What Power Does Donald Trump Actually Have Over Governors In the Coronavirus Crisis? It's a debate that's been happening since 1789. by Jennifer Selin

President Donald Trump recently attempted to explain the complex relationship between the federal government and the states, as outlined by the framers in 1787. 

“[Y]ou can call it ‘federalist,’ you can call it ‘the Constitution,’ but I call it ‘the Constitution,’” he said at a briefing by the Coronavirus Task Force.

Trump’s statement, along with several others he has made recently, highlights one of the key issues that has affected America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic: federalism.

In its most basic terms, “federalism” is the Constitution’s way of distributing decision-making authority. The Constitution grants the national government the power to conduct certain activities and reserves the rest of governmental decisions to the states.

But who does what is not always clear-cut.

Throughout the coronavirus crisis, the president has made contradictory statements about who is responsible for key aspects of the nation’s response to the pandemic.

For example, while Trump asserted he has the authority to order the states to reopen the economy, he also insisted that it is the governors’ responsibility to manage coronavirus testing. From my perspective as a constitutional scholar, Trump’s statements are haphazard at best and unconstitutional at worst.

But what is the president’s role when it comes to guiding the nation through the pandemic? How much power do state governors have? Who is in charge?

Parceling out power

One of the most difficult tasks facing the framers when they drafted the Constitution was the proper distribution of power. Americans’ experience living under British rule taught them that power centralized in a single executive could lead to oppression. As a result, many were reluctant to grant too much power to a president.

This reluctance was reflected in the Articles of Confederation. The articles, which were adopted after the Declaration of Independence but before the Constitution, gave a lot of power to the states and almost no power to the national government.

Yet early American governance under the articles illustrated that individual states can fail to work together to overcome big problems, like national security.

What became clear to the Founding Fathers was that a central authority is often necessary to coordinate the responses of individual states to the big economic and security issues that face the nation.

The framers’ solution to this problem was to grant the national government authority to regulate citizens but not to regulate the states themselves. Put in the most basic terms, Congress and the president lack the constitutional power to tell states what to do.

The Constitution gives the federal government the ability to address national issues like defense, foreign policy and monetary policy. The states retain the power to address the well-being of their citizens. This includes setting health and education policy and even regulating elections.

Managing relationships

The constitutional balance between state and federal power is still in flux. Enormous changes in our federal system mean that the national government now takes on challenges that the framers of the Constitution could not have imagined. For example, the national government protects human health by regulating the environment and helps our ability to communicate by providing uniform standards for internet technologies.

As a result, the president has more expansive power than anticipated. Yet, a large part of the president’s executive and administrative tasks involves managing the relationship between the national government and the states.

The president cannot constitutionally issue directives to require states to address certain problems or command governors to administer specific programs. But presidential administrations can encourage states to adopt certain policies, such as uniform education standards.

Sometimes this occurs by providing states with opportunities for federal funding but attaching conditions to the receipt of those funds. For example, the Obama administration routinely used federal funding to encourage states to adopt his preferred health care policies.

Coordination common

Federalism is often viewed as a conflict between the national government and the states. Yet there are many areas in which coordinated action between all levels of government occurs on a regular basis.

Health care is a prime example. While states have the constitutional power to regulate health and welfare, there is a long history of national government involvement in health policy.

Historical crises such as the Great Depression and the two World Wars highlighted the fact that not every state has the means to address all of the medical needs of its citizens. Every president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has used the national government to expand or improve health care in the states.

The framers recognized the importance of national government in times of crisis. Both James Madison and Alexander Hamilton acknowledged the need for unified, national leadership when the country faced threatening circumstances. Madison said in the Federalist Papers, “The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the State governments, in times of peace and security.”

The coronavirus is such an emergency.

Divided governing

What does all of this constitutional history mean for the nation’s response to COVID-19?

First, consistent with constitutional principles, the national government’s US$2 trillion response bill is largely directed at providing help to individuals and private entities. The provisions of the bill that do relate to state and local government simply offer opportunities for federal funding.

Second, the Trump administration retains the authority to administer funds. President Trump has used this authority to do things like direct military aid to states and relax rules that regulate government approval for coronavirus testing. He also has announced guidelines for states to use when reopening state economies.

However, consistent with the Constitution, governors have discretion whether to implement these guidelines.

This means that it is still up to individual states to craft policies that protect the health and welfare of their citizens during this time of crisis. Some states are working closely with the White House, and others are coordinating their response efforts with neighboring states.

