Do you Read Me?

For this chapter, I started with the idea of folk tales as stories adapted each time they are passed from person to person. I remembered how Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme, said of Covid-19 that, “Nature is sending us a message”, and thought that in recognising planetary ecology as a communicating system, she evoked the way that animals and plants have agency in ancient fables. Like a magic spell, the pandemic has revealed both flaws and potentials in our interactions, so that the virus somehow speaks through us.

As Gregory Bateson said, “The meaning of your communication is the response you get.” If there is a moral to the tale, perhaps it is that we need to see the virus not as an enemy to be conquered, but as a piece of code that our bodies (physical and political) must learn to read.

• https://rapidtransition.org
• https://www.newweather.org