The handiwork of these well-armed death squads combined with the widespread random killing of Indians by individual miners resulted in the death of 100,000 Indians in the first two years of the gold rush. A staggering loss of two thirds of the population. Nothing in American Indian history is even remotely comparable to this massive orgy of theft and mass murder. Stunned survivors now perhaps numbering fewer than 70,000 teetered near the brink of total annihilation…
— from ‘A Short Overview of California Indian History”, State of California Native American Heritage Commission website.
According to NPR, the “omicron variant” was identified in a patient in California yesterday — in San Francisco, of all places — and the person is reportedly showing “mild” symptoms, which NPR stated is generally true about other ‘omicron’ cases in South Africa. So this might be a lot of fuss about nothing much.
Much remains unknown about this variant, including whether it’s more contagious than previous strains, whether it causes more serious symptoms, and whether it can outmaneuver existing vaccines. Tony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, thinks more would be known about the omicron strain in two to four weeks.
California’s Department of Public Health credited the state’s “large-scale testing and early detection systems” for identifying the case.
Here’s a computer-generated image of the omicron variant of the coronavirus — also known as B.1.1.529. Reported in South Africa on November 24, this variant has a large number of mutations, some of which are concerning, but none of which are understood. Yet.
The blend of colors chosen for this image — by artist Uma Shankar sharma — are imaginative, but perhaps slightly unsettling? Personally, I find blue or turquoise coronaviruses more attractive. I’m also not terribly fond of the ‘hairs’ the artist added to this computer image. It makes the virus look like it forget to shave. Surely, there was a more attractive way to indicate “a large number of mutations”…?
It turns out that, in reality, a coronavirus has no color at all. The electromagnetic frequencies that humans identify as “visible colors” range from 700 nanometers (red) through about 400 nanometers (violet). But a coronavirus measures only about 160 nanometers in diameter, meaning that, due to the laws of physics as we currently understand them, it cannot possibly reflect visible light. Light waves simply pass… as if the virus wasn’t even there.
In other words, coronaviruses are invisible. Scientists can generate images of viruses using an electron microscope, but no human eye can actually see a virus.
Viruses are (not) red
Viruses are (not) blue
Even if you magnify them
They won’t be visible to you!
(Poem by Lenka Otap, medium.com)
Near the other end of the visual spectrum, we have forest fires — one of the larger natural phenomena know to us, especially if you include the enormous clouds of smoke…
Scientists, over the past year, have developed several vaccines that offer some level of protection from the COVID-19 virus. (The ‘omicron variant’ case in San Francisco, mentioned above, happened to be a fully-vaccinated person, according to NPR.)
Scientists have been less successful developing a treatment that protects us from forest fires. But the indigenous tribes in California apparently had a handle on the problem… treating up to 4.5 million acres of wildland annually, with intentional burning…
…until the arrival of the Spanish colonists… succeeded by the Mexicans… and most disastrous of all, American gold hunters, starting in 1849. An original population of 300,000 California Indians was reduced to about 16,000 by 1900. (More of the story can be found on California’s Native American Heritage Commission website.)
If you were able to watch the fascinating video shared yesterday in Part Three of this editorial series, you might conclude that science understands relatively little about viruses. Even the various viruses that live inside the human body remain mostly unidentified.
The State of California reports that about 73,800 citizens have succumbed to COVID-19 since March 2020. That suggests that about one out of 535 Californians have died from — or at least, died while having — a COVID infection.
The 2020 wildfire season in California was especially terrible, burning about 4.4 million acres. 33 people are know to have died as a result of 9,917 fires.
During the colonization of California by Europeans and Americans, only about 5 out of every 100 Indians survived.
Sort of puts the coronavirus into perspective, I think. And wildfire, too.
From a New Yorker article by M.R. O’Connor dated November 8, 2021:
In 2008, [former hotshot firefighter Jeremy] Bailey went to work for the Nature Conservancy, a global environmental organization headquartered in Virginia. He is now the director of its prescribed-fire program, and an advocate for “good fire”—a term used by some activists to describe fires of low to moderate severity that result in ecological benefits, including reducing the fuels that create megafires. In previous centuries, Native Americans managed their forests by setting this type of fire. An estimated eighty per cent of North American vegetation is fire-dependent, and Bailey and others think that good fires are essential if prairies and forests are to become fire-resilient. Bailey argues for the establishment of a workforce dedicated not just to extinguishing fires in the summer but to setting them in the cooler months.
“Imagine if for every firefighter poised and ready to extinguish any start, we also had a fire lighter,” he wrote, in an essay published in 2019.
Imagine, if that’s true? That eighty per cent of North American vegetation can not only come through a fire, on the ‘other side’… but is actually “fire-dependent”.
That our forests and grasslands need fire, to thrive.
How many other types of “good fires” has our modern world been trying, in vain, to stamp out?
That’s a question we can’t answer. But at least we can ask it.