So if America’s response to the coronavirus crisis will likely remain piecemeal and state-specific, perhaps this is what the framers intended.

Why Your Age and Sex Matter If You Get the Coronavirus Here's what the data says. by Jeremy Rossman

For COVID-19, age and sex appear to be strong predictors of who lives and who dies. 

The fatality rate for the disease is estimated to be 0.66%, according to data from China. In other words, 0.66% of people who are formally diagnosed with COVID-19, die. But the rate varies dramatically for different age groups, ranging from 0.0016% for children under ten to 7.8% in people over 79. Similar rates are seen in New York city.

The graph below shows the increasing fatality rate for increasingly older populations.

Graph of infection-fatality rates derived from: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1473309920302437. Jeremy Rossman from Verity et al. data.

Similar trends are seen with the percentage of COVID-19 patients that need hospitalisation (ranging from 0% in under tens to 18.4% in over 79s). Yet those over 79 do not appear to be more likely to become infected, as they represent just 3.15% of the total confirmed cases.

Recent studies have shown that gender is a risk factor, too. Men are at a greater risk of dying from COVID-19 than women.

Data from China shows that men have 1.65 times the risk of dying from COVID-19 and in New York city, the rate is 1.77 times greater. Yet overall, men and women have roughly similar risks of getting the virus.

A declining immune system?

The ability of the human immune system to fight off pathogens declines over time and is significantly reduced in those over 70. Recent results show that in bad cases of COVID-19, there is a severe deficiency in certain classes of immune cells that fight off infections. These immune cells are known to be less active in the elderly, suggesting that an age-related decline in immune function may put the elderly at risk of more severe COVID-19 disease. Yet many of the most severe cases of COVID-19 are associated with over activation of the immune system.

The immune system is composed of many different parts and so it is possible to have suppression of one component and over-activation of another. But if the age-dependency of COVID-19 disease was specifically due to immune function, we would expect babies to also show severe disease, as their immune systems are still developing. This is what is seen in most seasonal flu epidemics, where those under two and those over 65 are at a greater risk of severe disease.

Changes in ACE2 levels?

In contrast to the flu, the 2003 Sars epidemic showed a fatality rate that increased with age similar to COVID-19 (4.26% for those under 44, rising to 64.2% for those over 74) and a 1.66 times greater fatality rate in men compared with women. The absence of severe infection in babies suggests that the age and gender disparity for COVID-19 may not be due to differences in immune response but rather something specific to the Sars viruses.

Both the 2003 SARS-CoV-1 and the current SARS-CoV-2 viruses bind to and use a protein known as ACE2 to gain entry into cells. ACE2 normally helps to regulate blood pressure and is found on the surface of many different cells, including those that line the lungs. The amount of ACE2 on human cells is higher in men and increases with age.

Certain variants of the ACE2 gene in humans are also associated with different levels of ACE2 expression, and the amount of ACE2 in different populations is somewhat correlated with COVID-19 disease. Also, hypertension (high blood pressure) is known to be a significant age-dependent risk factor for severe COVID-19 disease. Hypertension is typically treated with ACE-inhibitors that have also been shown to increase the amount of ACE2.

However, it appears that COVID-19 infection results in decreased ACE2 levels, which are associated with more severe lung disease. It is not clear what happens when ACE2 levels are high to begin with, such as in older men. Simply increasing ACE2 levels does not appear to cause more severe disease.

In addition, a recent clinical trial showed that ACE-inhibitor use was associated with less severe COVID-19 disease.

ACE2 is just one component of a complex regulatory system and so changes in ACE2 levels and action may have more complicated effects on disease progression than just virus entry into cells. These effects may change as the disease progresses and the immune system is activated.

Exposure to other coronaviruses?

Other related coronaviruses have been found to cause pneumonia in elderly patients and the likelihood of exposure to a virus increases with age. We also know that the human immune system can show some cross-reactivity between different coronaviruses.

Normally, recovery from an infection generates an immune memory that protects a person from being reinfected with the same pathogen. Cross-reactivity occurs when the immune system responds to a new pathogen as if it already had a memory of it. Sometimes this can protect against infection, but sometimes it can make the disease worse.

As severe COVID-19 disease appears to result from an over-activation of the immune system, it is possible that previous exposure to related coronaviruses may create an immune memory that primes the system to overreact to COVID-19. This process could be more prevalent in older people with more past exposure to other coronaviruses.

