The Government has failed to meet its 100,000 coronavirus daily testing target for the fifth day running as criticism mounts on ministers to bolster supplies.

Celebrities from across the globe came together Saturday night to lift their fans’ spirits as the world continues to cope with the coronavirus pandemic.

Canadian actors, musicians and public figures came together on Saturday night for a televised special to support frontline and essential workers, and to raise funds for Food Banks Canada.

Drake dropped a surprise 14-track mixtape and announced his next studio album will be released this summer.

My mother-in-law, Carol, lives alone. It was her 75th birthday the other day. Normally, I send flowers. Normally, she spends some part of the day with the family members who live nearby and not across the country as my husband, Mark, and I do. And normally, she makes plans to celebrate with a friend. But these are not normal times. I was worried about sending a flower delivery person. Social distancing means no visiting with friends or family, no matter how close they are. So, my sister-in-law dropped off a gift and Mark and I sang “Happy Birthday” down the phone line with our kids. But I could hear the loneliness in Carol’s voice.

This was hardly the worst thing anyone experienced in America on that particular April day. We are fortunate that Carol is healthy and safe. But it upset me anyway. People over 60 are more vulnerable to COVID-19 than anyone else. They are also vulnerable to loneliness, especially when they live alone. By forcing us all into social isolation, one public health crisis—the coronavirus—is shining a bright light on another, loneliness. It will be some time before we have a vaccine for the coronavirus. But the antidote to loneliness is accessible to all of us: friendship.

Those who valued friendship as much as family had higher levels of health and happiness.

All too often we fail to appreciate what we have until it’s gone. And this shared global moment has illuminated how significant friends are to day-to-day happiness. Science has been accumulating evidence that friendship isn’t just critical for our happiness but our health and longevity. Its presence or absence matters at every point in life, but the cumulative effects of either show up most starkly in the later stages of life. That is also the moment when demographics and health concerns can conspire to make friendships harder to find or sustain. As the world hits pause, it’s worth reminding ourselves why friendship is more important now than ever.

Friendship has long been understood to be valuable and pleasurable. Ancient Greek philosophers enjoyed debating its virtues, in the company of friends. But friendship has largely been considered a cultural phenomenon, a pleasant by-product of the human capacity for language and living in groups. In the 1970s and 1980s, a handful of epidemiologists and sociologists began to establish a link between social relationships and health. They showed those who were more socially isolated were more likely to die over the course of the studies. In 2015, a meta-analysis of more than 3 million people whose average age was 66 showed that social isolation and loneliness increased the risk of early mortality by up to 30 percent.1 Yet loneliness and social isolation are not the same thing. Social isolation is an objective measure of the number and extent of social contact a person has day to day. Loneliness is a subjective feeling of mismatch between how much social connection you want and how much you have.

Once the link between health and relationships was established in humans, it was noticed in other species as well. Primatologists studying baboons in Africa remarked that when female baboons lost their primary grooming partners to lions or drought, they worked to build bonds with other animals in place of the one they’d lost. When the researchers analyzed the social behavior of the animals and their outcomes over generations, they found in multiple studies that the animals with the strongest social networks live longer and have more and healthier babies than those that are more isolated.2 Natural selection has resulted in survival of the friendliest.

Since baboons don’t drive each other to the hospital, something deeper than social support must be at work. Friendship is getting “under the skin,” as biologists say. Some of the mechanisms by which it works have yet to be explained, but studies have demonstrated that social connection improves cardiovascular functioning, reduces susceptibility to inflammation and viral disease, sharpens cognition, reduces depression, lowers stress, and even slows biological aging.3

We also now have a clearer definition of what friendship is. Evolutionary biologists concluded that friendship in monkeys—as well as people—required at least three things: it had to be long-lasting, positive, and cooperative. When an anthropologist looked for consistent definitions of friendship across cultures, he found something similar. Friendships were described as positive, and they nearly always include a willingness to help, especially in times of crisis. What friendship is about at the end of the day is creating intensely bonded groups that act as protection against life’s stresses.4

Social connection reduces depression, lowers stress, and even slows biological aging.

