Wuhan and the plum blossom

The beautiful flowers of the Chinese plum are a favorite subject in Chinese art, and in the spring when the blossoms are at their fullest, they paint millions of smiles across the countryside. In the city of Wuhan , the plum flowering has historically been a sublime and important seasonal symbol—and they are the official flower of the city.

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But Wuhan today is a city of 11 million people. It has become the “ Chicago of China ,” located in a region that has been inhabited by humans for 3,500 years. As the first plum blossoms began to open last winter in Wuhan , invisible forces were at work laying out the architecture of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. By January of this year, the smiles of the Chinese plum and the people of Wuhan had all but disappeared.

It has now been confirmed that the COVID-19 path of transmission was from animals to humans, and that is the ultimate price that Wuhan and the world is paying for the deep-rooted habit of eating pangolins, bats, snakes, koalas, donkeys, civets, dogs, cats and almost any living being that moves. Every day, wild and domestic animals are devoured because of their supposed health and sexual benefits, or simply because of local tradition. It is part of the Chinese culinary custom, which has persisted for decades, centuries, and perhaps millennia. A practice that for years has fed the exorbitant demand, illegal traffic, and consumption of many species that are now endangered throughout the world. Exotic gastronomic lifestyles that today have the world under siege.

Wuhan

is located near the confluence of the Three Gorges Dam , the world´s largest hydroelectric dam; in the Yangtze River , the longest in Asia . One hundred million people live along its banks. The same river in which the Chinese River dolphin was driven to extinction a decade ago by pollution and incidental mortality in fisheries. Another casualty that then went unnoticed to the world.

Wuhan

has become ground zero in the chronicle of another surprise pandemic. Today’s COVID-19 pandemic tragically resonates with the worst pandemic humanity has suffered, the influenza scourge exactly 100 years ago. The influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1920 infected 500 million people and killed up to 100 million around the world. More recently, in 2003, the SARS outbreak also originated in China from a virus in the same family as COVID-19 . In less than a year, it killed 774 people in 29 countries.

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The avalanche of images shared through the Internet show that almost any kind of live, dead and even dying animals are offered for sale in Wuhan markets. This is the tradition of a city with more than two thousand years of history and culinary habit: caged and terrified cats and dogs waiting to be cooked; chickens, geese and ducks heaped up; live snakes being fileted with sharp knifes in plain sight to please the most demanding customers; impaled rats, monkeys and bats—all here to be tasted, raw or roasted. Whatever the customer wants or can pay for.

Gruesome scenes that recall fragments of The Perfume by Patrick Süskind and the extraordinary life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, markets in which customers and prey float, together, on a broth of blood and entrails. The only thing left to the imagination is the stench that fills the air, stimulates the appetite, anticipates the binge. Customers who, with anticipation, take home their favorite wild or domestic animal into a plastic bag for all to see. Buyers that inspect, smell, handle, and even taste the juices of life, surrendering to the crowd that comes and goes, hastily wandering, pushed by the irresistible desire of eating something exotic. And tourists don’t miss the feast either.

And so, one must ask, now that COVID-19 has jumped from the animals of the Wuhan market to humans, and settled in amongst us, what are we doing? We are closing doors and airports, confining cities, and building higher walls. We are taking advantage of the tragedy to close borders and stop the entrance of migrants. We quarantine cruises ship and continents. We flee from Chinese, Koreans, Iranians, Italians, Spaniards, French, and Germans. A list of nationalities that grows by the day because the virus has already infected people in nearly 170 countries. Europeans have been banned from entering the U.S. and Americans are banned from entering Guatemala. We stigmatize each other, as all of us travel and all of us are suspected of carrying COVID-19 . As panic grew, financial markets collapsed within days : oil prices plummeted , stock markets fell throughout the floor , and the dollar value rose amid the collective paranoia. There is talk of a global economic recession .

This turmoil will end, our presidents and politicians promise. But what they really mean is that once we have emerged from this crisis, they will again try to hide our heads in the sand. They will only be thinking about their elections and their voters, and they will continue denying the evidence scientists have provided for us. Exactly the same way we will continue handling the impacts of our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels that cause global warming , melt the poles, raise sea level, and cause ocean acidification. We will be as negligent and disdainful as we now are with the destruction of the Amazon, the loss of biodiversity, the pollution of rivers, and the overexploitation of fisheries. As with the sargassum crisis in the Caribbean. Across the planet, impunity will continue as unique natural habitats are destroyed and the future of the indigenous communities who live there is threatened in the name of “development” by ill-designed megaprojects that are only the fancy of the thoughtless rulers. And we will continue being irresponsible until a new pandemic threatens us again and we have our too-brief a moment of enlightenment.

I don’t lean toward apocalyptic views, and I hope things will not be like this. Perhaps I’m too naïve, but I still believe that, once we tackle the COVID-19 pandemic , we will ask ourselves the hard questions: Haven’t we been reckless playing with nature and for too long? Wouldn’t now be the moment to radically change our way of living? Wouldn’t now be the moment to listen to the experts and follow the path of science? I truly hope that we will listen to the voice of the here and now, so that one day soon the plum blossoms will again smile upon us.

I close with something I wrote in these same pages for EL UNIVERSAL in August 2019:

“ Infectious diseases pass from wild or domestic animals to humans thanks to the increase in population density, the advance of the agriculture frontier, human settlements in wild areas, and international traffic of fauna. The implications for human health are serious. Think about the HIV and the Ebola viruses that appear to have been passed from wildlife to humans and domestic animals.”

Please, let’s examine deeply what COVID-19 can teach us. Let’s not allow our seven environmental sins to become our seven deadly sins .