No data shows this cross-reactivity occurs in COVID-19 disease, but analysis of COVID-19 severe infection rates in areas with previous related coronavirus outbreaks could shed some light on the matter.

A simple explanation?

It is also possible that the reason why more men and elderly people are dying from COVID-19 is more simple. We know that the risk of fatal COVID-19 disease is almost twice as great if the person has underlying health conditions. Most of these health conditions show increasing prevalence with age, such as hypertension, which increases in occurrence from 7.5% in those under 40 to over 63% in those over 60. This increasing rate of predisposing health conditions could directly increase the risk of severe COVID-19 disease.

We don’t know why these health conditions put people at risk of more severe disease. We also are just beginning to understand how COVID-19 causes disease in the first place. By understanding the process of severe COVID-19 disease we will be better placed to both mitigate the risks to specific populations and to develop interventions that block the most severe disease and possibly even prevent fatalities.

Jeremy Rossman, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Virology and President of Research-Aid Networks, University of Kent

Firing Workers Might Cost Them More Than Keeping Them During Coronavirus Many workers' saving grace: it's cheaper to keep them on. by Cheryl Carleton

The labor market is changing rapidly with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Many organizations are laying off almost all of their workers, while others are considering which workers to lay off, which to furlough and which to keep. Alternatively, some are expanding their labor forces.

When the economy starts to open up again, employers will need to consider rehiring or replacing workers, or hiring workers with a different mix of skills. The cost of replacing an employee is high for employers, and being out of work is harmful for workers, who may be replaced with artificial intelligence or contractors and risk losing their skills.

I’m an expert in labor economics, and my work with a colleague investigates the increase in people engaging in alternative work arrangements such as contract or gig work, along with the implications such jobs have for all workers’ well-being.

There is no denying that the U.S. was experiencing a tight labor market and a low rate of unemployment before the coronavirus pandemic took hold. For some fields, particularly health care and services deemed essential by local governments, the labor market continues to be tight.

A sudden massive loss of demand for their goods and services is forcing companies to make quick decisions, and some employers may underestimate the cost to replace good employees. Knowing these costs may encourage them to keep more of their workers on the payroll.

Where are the costs?

There are costs involved in losing a worker and replacing them, such as completing paperwork when they leave, advertising the open position, reviewing resumes, interviewing candidates and training the new worker.

Once a new worker is hired, others must also spend time training them, and it will take some time for the new worker to achieve the same level of productivity as the worker who left.

Another cost is the loss in social capital. Social capital is the relationships between individuals at work that take time to build and add to the productivity of the firm.

The Society for Human Resource Management found that departures cost about one-third of a worker’s annual earnings.

The Center for American Progress drilled in deeper. They found the costs of replacing workers who earn less than US$30,000 per year to be 16% of annual salary, or $3,200 for an individual earning $20,000 per year.

For those earning $30,000 to $50,000 per year, it is estimated to cost about 20% of annual salary, or $8,000 for an individual earning $40,000. For highly educated executive positions, replacement costs are estimated to be 213% of annual salary – $213,000 for a CEO earning $100,000 per year.

The much higher cost for replacing CEOs is partly due to the fact that they require higher levels of education, greater training, and firms may lose clients and institutional knowledge with such turnovers.

Employee alternatives

This high cost of losing and replacing workers has important implications for organizations, consumers and workers, especially now with an estimated 15 million unemployed.

For those workers where the costs to replace them are high, firms will try to accommodate them. Strategies may include maintaining pay, increasing benefits and retraining. These actions are also costly, so firms will weigh them against the cost of simply hiring new workers.

This means businesses face high costs to replace workers in the future, and high costs to retain current workers, leading to higher costs for consumers who buy the firms’ goods and services.

While the above consequences might sound great for workers that organizations choose to keep, these are not the only ways in which firms can respond.

The high cost of replacing workers, along with the increased uncertainty about the economy may cause businesses to use more automation and robots. Though such switches may entail a significant upfront cost, once they are made the firms then have more control over their production processes.

Another alternative for firms is to hire fewer permanent employees and turn instead to contract workers. With contract workers, employers are not responsible for benefits, and they can more simply increase or decrease the number of workers as needed.

While this may increase employment for some workers, it will decrease it for others and it has serious implications for the availability of health and pension benefits as well as unemployment benefits, as the current crisis has revealed.