That buffering effect is particularly powerful as we age. Those first epidemiology studies focused on people in the middle of life. In 1987, epidemiologist Teresa Seeman of the University of California, Los Angeles, wondered if age and type of relationship mattered for health.5 She found that for those under 60, whether or not they were married mattered most. Being unmarried in midlife put people at greater risk of dying earlier than normal. But that did not turn out to be true for the oldest groups. For those over 60, close ties with friends and relatives mattered more than having a spouse. “That was a real lightbulb that went on,” Seeman says.

In a 2016 study, researchers at the University of North Carolina found that in both adolescence and old age, having friends was associated with a lower risk of physiological problems.6 The more friends you had, the lower the risk. By contrast, adults in middle age were less affected by variation in how socially connected they were. But the quality of their social relationships—whether friendships provided support or added strain—mattered more. Valuing friendship also proved increasingly important with age in a 2017 study by William Chopik of Michigan State University. He surveyed more than 270,000 adults from 15 to 99 years of age and found that those who valued friendship as much as family had higher levels of health, happiness, and subjective well-being across the lifespan. The effects were especially strong in those over 65. As you get older, friendships become more important, not less; whether you’re married is relatively less significant.7

There’s a widespread sense, especially among younger people, that people are lonely post-retirement. The truth is more complicated. Social networks do get smaller later in life for a variety of reasons. In retirement, people lose regular interaction with colleagues. Most diseases, and the probability of getting them, worsen with age. It’s more likely you will lose a spouse. Friends start to die as well. Mental and physical capacities may diminish, and social lives may be limited by hearing loss or reduced mobility.

Yet some of this social-narrowing is intentional. If time is of the essence, the motivation to derive emotional meaning from life increases, says Laura Carstensen, director of the Stanford Center for Longevity. She found that people choose to spend time with those they really care about. They emphasize quality of relationships over quantity. While family members fill much of a person’s inner social circle, friends are there, too, and regularly fill in in the absence of family. A related, more optimistic perspective on retirement is that with fewer professional and family obligations, there are more hours for the things we want to do and the people with whom we want to do them.

At all stages of life, how we do friendship—whether we focus on one or two close friends or socialize more widely—has to do with our natural levels of sociability and motivation. Those vary, of course. I recently spoke with a man who had retired to Las Vegas. When he and his wife moved to their new house, his wife began baking cookies and distributing them to neighbors. She started throwing block parties for silly holidays and those neighbors showed up. No one had bothered to organize such a thing before. Even in retirement, this woman is what psychologists call a “social broker”—someone who brings people together. She has most likely always been friendly.

What best predicted health wasn’t cholesterol levels, but satisfaction in relationships.

How you live your life before you reach 60 makes a difference, experts on aging say. Friendship is a lifelong endeavor, but not everyone treats it that way. Think of relationships the way we do smoking, says epidemiologist Lisa Berkman of Harvard University. “If you start smoking when you’re 14, and stop smoking when you’re 65, in many ways, the damage is done,” she says “It’s not undoable. Stopping makes some things better. It’s worth doing but it’s very late in the game.” Similarly, if you only focus on friendships when your family and professional obligations slow, you will be at a disadvantage. Damage will have been done. The payoff in making friendship a priority was born out in the long-running Harvard Study of Adult Development, which followed more than 700 men for the entire course of their lives. What best predicted how healthy those men were at 80 wasn’t middle-aged cholesterol levels, it was how satisfied they were in their relationships at 50.8

Fortunately, it is possible to make new friends at every stage of life. In Los Angeles, I met a group of 70-something women who bonded as volunteers for Generation Xchange, an educational and community health nonprofit. The program places older adults in early elementary classrooms as teachers’ aids for a school year. As a result of the extra adult attention in class, the children’s reading scores have gone up and behavioral problems have gone down. The volunteers’ health has improved—they’ve lost weight, and lowered blood pressure and cholesterol. But they have also become friends, which is just what UCLA’s Seeman had in mind when she started the program. “One of the reasons our program may be successful is that we are motivating them to get engaged through their joint interest in helping the kids,” Seeman says. “It takes the pressure off of making friends. You can start getting to know each other in the context of the school and our team. Hopefully, the friendships can grow out of that.”

