COVID-19 and Mother Nature

Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard… -Thoreau

The corona virus is not Nature’s revenge on humanity, nor is it Nature’s immune system trying to flush us or put us in our place. The balance of nature is real and important, but it doesn’t work like that. The balance is not that of one, big, integrated system, but a patchy fabric sewn by multitudes of individual organisms and populations working out their relationships with their fellow creatures and the abiotic factors they…