Businesses might also consider limiting the scope of what some workers do to limit the cost of replacing them. If the scope of a worker’s job is limited, then fewer areas will be impacted by the individual leaving, and the costs to train a replacement will be lower. For workers, however, it means fewer opportunities to gain experience.

For example, instead of training workers on several or all parts of the production process, the business may limit them to one specific aspect. It will then be less costly for the firm to replace them and the worker will have less experience to add to their resume. This also means less bargaining power for employees.

Some win, but others lose

The high cost of losing and then hiring new workers along with increased restrictions on hiring nonresidents might mean higher wages and increased benefits for some workers.

However, the high degree of uncertainty in the current labor market, along with the potential increase in contract workers and automation means that some workers will not realize these potential gains, and all of us as consumers will most likely end up paying higher prices for the goods and services we buy.

Why Trump Defunded the WHO Surprisingly, it was a premeditated move. by Luke Allen

It wouldn’t make much sense to sack the fire service during a forest fire, yet that’s effectively what US President Donald Trump has done by suspending funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) in the middle of a pandemic. The WHO is by no means perfect, but undermining the world’s only global public health agency does not serve US interests. 

The US is the biggest contributor to the 194-member WHO, providing around US$400 million (£322 million) annually, which makes up about a fifth of the budget. The organisation has been asked to do more with less for decades and is already in a fairly perilous financial situation.

Although the move is characteristically shortsighted, this time Trump’s decision was premeditated. On April 10, he hinted that US funding would be withdrawn, adding: “We’re looking at it very, very closely … we’ll have a lot to say about it.”

The following week he confirmed the suspension of funding and blamed the WHO for “severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus”. He argued that the organisation had been too slow to investigate the outbreak and had been complicit in China’s suppression and misreporting of cases.

Was he correct? Well, there is evidence that local officials attempted to cover up the early outbreak, and the WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has stood by his endorsement of China’s heavy-handed tactics. As with decisions to honour Turkey’s president, Recep Erdogan, and former Zimbabwean ruler Robert Mugabe, Tedros’ stance has been roundly criticised. In his defence, it does seem to stem from a genuine desire to win engagement in order to deliver his mandate of achieving health for all.

Interestingly, President Trump was one of the few world leaders who seemed to agree that China was doing a good job, praising the government’s “hard work and transparency” in January and commending Xi Jinping’s handling of the mounting pandemic in a string of further comments during February.

Trump had two other aims in mind when he pulled the rug from under the WHO’s feet. In the short term, most pundits agree that Trump’s main motivation for cutting WHO funding was to deflect blame from his own bungled handling of COVID-19 on home soil. His approval ratings are at an all-time low and the US now has more cases of coronavirus than any other country.

In the longer term, withdrawing from multilateral partnerships aligns with Trump’s zero-sum worldview. As with Nato, the World Trade Organization and virtually every other international body, Trump feels that the US is getting a bad deal from its WHO contribution. And he bristles at the thought of foreign nations exploiting American generosity.

Former presidents have worked to develop, maintain and promote an Anglophone, dollar-backed international world order built on American values of capitalism, liberalism, democracy, integration and the transparent rule of law. This has fostered an unprecedented era of peace, stability, international cooperation and integration of markets (as well as massive socioeconomic inequality) – projecting American soft power and allowing national firms to enter formerly closed markets.

In Trump’s view, his predecessors were chumps who allowed other countries to abuse American generosity while flouting the rules: from Nato allies shirking their responsibilities to China’s currency manipulation, intellectual property theft and disproportionate access to the WHO.

Yet defunding the WHO is a microcosmic act that illustrates the folly of Trump’s “America first” approach. The sums involved are peanuts to the administration – less than it costs to run a large hospital. Yet the US gets enormous bang for its buck. Its citizens are over-represented among WHO leadership and technical staff, and as a member state, it has never been afraid to use its clout to veto documents and clauses that threaten its commercial interests. The WHO’s irreplaceable work in sharing information and promoting science-based practice also benefits American citizens during the pandemic.

Eastward shift in power

Withdrawing from the international stage also leaves a superpower-sized leadership hole that only China can fill. If Trump wants the WHO to be more effective and less China-centric, then surely the remedy is more US engagement, not less.

Besides expediting the eastward shift of power, the bigger picture is that continued disengagement from lopsided international partnerships will hurt his base more than anyone else. It will lead to higher export tariffs, increasingly expensive imports, higher costs of living – and later on, geopolitical instability and weakened alliances.

