked the bubonic plague. The Long Summer illuminates for the first time the centuries-long pattern of human adaptation to the demands and challenges of an ever-changing climate-challenges that are still with us today.