Concerns about loneliness among the elderly are well-founded. Demographics are not working in favor of the fight against loneliness. By 2035, older adults are projected to outnumber children for the first time in American history. Because of drops in marriage and childbearing, more of those older adults will be unmarried and childless than ever before. The percentage of older adults living alone rose steadily through the 20th century, and now hovers at 27 percent. And a digital divide still exists between older adults and their children and grandchildren, according to recent studies. That means older adults are less able to use virtual technology like Zoom to stay connected during the COVID-19 pandemic—though some are learning. Laura Fisher, a personal trainer in New York City, found that putting her business online meant training older clients one-on-one in videoconferencing. She now works out with one of her young clients in New York City and her client’s grandmother in Israel. Generally, older adults who use social media report more support from both their grown children and their friends. “For older people, social media is a real avenue of connection, of relational well-being,” says psychologist Jeff Hancock who runs the social media lab at Stanford University.

That is good news in this moment of enforced social isolation. So is the fact that being apart has reminded so many of us of how much we enjoy being together. For my part, I sent those flowers to my mother-in-law after all when I discovered contactless delivery. When the flowers arrived, we spoke again. And then I called her again two days later. “It’s great to talk to you,” she said.

Lydia Denworth is a contributing editor for Scientific American and the author of Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond.

Lead image: SanaStock / Shutterstock

References

1 Holt-Lunstad, J., et al. Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: a meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science 10, 227-237 (2015).

2 Silk, J.B., Alberts, S.C., & Altmann, J. Social bonds of female baboons enhance infant survival. Science 302, 1231-1234 (2003).

3 Holt-Lunstad, J., Uchino, B.N., Smith, T.W., & Hicks, A. On the importance of relationship quality: The impact of ambivalence in friendships on cardiovascular functioning. Annals of Behavioral Medicine 33, 278-290 (2007).

4 Uchino, B.N., Kent de Grey, R.G., & Cronan, S. The quality of social networks predicts age-related changes in cardiovascular reactivity to stress. Psychology and Aging 31, 321–326 (2016).

5 Seeman, T.E., et al. Social network ties and mortality among tile elderly in the Alameda County Study. American Journal of Epidemiology 126, 714-723 (1987).

6 Yang, Y.C., et al. Social relationships and physiological determinants of longevity across the human life span. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, 578-583 (2016).

7 Chopik, W.J. Associations among relational values, support, health, and well‐being across the adult lifespan. Personal Relationships 24, 408-422 (2017).

8 Vaillant, G.E. & Mukamal, K. Successful aging. American Journal of Psychiatry 158, 839-847 (2001).

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Plants are intelligent beings with profound wisdom to impart—if only we know how to listen. And Monica Gagliano knows how to listen. The evolutionary ecologist has done groundbreaking experiments suggesting plants have the capacity to learn, remember, and make choices. That’s not all. Gagliano, a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney in Australia, talks to plants. And they talk back. Plants summon her with instructions on how to live and work. Some of Gagliano’s conversations happened in prophetic dreams, which led her to study with a shaman in Peru while tripping on psychoactive plants.

Along with forest scientists like Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben, Gagliano raises profound scientific and philosophical questions about the nature of intelligence and the possibility of “vegetal consciousness.” But what’s unusual about Gagliano is her willingness to talk about her experiences with shamans and traditional healers, along with her use of psychedelics. For someone who’d already received fierce pushback from other scientists, it was hardly a safe career move to reveal her personal experiences in otherworldly realms.