World leaders lined up to condemn Trump’s assault on multilateralism, sparking a rare moment of coordination in a pandemic hitherto marked by international fragmentation. Selfish, reckless or misguidedly patriotic – whatever your take on Trump’s castigation, there is no denying that it couldn’t come at a worse time for the fragile states depending on the WHO to guide them through this raging inferno. It seems this move will achieve the exact opposite of everything Trump has intended: a worse deal for ordinary US citizens, a weaker America and an ever more China-centric global order.

Thanks To Trump, All Of The Middle East Is In Range Of Israel's F-35s If Israel does decide to bomb Iran, the U.S. government has made it a little easier. by Michael Peck

Here's What You Need To Remember: New aerial tankers by themselves won’t guarantee the success of an Israeli strike on Iran. But they do make it a little easier. 

If Israel does decide to bomb Iran, the U.S. government has made it a little easier.

The U.S. State Department has approved an Israeli request to buy eight KC-46A Pegasus aerial tankers. Including support equipment, spare parts and training, the deal is valued at $2.4 billion, with the first aircraft arriving in 2023.

The sale “supports the foreign policy and national security of the United States by allowing Israel to provide a redundant capability to U.S. assets within the region, potentially freeing U.S. assets for use elsewhere during times of war,” said the State Department’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency. “Aerial refueling and strategic airlift are consistently cited as significant shortfalls for our allies.  In addition, the sale improves Israel's national security posture as a key U.S. ally.”

If approved by the U.S. Congress -- which is unlikely to block it --  the sale is notable on several levels. It’s the first time the U.S. has sold tanker aircraft to Israel. The Israeli Air Force (IAF) currently has 11 tankers, including seven American-made Boeing 707 airliners and four Lockheed Martin C-130H transports. But the Israelis themselves converted these planes into tankers.

The problem is that most IAF tankers are 60 years old: the 707, long retired from commercial air travel, dates back to 1958. The IAF is so desperate to maintain its aerial refueling capability – which allows its aircraft to fly deep across the Middle East – that in 2017, it bought an old Brazilian Air Force 707 just to cannibalize for spare parts.

The KC-46A Pegasus is a different beast. Based on Boeing’s 767 airliner, the twin-engine KC-46A can carry 106 tons of fuel to feed hungry jet fighters, and has a range of more than 6,000 miles. The Pegasus is replacing the 1950s KC-135 Stratotanker as the Air Force’s aerial refueler, with 31 currently in service.

A series of manufacturing defects led the U.S. Air Force in 2019 to briefly ban cargo and passengers from flying on the KC-46A, and there are still glitches in the remote-controlled refueling boom. Because the U.S. also flies the Pegasus, it’s reasonable to assume that the Pentagon will insist on ironing out the bugs, which will also benefit the Israeli models.

Also significant is that the State Department approval of the sale is deemed to “provide a redundant capability to U.S. assets within the region, potentially freeing U.S. assets for use elsewhere during times of war.” In other words, the U.S. is selling tankers to Israel with the expectation that they will be used to support American as well as Israeli forces during wartime.

However, the U.S. government also asserts that the sale “will not alter the basic military balance in the region.”

Iran may beg to disagree.

Israel is buying 50 U.S. F-35 stealth fighters, and has already stood up two squadrons. The U.S. Air Force’s F-35A model has a range of more than 1,350 nautical miles using internal fuel. While the Israeli-modified F-35I has special Israeli-designed external fuel tanks, a direct flight path between Jerusalem and Tehran is just under a thousand miles each way.  

Israel has long threatened to attack Iranian nuclear sites if Tehran tries to build atomic weapons. Iran has more than a thousand anti-aircraft guns, several varieties of surface-to-air missiles, and has repeatedly asked Russia to sell it advanced S-400 anti-aircraft missiles. Iranian nuclear facilities will certainly be protected by strong air defenses.

Which means that if Israel attacks Iranian nuclear sites, the IAF F-35’s – as well as additional F-15 fighters that it intends to purchase – would need mid-air refueling, and probably multiple refills. The KC-46A carries more fuel than current Israeli tankers, and it has better sensors and jammers to survive hostile air defenses.

New aerial tankers by themselves won’t guarantee the success of an Israeli strike on Iran. But they do make it a little easier.

