Harvesting a pangolin or having Goldman Sachs flood hundreds of millions of dollars into rural China to build a bunch of hog barns - that's a particularly distorted and concentrated idea of what is valuable. We need as a society - as individuals and collectively - to ask how we treat the wrath of the virus with awe, and enough humility to reorient the systems of value that have lead to this pathogen. What is it about the drive to penetrate into the forest, to disrupt it, to fragment it, to keep extending these spaces of industrial production?

Rob Wallace and Alex Liebman examine the grim realities of the Covid-19 pandemic today, and its structural causes in the capitalist destruction of both the natural world, and the commons of public health.

Rob and Alex wrote the essay Covid-19 and the Circuits of Capital with Luis Fernando Chaves and Rodrick Wallace for Monthly Review.