Benati River; a quite filthy body of water with effluents of raw sewage and solid
waste. But it is not laden with heavy metals as in some cities, and therefore it is
possible for the river to be restored to an unpolluted state. Kathmandu is a city with a
hierarchical system of governance: highest caste people are located farther from the
polluted riverscape and live in permanent houses, whereas the lower and outcastes
are crowded together as temporary settlers within the riverscape basin (Rademacher
2011). Right now, there is no solution to the pollution of the riverscape, but a
political way out can eventually be found. Complexity of society and landscape
can sustain or even enhance diversity, yet it can also lead to environmental
degradation.
No predictive consequence exists for any modern city’s environmental and
biological impact except that it will be primary transformation of whatever the
landscape was that preceded it. Cities and megacities have historically potentiated
the spread of epidemics. Globalization has furthered this phenomenon, as with the
current COVID-19 pandemic, which at the time of this writing has killed more than
1,000,000 people worldwide in less than 1 year. It would not have become a
pandemic unless the world’s territorial borders had not been relatively porous and
vast distances could not have been covered by an infectious load of tiny strips of
SARS–CoV-2 RNA, which is the virus, in short time periods, like the time it takes an
asymptomatic, infected individual to fly from, say, Wuhan to London, or from
Seattle to New York. That would have been before preventive measures (like
government-ordered lockdowns, social distancing, mask-wearing, and other socially
organized mitigations) could have occurred. Ancient and some contemporary indigenous societies that are organized into camps and villages, including simple hunter–
gatherers and small-scale horticultural societies, are what Wilkinson (2016) calls
second order of magnitude settlements. Such settlements—often autonomous politically—would have seen fadeouts of most viral syndromes, if they survived at all.
The high demographic toll taken on indigenous groups in the Americas by viral
syndromes originating in Europe and Africa has been known for a long time (e.g.,
Black 1992). That is because if they had survived it, living susceptible hosts would
have already died (Newson 1998). In other words, fadeouts of viral syndromes occur
once potential hosts are depleted, and this can be the result of mortality (as it was in
many indigenous societies over centuries in the New World), or acquired immunity
(which has been historically and epidemiologically common), or, in the world we
live in today—that of globalization—government-ordered lockdowns and other
preventive measurements or, what has yet to be guaranteed long-term in the current
case of SARS–CoV-2 RNA, an efficacious vaccine available to all who have not yet
been infected. Otherwise, the disease has shown a propensity to infect susceptible
human beings who occupy huge, densely populated settlements—of the first magnitude in Wilkinson’s classification—like megacities, including New York City, as a
tragic, though perhaps inevitable case in point. New York City public hospitals saw
not only a surge in COVID-19 cases in 2020 but they also were the sites where
countless cases of yellow fever and cholera in the nineteenth century, HIV/AIDS in
the late twentieth century, and Ebola in the 2000s were manifested (Chokshi and
Katz 2020). I should note that regardless of settlement size, globalized societies as a
3 Historical Ecology of Societal Nucleation and Collapse
39
waste. But it is not laden with heavy metals as in some cities, and therefore it is
possible for the river to be restored to an unpolluted state. Kathmandu is a city with a
hierarchical system of governance: highest caste people are located farther from the
polluted riverscape and live in permanent houses, whereas the lower and outcastes
are crowded together as temporary settlers within the riverscape basin (Rademacher
2011). Right now, there is no solution to the pollution of the riverscape, but a
political way out can eventually be found. Complexity of society and landscape
can sustain or even enhance diversity, yet it can also lead to environmental
degradation.
No predictive consequence exists for any modern city’s environmental and
biological impact except that it will be primary transformation of whatever the
landscape was that preceded it. Cities and megacities have historically potentiated
the spread of epidemics. Globalization has furthered this phenomenon, as with the
current COVID-19 pandemic, which at the time of this writing has killed more than
1,000,000 people worldwide in less than 1 year. It would not have become a
pandemic unless the world’s territorial borders had not been relatively porous and
vast distances could not have been covered by an infectious load of tiny strips of
SARS–CoV-2 RNA, which is the virus, in short time periods, like the time it takes an
asymptomatic, infected individual to fly from, say, Wuhan to London, or from
Seattle to New York. That would have been before preventive measures (like
government-ordered lockdowns, social distancing, mask-wearing, and other socially
organized mitigations) could have occurred. Ancient and some contemporary indigenous societies that are organized into camps and villages, including simple hunter–
gatherers and small-scale horticultural societies, are what Wilkinson (2016) calls
second order of magnitude settlements. Such settlements—often autonomous politically—would have seen fadeouts of most viral syndromes, if they survived at all.
The high demographic toll taken on indigenous groups in the Americas by viral
syndromes originating in Europe and Africa has been known for a long time (e.g.,
Black 1992). That is because if they had survived it, living susceptible hosts would
have already died (Newson 1998). In other words, fadeouts of viral syndromes occur
once potential hosts are depleted, and this can be the result of mortality (as it was in
many indigenous societies over centuries in the New World), or acquired immunity
(which has been historically and epidemiologically common), or, in the world we
live in today—that of globalization—government-ordered lockdowns and other
preventive measurements or, what has yet to be guaranteed long-term in the current
case of SARS–CoV-2 RNA, an efficacious vaccine available to all who have not yet
been infected. Otherwise, the disease has shown a propensity to infect susceptible
human beings who occupy huge, densely populated settlements—of the first magnitude in Wilkinson’s classification—like megacities, including New York City, as a
tragic, though perhaps inevitable case in point. New York City public hospitals saw
not only a surge in COVID-19 cases in 2020 but they also were the sites where
countless cases of yellow fever and cholera in the nineteenth century, HIV/AIDS in
the late twentieth century, and Ebola in the 2000s were manifested (Chokshi and
Katz 2020). I should note that regardless of settlement size, globalized societies as a
3 Historical Ecology of Societal Nucleation and Collapse
39