America's BLU-129 Bomb Is Making Air Force Jets More Lethal Than Ever The often-requested weapon, described as an adaptable carbon fiber bomb, is specially engineered to control “field effects” and create low collateral damage resulting from air attacks. by Kris Osborn

Here's What You Need To Remember: Accelerated production of the BLU-129 represents a significant element of an ongoing Air Force initiative to build increased attack flexibility within an individual warhead by adjusting timing, blast effect and detonation.

The Air Force is revving up production of the air-dropped, precision-guided BLU-129 bomb increasingly in demand by warzone commanders - so accurate, lethal and precise, it is called “the world’s largest sniper accuracy.”

The often-requested weapon, described as an adaptable carbon fiber bomb, is specially engineered to control “field effects” and create low collateral damage resulting from air attacks.

“The Air Force is currently producing BLU-129 bomb bodies to address operational demand,” Capt. Hope Cronin, Air Force Spokeswoman, told Warrior Maven.

The BLU-129 is increasingly in demand because, among other things, it is capable of quickly tailoring its explosive charge depending upon the threat, using what’s called “variable yield effects.” Variable-yield effects allow for attackers to adjust the explosive power while in-flight, in some cases enabling extremely effective, yet precise, more narrowly-configured attacks.

“There are limited numbers of this weapon, and we want to hold onto it for those missions which need to have only that capability,” Col. Gary Haase, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), told Warrior Maven in an interview last Fall at an Air Force Association Symposium.

Developing what Air Force engineers call “flight selectability” is an essential element of this, as it will enable dynamic combat-targeting to adapt while an aircraft is airborne. This can be done with a range of technologies to enable improved precision with multi-mode energetics and specialized structures engineered into the warhead,

The BLU 129 is described as having innovations called “adapted effects design” with a contained lethal radius, yet precise and substantial destructive ability. “This allows a much-reduced size of warhead with the same kill capability,” Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, USAF (Ret.) - former fighter pilot and current Director of Research for the Mitchell Institute - said AFA in September of last year. Stutzriem characterized an explosive envelope as a “combination of heat blast and fragmentation.”

There is a compelling needed for a new regime of munitions for expanded effects, according to Haase. Given that combat warfighters discovered more applications for the weapon beyond things it was initially built to do, the Air Force has been restarting production of the BLU-129 weapon.

Accelerated production of the BLU-129 represents a significant element of an ongoing Air Force initiative to build increased attack flexibility within an individual warhead by adjusting timing, blast effect and detonation.

“We want to have options and flexibility so we can take out this one person with a hit-to-kill munition, or crank it up and take out a truck or a wide area,” Hasse told Warrior Maven.

A vendor which makes some of the warhead casing, Aerojet Rocketdyne, provides some technical detail about how the weapon achieves its precision.

"These weapons use carbon-fiber-wound construction of the warhead casing, provided by Aerojet Rocketdyne. A carbon-fiber-wound bomb body disintegrates instead of fragmenting, which adds explosive force nearby, but lowers collateral damage," a statement from Aerojet Rocketdyne says.

Hasse explained “multi-mode energetics” as a need to engineer a single warhead to leverage advanced “smart fuse” technology to adjust the blast effect.

These kinds of technical advances, wherein munitions can be adjusted in-flight, is inspiring new thinking when it comes to Concepts of Operations (CONOPS). Newer targeting and explosive yield variation naturally changes the types of attack missions falling within the realm of the possible.

For instance, combat circumstances are very fast-moving, often changing dramatically in minutes - even seconds. For this reason, “adaptable” effects better synchronize attacks with intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance by enabling pilots to quicken the kill chain and make faster decisions while tracking moving targets, senior Air Force weapons developers explain.

Hasse explained that the BLU-129 brings additional elements of attack flexibility, because instead of traveling with both very large, heavier bombs, a pilot can simply drop four BLU-129s on a target to increase blast effect.

Did the Earth's Enviornmental Crisis Start 12,000 Years Ago? What has humanity done? by Joshua Sterlin

Our global civilization may be doubting its mastery of the Earth as we temporarily close the shutters on many of our societies because of COVID-19. Among ecology scholars, one conversation has been about how wildlife and habitat destruction and ecosystem destabilization could be linked to our current pandemic. Some even argue — as ecology scholar Vijay Kolinjivadi recently wrote in Uneven Earth — the coronavirus is a product of capitalism’s own making.

The head of the United Nations environment program and other experts say the current pandemic is a warning sign from nature. They believe this may be the beginning of the spread of more infectious diseases.