Gagliano considers her explorations in non-Western ways of seeing the world to be part of her scientific work. “Those are important doors that you need to open and you either walk through or you don’t,” she told me. “I simply decided to walk through.” Sometimes, she said, certain plants have given her precise directions on how to conduct her experiments, even telling her which plant to study. But it hasn’t been easy. “Like Alice, [I] found myself tumbling down a rather strange rabbit hole,” she wrote in a 2018 memoir, Thus Spoke the Plant. “I did doubt my own sanity many times, especially when all these odd occurrences started—and yet I know I do not suffer from psychoses.”

Shortly before the COVID-19 lockdown, I talked with Gagliano at Dartmouth College, where she was a visiting scholar. We spoke about her experiments, the new field of plant intelligence, and her own experiences of talking with plants.

PAVLOV’S PEAS: Monica Gagliano sketches a pea plant in her lab at the University of Sydney (above). She conducted experiments with pea plants to determine if, like Pavlov’s famous dogs, the plants learned to anticipate food. They did. “Although they do not salivate,” Gagliano says.Scene from the upcoming documentary, AWARE ©umbrellafilms.org

You are best known for an experiment with Mimosa pudica, commonly known as the “sensitive plant,” which instantly closes its leaves when it’s touched. Can you describe your experiment?

I built a little contraption that allowed me to drop the plants from a height of maybe 15 centimeters. So it’s not too high. When they fall, they land in a softly padded base. This plant closes its leaves when disturbed, especially if the disturbance is a potential predator. When the leaves are closed, big, spiny, pointy things stick out, so they might deter a predator. In fact, they not only close the leaf, but literally droop, like, “Look, I’m dead. No juice for you here.”

You did this over and over, dropping the plants repeatedly.

Exactly. It makes no sense for a plant or animal to repeat a behavior that is actually useless, so we learn pretty quick that whatever is useless, you don’t do anymore. You’re wasting a lot of energy trying to do something that doesn’t actually help. So, can the plant—in this case, Mimosa—learn not to close the leaves when the potential predator is not real and there are no bad consequences afterward?

After how many drops did they stop closing their leaves?

The test is for a specific type of learning that is called habituation. I decided they would be dropped continuously for 60 times. Then there was a big pause to let them rest and I did it again. But the plants were already re-opening their leaves after the first three to six drops. So within a few minutes, they knew exactly what was going on—like, “Oh my god, this is really annoying but it doesn’t mean anything, so I’m just not going to bother closing. Because when my leaves are open, I can eat light.” So there is a tradeoff between protecting yourself when the threat is real and continuing to feed and grow. I left the plants undisturbed for a month and then came back and repeated the same experiment on those individuals. And they showed they knew exactly what was going on. They were trained.

This is who I am. And nobody has the right to tell me that it’s not real.

You say these plants “understand” and “learn” that there’s no longer a threat. And you’re suggesting they “remember.” You’re not using these words metaphorically. You mean this literally?

Yes, that’s what they’re doing. This is definitely memory. It’s the same kind of experiment we do with a bee or a mouse. So using the words “memory” and “learning” feels totally appropriate. I know that some of my colleagues accuse me of anthropomorphizing, but there is nothing anthropomorphic about this. These are terms that refer to certain processes. Memory and learning are not two separate processes. You can’t learn unless you remember. So if a plant is ticking all the boxes and doing what you would expect a rat or a mouse or a bee to do, then the test is being passed.

Do you think these plants are actually making decisions about whether or not to close their leaves?

This experiment with Mimosa wasn’t designed to test that specific question. But later, I did experiments with other plants, with peas in particular, and yes, there is no doubt the plants make choices in real decision-making. This was tested in the context of a maze, where the test is actually to make a choice between left and right. The choice is based on what you might gain if you choose one side or the other. I did one study with peas that showed the plants can choose the right arm in a maze based on where the sound of water is coming from. Of course, they want water. So they will use the signal to follow that arm of the maze as they try to find the source of water.

So plants can hear water?

Oh, yeah, of course. And I’m not talking about electrical signals. We have also discovered that plants emit their own sounds. The acoustic signal comes out of the plant.

