"Gaia and MRSA" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Gaia and MRSA

If your worst nightmares aren’t disturbing enough, let’s add the danger of MRSA to the cast of demons. You don’t need to know the scientific definition. It is the super-bug, the bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. There’s an article in The New Yorker if you are brave enough to read it. I bring this to your attention not to frighten, of course, but to inform. And to share this thought. Since the advent of sulfa in the Thirties, penicillin in the Forties, and the many and significant developments in antibiotics since then, bacteria have mutated so that our medicines don’t work against them.

Now doesn’t this raise an interesting question, as in, what kind of thinking must be behind the mutating to circumvent our scientific advancements? Is there a council of bacteria that gets together to discuss how to wage war against the latest medicines? What kind of "mind" could be behind such a process? And what does it say about this force that it could be winning?

I have long believed in the Gaia Principle, that the Earth is a living system and that it will protect itself against the destruction inflicted by mankind, the only species to threaten the natural order. I would also note that with our five billion over-population we are polluting the land, water and air, contributing to the melting of huge tracts of ice which will have deleterious effects on myriad life forms, including our own.

Since we don’t appear inclined to stop, or even to slow ourselves down, let alone clean up our messes, it would make sense that the Gaia Principle would kick in and we’d get a kick in the butt, either to wake up and right our wrongs, or be incapacitated so we could do no more damage and the Earth could begin to repair itself. It is morally reprehensible that we don’t take matters in hand, end our evil ways and learn to live lightly on the planet, but no matter.

As George Carlin would say, scoffing at environmentalists, the Earth will take care of itself, even if it takes hundreds of thousands of years. Time doesn’t matter to It; time doesn’t even exist, at least existentially. It’s kinda like how we get frightened by and antagonistic toward sharks and lions for feeding themselves. Hey, they not plotting against us. It’s not malevolence; it’s hunger and sustenance. One presumes the same could be said about the drug-resistant bugs that are bedeviling the medical profession; they’re out for their own survival.

There’s no reason to presume that these bacteria presage the end of mankind, any more than we might expect a wholesale nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India to send up a great toxic cloud that would envelope the planet. I would certainly prefer an alternative, perhaps a pandemic that culled the chaff from the wheat on the basis of consciousness, eliminating the depraved who have mired us in the situation we find ourselves today, with soaring food and fuel prices, and popularly-elected leaders like Cheney, Putin, and Ahmadinejad.

Perhaps we can’t rid ourselves of these scourges this time; we seem to lack either the moral suasion or the critical mass in numbers to cleanse the Earth. Whatever, in years or centuries, we’ll likely have the opportunity to get it right ourselves. It’s the nature of things.