This is no new development, however. The story of how our current environmental state came to be is over 12,000 years old.

Are we the virus?

In the wake of our recent retreat indoors, animals have begun to reclaim human-dominated spaces. Our stalled economy has led to improved air quality in major cities. The immediate effects of our societal contraction are stark.

This has brought to the surface a perennial narrative and fear, quickly rejected, that humans are the true virus and that COVID-19 is the Earth’s vaccine. However, people have been right to point out that a small minority of actors — large corporations and governments — are responsible for the vast majority of ecological destruction and carbon emissions.

As we debate the proposals for what the world should look like after the virus, we must discuss the roots of what got us here. Doing this will help us change in a systemic way, rather than merely at the surface.

Origin stories and the Anthropocene

We have changed the planet so much that it can be detected in the very crust of the Earth. This has led some to name our current age after our species, calling it the Anthropocene.

When did the Anthropocene start? An often suggested answer is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when some humans began to change the planet at a remarkable clip. This includes pumping out the first significant greenhouse gas emissions.

Not all humans beings have participated in this process, however. This is why some have argued for naming our era after the social and economic arrangements that created it. The development of capitalism is often singled out as the defining feature for our era.

But we have to look further back for the genesis of our current set of crises: environmental, inequality and domination, and epidemic disease affecting both us and domesticated animals, including COVID-19. They all have their roots in the first tilled soils.

Fertile grounds (for disease)

The agricultural revolution began approximately 12,000 years ago and sparked a cascading shift in human-environment relations among certain peoples that has yet to end. The domestication of cereals and livestock, on which this revolution is based, created the population sizes and densities that provide the basis for epidemic disease.

Fanning out from those initial centres, the agricultural revolution arrived in the Americas (though it too had already begun here), carried and enacted by European settlers — with disastrous results.

It continues in the Amazon rainforest as the forest is cleared, mined and planted. Indigenous peoples are again at major risk from introduced disease.

Society, not species

Agriculture began not long after the end of the last major ice age. The stable climate conditions made planting grains viable. Agriculture sprouted in multiple locations across the world at a similar time.

However, of the roughly 300,000 years of the existence of modern humans, our current style of agricultural civilization comprises at most four per cent of humanity’s time on the planet. This is the era that is taught to students in schools. But this is only a single strand of the human story.

This narrative is our culture’s origin story. No wonder it is so hard for us to think there are any viable alternatives. The idea of the Anthropocene fuses the very definition of our entire species with a single way of life that itself has been a relatively recent development.

The vast majority of humanity’s time has been of us living in a quite different manner. Some Indigenous Peoples, from the Amazon to the Bay of Bengal continue to live in some approximation of that different way of life to this day.

Implicit within the idea of the Anthropocene is not only that all these societies are unimportant, but also in a certain way, that they are not even really human. It further lends a sense of inevitability to our present. It seems to say that our trashing of the planet is unfortunately, just an inescapable part of our nature. Sounds like “we are the virus” - doesn’t it?

Civilization and survival

Perhaps we need a new frame and name for our current era instead of the Anthropocene. This might allow us to see alternative futures.

This does not mean we need to dismantle our modern structures to live as hunter-gatherers. Nor does it mean that hunter-gatherers live without hardship, or that the rest of humanity has fallen from grace, although climate destabilization may eventually make current agricultural practices impossible.

There are many aspects and achievements of agricultural civilization such as modern medicine, the internet and scientific advancements, that if we were to lose them, it would diminish us. We are relying on many of the most highly developed medical and logistical ones during this pandemic.

After the pandemic — and if we are to survive this geologic era — we must re-establish mutually enhancing relationships with the Earth and each other. There may be no better way to do this than to turn to the societies that have succeeded, such as the hunter-gatherer societies that have generally discouraged hierarchy and maintained sustainable and flourishing relationships with land.

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are being refracted through inequality, private property, class structures and state power — all agricultural inheritances. There is a temptation, for instance, for states to tighten control over human and non-human populations.

These patterns have recurred in crisis for the past 12,000 years, and there are troubling signs of it already happening throughout the world.

We must forcefully resist this inclination. We must instead endeavour to use this moment, and our best civilizational inheritances, in the mitigation of our worst ones, and at the service of just and sustainable cultures. By doing so might we live not in old, but in utterly new ways.

Joshua Sterlin, Phd Student, NRS, Leadership for the Ecozoic Program, McGill University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.