What kind of sounds do they make?

We call them clicks, but this is where language might fail because we are trying to describe something we’re not familiar enough with to create the language that really describes the picture. We worked out that, yes, plants not only produce their own sound, which is amazing, but they are listening to sounds. We are surrounded by sound, so there are studies, like my own study, of plants moving toward certain frequencies and then responding to sounds of potential predators chewing on leaves, which other plants that are not yet threatened can hear. “Oh, that’s a predator chewing on my neighbor’s leaves. I better put my defenses up.” And more recently, there was some work done in Israel on the sound of bees and how flowers prepared themselves and become very nice and sweet, literally, to be more attractive to the bee. So the level of sugars gets increased as a bee passes by.

SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS: Monica Gagliano says her experiences with indigenous people, such as the Huichol in Mexico (above), informed her view that plants have a range of feelings. “I don’t know if they would use those words to describe joy or sadness, but they are feeling bodies,” she says.Scene from the upcoming documentary, AWARE ©umbrellafilms.org

You are describing a surprising level of sophistication in these plants. Do you have a working definition of “intelligence?”

That’s one of those touchy subjects. I use the Latin etymology of the word and “intelligere” literally means something like “choosing between.” So intelligence really underscores decision-making, learning, memory, choice. As you can imagine, all those words are also loaded. They belong in the cognitive realm. That’s why I define all of this work as “cognitive ecology.”

Do you see parallels between this kind of intelligence in plants and the collective intelligence that we associate with social insects in ant colonies or beehives?

That kind of intelligence might be referred to as “distributed intelligence” or “collective intelligence.” We are testing those questions right now. Plants don’t have neurons. They don’t have a brain, which is often what we assume is the base for all of these behaviors. But like slime molds and other basal animals that don’t have neural systems, they seem to be doing the same things. So the short answer is yes.

What you’re saying is very controversial among scientists. The common criticism of your views is that an organism needs a brain or at least a nervous system to be able to learn or remember. Are you saying neurons are not required for intelligence?

Science is full of assumptions and presuppositions that we don’t question. But who said the brain and the neurons are essential for any form of intelligence or learning or cognition? Who decided that? And when I say neurons and brains are not required, it’s not to say they’re not important. For those organisms like ourselves and many animals who do have neurons and brains, it’s amazing. But if we look at the base of the animal kingdom, sponges don’t have neurons. They look like plants because when they’re adults, they settle on the bottom of the ocean and pretty much just sit there forever. Yet if you look at the sponge’s genome, they have the genetic code for the neural system. It’s almost like from an evolutionary perspective, they simply decided that developing a neural system was not useful. So they went a different way. Why would you invest that energy if you don’t need it? You can achieve the same task in different ways.

Your food is psychedelic. It changes your brain chemistry all the time.

Your critics say these are just automatic adaptive responses. This is not really learning.

You know, they just say plants do not learn and do not remember. Then you do this study and stumble on something that actually shows you otherwise. It’s the job of science to be humble enough to realize that we actually make mistakes in our thinking, but we can correct that. Science grows by correcting and modifying and adjusting what we once thought was the fact. I went and asked, can plants do Pavlovian learning? This is a higher kind of learning, which Pavlov did with his dogs salivating, expecting dinner. Well, it turns out plants actually can do it, but in a plant way. So plants do not salivate and dinner is a different kind of dinner. Can you as a scientist create the space for these other organisms to express their own, in this case, “plantness,” instead of expecting them to become more like you?

There’s an emerging field of what’s called “vegetal consciousness.” Do you think plants have minds?

What is the mind? [Laughs] You see, language is very inadequate at the moment in describing this field. I could ask you the same question in referring to humans. Do you think humans have a mind? And I could answer again, what is the mind? Of course, I have written a paper with the title “The Mind of Plants” and there is a book coming called The Mind of Plants. In this context, language is used to capture aspects of how plants can change their mind, and also whether they have agency. Is there a “person” there? These questions are relevant beyond science because they have ethical repercussions. They demand a change in our social attitude toward the environment. But I already have a problem with the language we are using because the question formulated in that way demands a yes or no answer. And what if the answer cannot be yes or no?

