This pandemic offers our field a rare opportunity to highlight these indelible connections while the world is listening. Environmental historians often stress the deep connections between humans and other animals. Indeed, one of the most striking features of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic is the extent to which nonhuman animals have emerged as key figures and flashpoints in the drama of an all-too-human disease. Yet even as I was being reminded of my brute nature, millions of other people around the world were turning their attention to different animal species.
Never before had I felt so much a member of a biological species-bound to every one of the world’s other 7.8 billion Homo sapiens and connected to the myriad other species with which we share our genes, our habitats, and our parasites. It had, of course, occurred to me previously-for example, on the day of my son’s birth, but this time was different. That this obvious, but uncomfortable, fact reached me halfway through my forty-seventh year, the past twenty-five of which I had spent studying wildlife, is humbling to admit. On the second Friday in March 2020, at around 4:30 p.m., as I scanned the news trying to make sense of a dizzying week-viral pandemic, roiling stock market, mass layoffs, online education, social distancing, a summer without baseball-it finally hit me: I am an animal. Marco’s contribution, which is set in the context of those that precede it, underscores a central insight of environmental history: that the human and nonhuman worlds are inextricably linked and that we ignore this linkage at our peril. As his essay reveals, Marco had a much closer encounter with the virus than anyone wants. We have arranged the essays alphabetically, with one exception: the concluding essay is a piece by Marco Armiero, the president of the European Society for Environmental History and also a COVID-19 survivor. Taken together, the essays provide a panoramic picture of a world coming to grips with contagion. Some have drawn upon science, while others have drawn upon personal experience some are dispassionate, while others excoriate elected leaders for failing to respond to the crisis adequately or society at large for tolerating problems that the pandemic has cast in sharp relief. The contributors have, accordingly, gone in a variety of directions some have focused on geographical regions, some have focused thematically, and others have considered the epidemiology or microbiology of the COVID-19 virus. Our instructions to each contributor were spare: simply convey to our readers what seems important in understanding the pandemic and keep it short. The result of their efforts is the following collection of diverse and thought-provoking essays.
Although we have done so in private correspondence, we would like to thank them here for their generosity, their professionalism, and their diligence. We were heartened by the response-despite the disruptions to daily life that most of us have experienced as the virus closed schools and universities, almost every invitee agreed. Our hope was that the collected essays could provide some useful context for understanding a global historical phenomenon and also serve as a sort of time capsule, capturing what environmental historians thought was noteworthy at a moment when the natural world came crashing into the human world in a dramatic way. In March 2020, as the scope and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic began to come into focus, we reached out to some of the leading lights in the field of environmental history-some senior, some junior, from every continent but Antarctica-and asked if they would be interested in committing to paper their thoughts about the meaning of the virus from their perspectives.