Let me ask the question a different way. Do you think plants have emotional lives? Can they feel pain or joy?

It’s the same question. Where do feelings arise from, and what are feelings? These are yes or no questions, usually. But to me, they are yes and no. It depends on what you mean by “feeling” and “joy.” It also depends on where you are expecting the plant to feel those things, if they do, and how you recognize them in a human way. I mean, plants might have more joy than we do. It’s just that we don’t know because we’re not plants.

We have only talked about this from the scientific perspective, which is the Western view of the world. But I’ve also had a close relationship with plants from a very different perspective, the indigenous world view. Why is that less valuable? And when you actually do explore those perspectives, they require your experience. You can’t just understand them by thinking about them. My own personal experience tells me that plants definitely feel many things. I don’t know if they would use those words to describe joy or sadness, but they are feeling bodies. We are feeling bodies.

Science is full of assumptions and presuppositions that we don’t question.

You’ve studied with shamans in indigenous cultures and you’ve taken ayahuasca and other psychoactive plants. Why did you seek out those experiences?

I didn’t. They sought me. So I just followed. They just arrived in my life. You know, those are important doors that you need to open and you either walk through or you don’t. I simply decided to walk through. I had this weird series of three dreams while I was in Australia doing my normal life. By the time the third dream came, it was very clear that the people that I was dreaming of were real people. They were waiting somewhere in this reality, in this world. And the next thing, I’m buying a ticket and going to Peru and my partner at the time is looking at me like, “What are you doing?” [laughs] I have no idea, but I need to go. As a scientist, I find this is the most scientific approach that I’ve ever had. It’s like there is something asking a question and is calling you to meet the answer. The answer is already there and is waiting for you, if you are prepared to open the door and cross through. And I did.

What did you do in Peru?

The first time I went, I found this place that was in my dream. It was just exactly the same as what I saw in my dream. It was the same man I saw in my dream, grinning in the same way as he was in my dream. So I just worked with him, trying to learn as much as I could about myself with his support.

This was a local shaman whom you identify as Don M. And there was a particular plant substance, a hallucinogen, that you took.

I did what they call a “dieta,” which is basically a quiet, intense time in isolation that you do on your own in a little hut. You are just relating with the plant that the elder is deciding on. So for me, the plant that I worked with wasn’t by itself a psychedelic in the normal way of thinking about it. But of course, all plants are psychedelic. Even your food is psychedelic because it changes your brain chemistry and your neurobiology all the time you eat. Sugars, almonds, all sorts of neurotransmitters are flying everywhere. So, again, even the idea of what a psychedelic experience is needs to be revised, because a lot of people might think that it’s only about certain plants that they have a very strong, powerful transformation. And I find that all plants are psychedelic. I can sit in my garden. I don’t have to ingest anything and I can feel very altered by that experience.

You’ve said the plant talked to you. Did you actually hear words?

When you’re trying to describe this to people haven’t had the experience, it probably doesn’t make much sense because this kind of knowledge requires your participation. I don’t hear someone talking to me as if from the outside, talking to me in words and sound. But even that is not correct because inside my head it does sound exactly like a conversation. Not only that, but I know it’s not me. There is no way that I would know about some of the information that’s been shared with me.

Are you saying these plants had specific information to tell you about your life and your work?

Yeah, I mean, some of the plants tell me exactly how wrong I was in thinking about my experiments and how I should be doing them to get them to work. And I’m like, “Really?” I’m scribbling down without really understanding. Then I go in the lab and try what they say. And even then, there is a part of me that doesn’t really believe it. For one experiment, the one on the Pavlovian pea, I was trying to address that question the year before with a different plant. I was using sunflowers. And while I was doing my dieta with a different tree back in Peru, the plant just turned up and said, “By the way, not sunflowers, peas.” And I’m like, “what?” People always think that when you have these experiences, you’re supposed to understand the secrets of the universe. No, my plants are usually quite practical. [laughs] And they were right.

Do you think you are really encountering the consciousness of that plant? Maybe your imagination has opened up to see the world in new ways, but it’s all just a projection of your own mind. How do you know you are actually encountering another intelligence?

If you had this experience of connecting with plants the way I have described—and there are plenty of people who have—the experience is so clear that you know that it’s not you; it’s someone else talking. If you haven’t had that experience, then I can totally see it’s like, “No way, it must be your mind that makes it up.” But all I can say is that I have had exchanges with plants who have shared things about topics and asked me to do things that I have really no idea about.

What have plants asked you to do?

I’m not a medical scientist, but I’ve been given information by plants about their medical properties. And these are very specific bits of information. I wrote them in my diary. I would later check and I did find them in the medical literature: “This plant is for this and we know this.” I just didn’t know. So maybe I’m tapping into the collective consciousness.

What do you do with these kinds of personal experiences? You are a scientist who’s been trained to observe and study and measure the physical world. But this is an entirely different kind of reality. Can you reconcile these two different realities?

I think there are some presuppositions that a scientist should just explore the consensus reality that most of us experience in more or less the same way. But I don’t really have a conflict because I find this is just part of experimenting and exploring. If anything, I found that it has enriched and expanded the science I do. This is a work in progress, obviously, but I think I’m getting better at it. And in the writing of my book, which for a scientist was a very scary process because it was laying bare some parts of me that I knew would likely compromise my career forever, it also became liberating because once it was written, now the world knows. And it’s my truth. This is how I operate. This is who I am. And nobody has the right or the authority to tell me that it’s not real.

Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally syndicated show “To the Best of Our Knowledge.” He’s the author of Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science. You can subscribe to TTBOOK’s podcast here.

Lead image: kmeds7 / Shutterstock

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The coronavirus news from Mozambique is mixed, as it is in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Many experts fear chaos is inevitable.Photograph by gaborbasch / Shutterstock

We called Greg Carr the other day to talk about the spread of the coronavirus in Africa. Carr, who has been featured in Nautilus, is the founder of the Gorongosa Restoration Project, a partnership with the Mozambique government to revive Gorongosa National Park, that environmental treasure trove at the southern end of the Rift Valley. The 1,500 square-mile park, about the size of Rhode Island, was first given animal refuge status in the 1920s by the Portuguese, and for years was a favorite of European tourists. But in 1983 civil war broke out and the park became a no-man’s land. The place was poached to death, closed up and didn’t reopen until 1992.

Renewal began in 2004 and in 2008 the government signed a restoration agreement with Carr’s foundation. The agreement, which lasts through 2043, envisions a “human rights park” that will restore both ecosystems and economic vitality. After 11 years of rebuilding infrastructure, reintroducing animals, including hippos and wildebeests, and working with local communities, Gorongosa is thriving again. The park now serves as a model for future conservation. Today some 200,000 people live around the park in a “sustainable development zone” that includes education, employment opportunities, and health service. About 700 people have full time jobs in the park; another 300, part time. Naturalist E.O. Wilson calls Gorongosa “a window on eternity.”

“If there’s one thing the rest of the world can learn from Africans, it would be their resilience.”

Carr is a 60-year-old entrepreneur and philanthropist who grew up in Idaho and in his mid twenties co-founded Boston Technology, a voice mail company. By the time he turned 40 he had amassed his fortune and couldn’t see the fun in doing it all over again, and so turned to philanthropy. These days he’s in Idaho Falls, on the phone six hours a day, getting the latest reports from his staff in the park, now closed until further notice.

The coronavirus news from Mozambique is mixed, as it is in much of sub-Saharan Africa. With the exception of South Africa, with over 7,500 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 148 deaths, some countries below the Equator have fewer than 100 cases. As of May 6, there were just 81 cases in Mozambique and no deaths. If these numbers don’t blow up, the quick explanation might hold that the median age in Sub Saharan Africa is under 20, just 17.6 in Mozambique; population density is low (103 people per square mile); and there’s relatively limited direct contact with heavily infected countries in other parts of the world. 

Still, many experts fear chaos is inevitable. Underlying conditions in Mozambique include implacable poverty and a 60-year history of colonial and civil wars. On another front, in early April, in northern Mozambique, an Isis group shot or beheaded 52 young people because they refused to be recruited. Add a 48 percent literacy rate for women, 60 percent for men. The country also suffers the world’s eighth-highest incidence of HIV; 1.5 million people have contracted the virus and nearly 40,000 people have died. Finally, a large number of Mozambicans go to South Africa for work and then return. Testing is rare in the entire country.

In March, CDC Africa sent out a national directive requiring social distancing. “People are going to pay more attention to that in the cities than they are in rural Mozambique, at least until the virus really comes,” Carr said the other day. “Now, if you live in rural Mozambique, you don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘I’m isolating at home.’ People have to go out every day, to get food and water, from 40 to 60 liters a day, they have to tend to their farms. The idea of social distancing is a bit impossible for these folks.” He added, “Schools are closed and we are making our own masks for people. We all know there’s no treatment per se or certainly vaccine. If this hits, we’ll only be able to offer people Tylenol and soup.”

Cases in Mozambique could shoot up as mine workers continue to return home from their jobs in South Africa. “In my opinion,” said Carr, “Mozambique does not have the capacity to deal with this type of pandemic, as there are few qualified health personnel and the high level of poverty leads people to resist isolating themselves, as they look for alternatives to take care of their families. Our Gorongosa teams are in the field, spreading prevention messages, distributing masks and water purification.” 

Berta Barros, head nurse at Gorongosa, told Carr recently she has three main worries: lack of COVID-19 test kits, lack of healthcare professionals to respond to sick patients, and shortage of medications for treatment. “Mozambique has a population close to 30 million and we only have 34 ventilators,” Barros said. “It’s beyond impossible to work and choose who to save.”

Carr often talks about Mozambique as though he was Mozambican. “We’re very practical people,” he’ll say. “We’re not really theoretical. We’re just going to work our way through this.” He shies away from broad, open-ended questions about Africa, much less cultural comparisons and grand conclusions. “Africa is more than 1 billion people in 54 countries with, what, 2,500 languages? To make a statement like, ‘Africa is this…’ Frankly, I just think a lot of it is complete baloney.”

At the same time, says Carr, “If there’s one thing the rest of the world can learn from Africans, it would be their resilience. We’ve had five years of war in Mozambique and then last year we had a cyclone that killed nearly 1,000 people. I didn’t even mention the two droughts we had in the last seven years and the armyworm that came through and ate everybody’s maize. These people had their homes washed away in a flood last year, lost everything. So they rebuild their homes and then someone says, ‘Hey, there might be a virus coming through.’ It’s just one thing after another.”

What impact might the pandemic have on animals in the park? What effect will it have on just recovered antelope populations, for example, and the inevitable increase in poaching as tourism subsides? How many resources will need to be taken away from the war on other diseases to fight this? Impossible to say. But an anecdote came to Carr’s mind that suggests the vagaries of death in Southern Africa. “I got a call from a dear friend of mine yesterday, a Mozambique good friend, who said her aunt had just died. I said, ‘Wow, do you think it was COVID?’ She goes, ‘No, she’d been suffering for a while with a bad kidney.’ Life is tough in Africa. Do we know for sure this woman didn’t also have COVID and that contributed? Maybe. The truth about Africa is that disaster is hardly news. Malaria is the most prolific killer. And when they turn 50, people die and often no one knows exactly what the cause was. It’s just the way life is.”

Mark MacNamara is an Asheville, North Carolina-based writer. His articles for Nautilus include “We Need to Talk About Peat” and “The Artist of the Unbreakable Code.”

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